Western Hobos Confront a Hostile World

As the extension of railroads facilitated agribusiness in the Western United States, workers began arriving from all over the country, much of Europe, Asia, and increasingly Mexico.  Many were called hoboes -- migrants traveling to work -- to distinguish them from tramps, who only worked occasionally.   Throughout this era before the automobile changed the migrant worker’s world in the 1920s, newspapers frequently reported that crops were left to rot because harvest help was unavailable.  Yet the communities that relied on successful harvests also looked down on the harvesters, had workers arrested as vagrants if they stayed around after the crops were in, put them to work on rock piles, or, most frequently, pushed them out of town on the next train.  And while railroads profited from the transport of the crops these workers harvested, their employees also pried the hoboes off the boxcars or went after them when they “rode the rods” beneath the cars after harvest. The roots of today's xenophobia in the Western United States are entwined with the early struggles of these native- and foreign-born harvesters.