Literature, Hobo and Tramp

Romance of the Frontier

Leaves of Grass was published just a decade before the tramp and hobo era began in earnest after the Civil War. In Leaves—“I inhale great draughts of space/ The east and west are mine, and north and/the south are mine”—Whitman celebrates the second chance of the New World, the “free original life there … simple diet and clean and sweet blood … litheness, majestic faces, clear eyes and perfect physique there … immense spiritual results.” In the 1860s and 1870s, the simultaneous opening of the Western frontier, growth of the railroad, and rapid transition of the United States from an agricultural to an industrial economy created a volatile society which, in the words of the historian Stephan Thernstrom, made “a hero of the man on the road, heading for the Great West or the Great City” (Thernstrom 1964).

Although Whitman wrote only incidentally about tramping, his free-roaming, liberated spirit hovers over virtually all later writings about the itinerant life, from the tramp letters of William Aspinwall to Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Even when the monotony and brutality of the vagabond experience sets in, that spirit often survives. William Aspinwall, a Civil War veteran and longtime tramp, was among the first to file literary dispatches from tramp world. He was commissioned in this exercise by John McCook, a rector and instructor in foreign languages at Trinity College in Connecticut, who published a series of letters from Aspinwall in 1901 and 1902. While Aspinwall decries his periods of intemperance and describes the dangers of riding the rails, he largely champions the freedoms of the vagabond life and its natural pleasures. In words sometimes oddly spelled, he is more likely than not to defend his ilk: