Tramps Who Took America (Adventurous Tramps Book 1)

If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Lummis tells of an America long departed, when the western and southern frontiers were wilderness, nature untrammeled and settlers rugged in the face of unforgiving conditions. Written as a retrospective of the adventurer's youth, A Tramp Across the Continent, through its varied events and encounters, transports the reader to an era lost to time.

The tale begins in , when the author - disgruntled and unhappy with the tedium of everyday life - sets off from Ohio with the intention of reaching California on foot. His trek, spanning some 3, miles and days, is filled with joy, pain and lessons aplenty. The author traverses several of North America's most distinctive landscapes; the bare Midwestern plains, the rugged Rocky Mountains, the deserts of Arizona, and finally the valleys and hills of California.

It is the people however which make the journey of Lummis so unique; he is accosted by outlaws multiple times, but evades robbery with a combination of bravado and his trusty revolver. Read more Read less. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Here's how restrictions apply.

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TRAMPS AND HOBOS

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Medieval writing contains numerous episodes featuring knights-errant, troubadours, and wandering scholars. Romantic literature abounds with the imagery of motion, and its protagonists are often wanderers who symbolize a range of positive characteristics, including optimistic visions for the future, educational desires, and an opposition to a mercantile world with its confining rules.

A similarly positive view of the peripatetic existence can also be found in American literature in the years before the age of the industrial tramp began in the s. Tales and songs were told about folk heroes like Daniel Boone who were almost constantly on the move looking for "elbow room," and vernacular characters such as Simon Suggs, the creation of humorist Johnson Jones Hooper, proclaimed that "it is good to be shifty in a new country" Hooper, p. Both authors celebrated the freedom found in aimless wandering; Thoreau wrote in his journal that "it is a great art to saunter.

In real life, the physical exercise gained in walks or rambles was regarded as beneficial to a person's health. In a contributor to Century Magazine recommended that Americans walk more because it would make them "bigger, happier, healthier, and tougher" C. Despite the existence of a literary tradition featuring wayfaring protagonists and a social reality that provided countless situations and models for intensive study, the tramp phenomenon was slow to register in the world of writing. The earliest written responses came in local newspapers, which reported about the various activities that the political bodies or the charitable organizations of individual communities initiated to deal with the problems resulting from the growing presence of transients in their neighborhoods.

As the topic gained in urgency, periodicals of national reputation opened their pages to a variety of contributors who discussed the issue from different angles. While journalists and public spokesmen of different persuasions addressed a subject that was of obvious relevance to late-nineteenth-century America, literary writers remained curiously silent on the topic.

Tramps and Hobos

Although Stephen Crane — and other naturalists included the tramp together with other characters from the margins of society in their fictional depictions of life in America, there is no substantial body of literature focusing on tramp figures. In terms of the prevailing literary taste of the time, the tramp was simply not an appropriate subject. Whatever measure one might use, there is no denying that the prevailing economic and social conditions forced the tramp into miserable living conditions. A realistic depiction of tramp life in literature would therefore have to address in detail unattractive and possibly offensive aspects of life in America, which would shed an unfavorable light on a country that liked to think of itself as especially favored by a divine providence.

It would also force the writer to take a position in a highly controversial issue and thus make him or her vulnerable to negative reactions from readers and literary critics. According to their own testimony, the guardians of a public taste based on middle-class values were mainly concerned with protecting the large female readership.

Since this group constituted the main market for fiction, a commercial aspect was obviously also involved in this issue.

Leon Ray Livingston, America's Most Famous Hobo

William Dean Howells — used his influential position as writer, editor, and critic to encourage his fellow writers "to concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life" Howells, p. The tramp did not fit the preferred visions of America and was thus relegated a shadow existence in American letters and in sociohistorical research.

This situation, according to some social historians, did not change until late in the twentieth century and may explain the relative lack of scholarly work in the field. The first author to devote intensive and sustained attention to the tramp was Josiah Flynt the penname of Josiah Flynt Willard, — His influential reports on tramp life appeared in periodicals such as Atlantic Monthly and Century Magazine and were widely read. Despite the journalistic coverage the tramp had by then received for more than ten years, Flynt claimed that "comparatively little is known about his real life and character" "Life," p.

To fill the void, he conducted interviews with tramps and, choosing a participant-observer approach, he gained first-hand knowledge of his subject by living the tramp's life himself, both in the United States and in Europe. His attention, however, was focused not on "the enforced vagrant, but rather the man who wanders because he desires to, and prefers begging to working" "Life," p.

It was a crucial decision because this limited perspective left out the socioeconomic dimensions of the issue and thus reduced its complexity. As he enthralled the genteel readers of the prestigious magazines with scenes from life on the road, he led them into a strange and exotic world that actually existed not far from their homes but was far removed from the daily experience of their own sheltered, bourgeois lives. Although at times he titillated his audience with episodes of an adventurous life marked by harshness, violence, criminal behavior, and veiled sexual allusions, he left no doubt about his own attitudes toward this class of people.

The texts he wrote showed him in agreement with the majority of his contemporaries: The tramp as beggar was a nuisance that needed to be eliminated. In Flynt's eyes, the origin of the problem lay both with the tramps, who were pathologically unwilling to work, and with the charitable people, whose generosity provided the basis for the tramps' continued existence. Jack London — took a much different attitude toward the homeless migrants.

Although his editor and friends advised him not to write about his own tramp reminiscences because his positive attitude toward the controversial figure might hurt the sales of his other books, London expressed himself on the subject both in his fiction and nonfiction. He became the major literary voice presenting the life of the American tramp at the turn of the twentieth century. Clearly informed by his socialist convictions, London's speech "The Tramp" identified the socioeconomic situation in America as the reason for the troubles of vagrancy.

In it, London analyzed the reasons for and the effects of the existence of a "surplus labor army. London's best-known publication on the tramp is his pseudo-autobiographical book The Road , in which the author collected, without much effort to achieve narrative unity, nine essays on life on the road that had been previously published in Cosmopolitan Magazine. It was an assortment of memories recalling various incidents from the time when London lived the life of a tramp in his younger years.

Writing under financial pressure and severe time constraints, London failed to revise his material and contented himself with the role of a storyteller by jumbling a series of entertaining anecdotes with a folksy appeal.

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His loosely connected chapters highlight individual episodes featuring characteristic situations from the life of a tramp. The book is pervaded by an atmosphere of competition in which an ambitious protagonist strives to prove himself superior to other tramps and to the representatives of law and order. Despite London's political convictions, social commentary is slight in this volume, and the emphasis is mostly on the adventures of tramp life and youthful excitement. London's literary work on the tramp was supplemented by the writings of now forgotten authors whose publications presented the figure of the tramp in a variety of formats, including sociological treatises and manifestos.

Most authors chose the pattern of the adventure story, generally framed as autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical accounts. Written by Himself The tone of these publications ran from a sharply critical attitude toward the subject to a justification or even celebration of a marginal, disdained existence and an explicit sense of pride in the conscious departure from a normative middle-class life.

While London celebrated the freedom of life on the road, Flynt was critical of an existence that appeared to him as socially reprehensible behavior. He has loafed, seen the country and green things, laughed in joy, lain on his back and listened to the birds singing overhead, unannoyed by factory whistles and bosses' harsh commands; and, most significant of all, he has lived. That is the point! He has not starved to death. Not only has he been care-free and happy, but he has lived!

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And from the knowledge that he has idled and is still alive, he achieves a new outlook on life; and the more he experiences the unenviable lot of the poor worker, the more the blandishments of the "road" take hold of him. And finally he flings his challenge in the face of society, imposes a valorous boycott on all work, and joins the far-wanderers of Hoboland, the gypsy folk of this latter day. I must first explain just what I mean by a tramp. Some people think that he is simply a man out of work, a man willing to labor if he has the chance; and others, although admitting that he is not so fond of toil as he might be, claim that he is more a victim of circumstances than of his own perversity.

Neither of these opinions seems to me to meet the case. According to my experience,—and I have studied the tramp carefully in over thirty States of the Union,—he is a man, and too often a boy, who prefers vagabondage to any other business, and in moments of enthusiasm actually brags about the wisdom of his choice.

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There are some exceptions, it is true, but by no means so many as is generally supposed. Not one tramp in fifty of those that I have met could say that he could find no work, and not over ten in a hundred could claim that they had never had a "fair chance in life. Josiah Flynt, "What to Do with the Tramp? Hobo songs were another source that provided insights into the life of the nation's transient population. Their thematic structure reflected the tramp's existence in its various forms.

Fatalistic and sarcastic visions of life in America existed alongside songs about the pathos of the hobo condition. In spite of many disappointing and cruel experiences encountered on the road, the songs often portrayed the tramp as an optimist who never gave up his dreams about a mythical hobo paradise, a theme that is exemplified in one of the most famous titles, "The Big Rock Candy Mountain. As the nineteenth century came to a close, the figure of the tramp had established itself most thoroughly in the field of popular entertainment.

In the hands of numerous artists and performers, the sad and sometimes tragic circumstances of homelessness moved into the background and were superseded by humorous representations of the carefree aspects of tramp life on the vaudeville stage, in newspaper comic strips, and in early silent films. Beginning in the late s, a large number of "tramp acts" were performed as entertaining comedy sketches that had a significant appeal for large audiences. Together with other popular figures of the time, the tramp became a comic character who provided innocent fun for middle-class urban vaudeville audiences of almost any racial or occupational background.

As the vaudeville stage simplified the complex social phenomenon into a hilarious caricature, the national comic weeklies, Puck, Judge, and Life, produced and reproduced endless verbal and visual gags about the tramp's tattered clothes, his panhandling ways, his jargon, and other stereotypes associated with the figure. Dime publications such as Wehman Bros. Monologues and Recitations collected vaudeville's most popular lines and comic episodes and distributed them to a large audience for repeated and leisurely consumption in a private setting. The humorous aspect of the tramp figure was also developed in the early comic strips, which frequently featured characters from the margins of American society.

The tramp appeared most prominently in Happy Hooligan, a very successful series by Frederick Burr Opper — that first appeared in William Randolph Hearst 's New York Journal in and ran for more than 30 years. The character of Happy, in Opper's words "a favorite son of misfortune" Goulart, p. This touching and ludicrous figure became a prototype for the "little man" in American humor, the unlucky individual overcome by the difficulties of life, yet irrepressible and cheerful in the face of never-ending challenges. The situations, the paraphernalia, and the themes that audiences encountered on the vaudeville stage and on the pages of the nation's humor magazines and comic strips provided a starting point for the newly emerging film productions.

This happened most prominently in the work of Charlie Chaplin — , whose Little Tramp character became "one of the most widely recognized popular culture icons in cinema" Cresswell, p. The process of simplification that the tramp figure had undergone in the various forms of mass-produced humor was reversed in Chaplin's work. The actor transformed the figure into a complex character who could embody a broad range of meanings that were sometimes contradictory. As a protean modern character, Chaplin's tramp slid into any role that the necessities of an uncertain existence required of him.

Chaplin's tramp retained the defining characteristics of worklessness and mobility, and quite often his actions were marked by pathos. But as clown, con man, and trickster located in the margins of normality, he highlighted the obstacles, absurdities, and tyrannies of middle-class life while resisting them with his comic subversiveness. That the subject of the tramp kept its relevance in the years after is borne out by fact that academic studies of hobos as well as more or less authentic autobiographical material continued to appear.

Joseph Stamper's Less than the Dust: The Memoirs of a Tramp , Carl S. Schockman's We Turned Hobo: Reitman's Sister of the Road: