Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond LifeFlynt, Josiah
History
Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life
Flynt, Josiah
Tramps
Buffalo did not interest me. There was nothing new in the tramp line. I
counted sixty-seven roadsters, and found that there was plenty to eat
and drink and a little money also, if looked for very diligently in the
main streets and offices; but there was nothing unique. My journey, when
I arrived in Buffalo, had extended over three hundred miles (from
Albany). I had had three meals every day, excepting the loss of a dinner
while traveling from Rochester to Buffalo, and I had met three hundred
tramps, who had probably had their meals just as frequently as I had had
mine. This number does not include, of course, those who may have been
traveling behind or before me, so that, not counting men who were
certainly on the road, but out of my sight, here was a voluntary vagrant
for every mile of the road between Albany and Buffalo. Further, I did
not see a train going west on the Central Railroad that was not carrying
at least one tramp, and I often saw a car passing by which appeared
simply alive with dead-beats. The reader must remember withal that New
York State is by no means such good tramp territory as certain other
States. Pennsylvania supports three times as many vagrants as New York
will tolerate.
Two extenuating statements ought to be made. In the first place, the
Central Railroad is a very easy one to beat, and probably half of the
tramps that I met were "residents" of other States. Secondly, a great
many tramps loaf around the hop-country in the vicinity of Syracuse and
Utica during the early autumn, in order to drink at the expense of the
too light-hearted hop-pickers. The nationality of these men, so far as I
could judge from pronunciation, some of their own statements, and
their professional names, was almost entirely American. I met one German
loafer called "Dutchy," and he was the only recognized foreigner that I
found. The others may have had parents born in other countries, but they
themselves were certainly Americanized. A good test of a tramp's
nationality is his professional name. For every genuine hobo couples the
name of his birthplace with whatever other name he chooses, and the
reader will find, if he will visit watering-tanks or other available
stationary railway property in his vicinity, like section-houses,
shanties, etc., where tramps "sign," that the names registered there
indicate, in the great majority of cases, a birthplace in the United
States.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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