Riding the rails to the ‘rainbow’
Nobody knows when the first hobo arrived in Spokane, but here’s a wild guess: It was probably about the time the first freight train chugged into town in the 1880s.
Hobos were men (or occasionally women) with no fixed address and their own remarkable subculture. They were common all over America, yet they tended to congregate at major railroad division points. Spokane was just such a division point.
On Nov. 26, 1905, a reporter for The Spokesman-Review visited what he called “Hobo Island,” on a bend in Hangman Creek near the Northern Pacific tracks.
“In a little clump of bushes, crouched beside a fire, was a hobo preparing his lunch,” wrote the reporter. “… He stirred a kettleful of a concoction. He scooped it out with a tin can and used a stick to eat it with. He showed little inclination to talk and is evidently demented.”
In place of socks, he was wearing corn shucks on his feet.
Farmers in the neighborhood reported that their chickens and pigs had an increasing tendency to go missing after the hobos arrived.
Yet the reporter also discovered that not all was squalid on Hobo Island. Two hobos were living in a “well-dug cave, fairly roomy, walled up with boards and stones.”
“The theory that hobos never wash does not hold good on this island,” wrote the reporter. “A wire is strung between two trees … used on ‘wash day’ on the island.”
By this time, the hobo culture was firmly established in Spokane’s river bottoms and freight yards. The terms tramp, vagabond and hobo were sometimes used interchangeably, but hobo conjured up a specific way of life:
“They hopped freight trains in search of work (sometimes) and handouts (other times).
“They lived in “hobo jungles,” usually near rail yards.
“They had their own lingo: A railroad guard was a “bull,” a freight car was a “rattler,” a bedroll was a “bindle.” A hobo himself was a “bindlestiff.”
Hobos were sometimes feared as larcenous loners and despised as freeloaders; yet they were just as often admired for their apparently carefree lives, free from society’s restrictions. Writers referred to them as “knights of the road.” Charlie Chaplin invented the character of the lovable Little Tramp and became the world’s biggest star.
Then, when the Great Depression arrived in the 1930s, the number of hobos swelled. Thousands of unemployed people rode the rails in search of work – and the Northwest was a popular destination for Dust Bowl refugees. This new influx changed the very nature of Spokane’s hobo jungles.
“Hundreds of them are boys and girls, as young as 10 years, who are traveling in bands,” wrote Spokesman-Review reporter Margaret Bean, who visited the rail yards and hobo jungles in October 1932. “…With a through freight, composed of 100 cars, it is impossible for a freight car to keep this swarming army from crowding their train, especially the mobs of children. They are too agile for a train crew. Chase them from one empty car and they are half a mile down the train and scrambling into another.”
Bean wrote that “whole families endure the rigors of this freight car riding, in a useless hope of finding greener pastures.”
She described what she saw when one freight car pulled into the yards on the east end of town:
“The door of one ‘empty’ swung open on its grating hinges and out climbed a fairly young woman. She carefully placed her newspaper bundles on the ground and then reached into the car to take off her small child and a parrot in a large cage.”
She fretted that these Depression victims would soon be “degenerated to the level of the hobo.” Yet she also quoted a railway official as saying that “98 percent of the people riding the freights are honest.”
At the hobo jungle at Parkwater (near Felts Field), Bean observed a typical morning.
“Two women stood over the fire cooking the mulligan for the mob of homeless men – men unshaven and dirty – men wearing dilapidated army uniforms – men clad in anything that could be classed as clothing,” she wrote. “The women wore overalls and were scarcely distinguishable from the men, except that they didn’t need a shave.”
She called them a “straggling and weary army.”
In popular culture, the hobos of the Great Depression were often depicted as sad and lonely.
Emmett Kelly became the country’s most famous clown when he adopted the character of Weary Willie, the downcast hobo. The folk song “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” promised a hobo paradise, with a “lake of stew and whiskey, too.”
The hobo culture declined during World War II, when it became increasingly hard to defend an entire unproductive class. In 1942, hobo king Jeff Davis (elected at a yearly hobo convention in Iowa) came to Spokane and declared that tramps and bums were men who would not work, but true hobos were either serving their country or working in war industries. These distinctions were blurry, to say the least.
In 1953, Spokesman-Review reporter Dorothy Powers visited a hobo jungle on the Spokane River flats. She found danger and fear.
“You get into a boxcar, you don’t ask nobody nuthin,’” she quoted one hobo as saying. “You best steer clear any other guys in there; you never know who got a knife.”
Yet one man was still able to concisely sum up the appeal of the hobo life: “Yeah, it’s cold, but you haven’t got no ties to nobody or nothin’. That’s how I like it.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, a new kind of vagabond, young and long-haired, was drawn to the hobo life. Yet if the life was ever truly carefree and adventurous, it no longer was. The camps still existed on the Spokane River, but they were more squalid and dangerous than ever.
By the 1980s, the term hobo was a relic of the past, replaced by words such as transient and homeless, words devoid of any hint of adventure.
Today, a few free spirits still ride the rails. Homeless people still gather in camps, sometimes down by the river.
Yet today’s homeless would probably not give the same answer that Margaret Bean heard in 1932 when she asked every hobo climbing off a freight this question: “Where are you going?”
She heard this expression, not once, but many times: “Chasing the rainbow.”