Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond LifeFlynt, Josiah
History
Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life
Flynt, Josiah
Tramps
One of the main reasons why Massachusetts is such poor territory for the
usual class of vagrants is its jail system. In many of these jails the
order and discipline are superb, and work is required of the
prisoners--and work is the last thing a real tramp ever means to
undertake. I cannot help looking forward to very gratifying results to
trampdom from the influence of the present Massachusetts jail system.
For anything which brings the roving beggar into contact with sobriety
and labor is bound to have a beneficial effect. New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan are all fairly good tramp States, and
all swarm with allowed beggars. The most remarkable feature of vagrancy
in New York State is that wonderful town known among vagrants as the
"City" and also as "York." This is the most notorious tramp-nest in the
United States. I have walked along the Bowery of an afternoon, and
counted scores of men who never soil their hands with labor, and beg on
an average a dollar a day. Even the policemen of this city are often
friends of beggars, and I have seldom met a hobo who was very angry with
a New York "bull." As a rule, the police officer, when finding tramps
drunk on door-steps or begging, says in a coarse and brutal voice, "Get
out!" and possibly gives them a rap with his club, but it is altogether
too seldom that the beggar is arrested. One rather odd phase of tramp
life in New York city is the shifting boundary-line that marks the
charity of the town. Several years ago Eighty-ninth Street was about as
far uptown as one could secure fair rewards for diligent begging. Now
one can see tramps, on a winter night especially, scattered all along
One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, not because this street is the only
"good one," but because it is so "good" that better profits are realized
than in those farther down. And for clothes, I have always found Harlem
more profitable than other parts of the city. New York city is also one
of the best places in the country for "snaring a kid"--persuading some
youngster to accompany an older beggar on the road. There are so many
ragamuffins lying around loose and unprotected in the more disreputable
quarters of the town that it is only necessary to tell them a few
"ghost-stories" (fancy tales of tramp life) to make them follow the
story-teller as unresistingly as the boys of Hamelin marched after the
Pied Piper. Almost every third boy that one meets in American
vagabondage hails from "York." This accounts for the fact that several
tramps of New York birth have the same name, for even the beggar's
ingenuity is not capable of always hitting upon a unique cognomen. I
have met fully a dozen roadsters having the name of "Yorkey," "New York
Bob," "New York Whitey," "New York Slim," etc., which makes it not only
the fashion but a necessity, when hearing a city tramp's name, to ask
which Whitey, which Yorkey, or which Bob it is, and a personal
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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