A jungle fire, a shared pot, an unspoken rule: don’t steal from the camp. Whether or not a parchment of “1889 commandments” ever hung in a hall, mutual aid had habits—and those habits still get recited at Britt.

Slang named the world. Ethics tried to govern it. A widely reprinted “Hobo Ethical Code” promises self-rule, work, clean jungles, decency to townspeople, and help for runaways. The list is real as living heritage. Its neat origin story—Tourist Union No. 63 at an 1889 St. Louis convention—is harder to pin to a primary archive. This chapter quotes the circulated text, says what the rules meant on the road, admits where reality fell short, and points forward to Britt’s ritual use of the same ideals.

An 1889 Origin Story—and Why Caution

Modern websites, Wikipedia’s hobo article, Mental Floss, Open Culture, and Britt-adjacent heritage pages commonly say Tourist Union No. 63 adopted an ethical code at a National Hobo Convention in St. Louis in 1889. That attribution is tradition more than proven parchment. This museum’s Tourist Union No. 63 chapter follows Bill Holm’s Iowa scholarship: Charles Noe and “Onion” Cotton sketched the union on a freight in 1896, with Chicago and Danville gatherings before Britt’s 1900 invitation. An 1889 St. Louis convention under the same union name sits awkwardly beside that timeline. Older Hobo Foundation / hobo.com narratives even place a “code of the road” at a Chicago meeting rather than at a single 1889 St. Louis vote. No widely cited contemporary 1889 minutes have surfaced in the secondary literature that reprints the list.

So label the dating carefully. The values are attested across memoirs and jungle ethnography. The neat “1889 commandments” package is later-documented heritage lore—useful, memorable, and not the same thing as a stamped archival original. Treat the printed list as the code Britt and popular culture transmit, not as a sealed founding tablet.

The Circulated Rules

The text most often reprinted today runs sixteen points (some popular lists drop the last item or the child-protection clause and stop at fifteen). Wikipedia’s enumeration, matching other heritage reprints, reads as follows:

1. Decide your own life; don’t let another person run or rule you.
2. When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times.
3. Don’t take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos.
4. Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again.
5. When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts.
6. Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals’ treatment of other hobos.
7. When jungling in town, respect handouts and do not wear them out; another hobo will be coming along who will need them as badly, if not worse than you.
8. Always respect nature; do not leave garbage where you are jungling.
9. If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help.
10. Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible.
11. When traveling, ride your train respectfully. Take no personal chances. Cause no problems with operating crew or host railroad. Act like an extra crew member.
12. Do not cause problems in a train yard; another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard.
13. Do not allow other hobos to molest children; expose all molesters to authorities—they are the worst garbage to infest any society.
14. Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home.
15. Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed; you may need their help someday.
16. If present at a hobo court and you have testimony, give it. Whether for or against the accused, your voice counts!

What the Rules Meant on the Road

Read against earlier rooms, the list is a practical handbook. “Always try to find work” and craft when jobs fail is the Work circuits ethic in sentence form—the hobo as migratory wage-seeker, not the idle tramp or the settled bum of the distinctions triad. Respect for local law, officials, and “gentleman” conduct in town was survival: a burned goodwill dried handouts for the next rider (rules 2, 3, 6, 7). Clean camps and pitched-in jungles (8–10) kept police and townspeople from clearing the ground; Nels Anderson’s Chicago ethnography describes jungle etiquette around shared pots, borrowed cans, and the expectation that you wash what you use.

Rules 11–12 speak the freight: ride respectfully, don’t sour a yard for the next traveler—the soft diplomacy of Life on the rails beside hard facts about bulls and crews. Rules 13–14 face the danger of kids on freights: protect children, steer runaways home—the moral counterweight to the Boxcar kids story. Rule 15 is reciprocal aid; rule 16 imagines a “hobo court” where testimony matters—peer justice more often informal (exclusion, shaming) than a sitting bench.

Self-Definition Against Tramp and Bum

The code is also a branding document. By insisting on work, crafts, sobriety-in-public, and respect for towns, riders drew a bright line against the tramp who traveled without seeking wages and the bum who did neither. Tourist Union No. 63’s wry “tourist” name made the same claim in civic language. Whether or not every member lived the list, repeating it told householders and newspapers: we are the working travelers. That self-definition never convinced every town—vagrancy laws still jailed men—but it shaped how Britt later sold hospitality and how museums still caption cases.

Where Reality Fell Short

Codes do not abolish danger. Jungles mixed migratory workers with thieves who used the camps for cover. Period papers and memoirs name jack-rollers—robbers who preyed on sleeping men for a few dollars. In July 1934 the Salt Lake Telegram reported two men beating and robbing a Fresno traveler in a boxcar after he had fed them in the jungle; police took the attackers on vagrancy while the victim fled California-bound. Anderson and later riders describe hi-jacking, fights, and the expulsion of men who stole from the pot. University of Iowa Hobo Archive material on Steam Train Maury recalls the burial of Lord Open Road after a jack-roller murder for pocket change—the ethical code’s opposite made flesh. The list’s child-protection clause exists because molesters and predators were not imaginary. Romance that stops at the mulligan pot lies; the archive keeps both stew and iron pipe.

The Code at Britt Today

At the National Hobo Convention the circulated ethic becomes civic theater. Speeches for king and queen still praise work, help, and respect for the town that hosts the jungle. Mulligan by the vat enacts the shared pot at festival scale. Friday’s memorial at Evergreen Cemetery—walked in Britt today—honors those who “caught the Westbound” under the same kinship language. Museum cases and Foundation lore keep reprinting the list even while historians flag the 1889 seal. The point for visitors is not to swear every rider in 1899 carried a sixteen-point card. It is to see how a mobile working culture tried to police itself, how that story became Britt’s brand, and how aspiration and violence shared the same tracks.

Shared rules left shared objects. The next room turns to the durable arts of the road: carved nickels, tramp-art wood, and the marks that outlasted the car.

See Sources for works and archives cited in this room.