Timeline

Selected, chapter-linked dates from the rail era’s beginnings through Britt’s living festival. Contested figures are marked as estimates or tradition.

1. 1865–69
   Civil War ends; veterans and workers move by rail. The first transcontinental railroad is completed (1869). See Origins.
2. 1866–73
   Tens of thousands of miles of new U.S. track are laid; railroads dominate employment and investment. See Origins.
3. 1873
   Panic of 1873 begins with Jay Cooke & Company’s failure (18 September). “Tramp” takes on its modern sense of the mobile unemployed. See Origins and Hobo, tramp, and bum.
4. 1876–86
   Tramp scare and tramp acts: New Jersey’s 1876 antitramping statute becomes a template for state vagrancy laws that jail men who “can give no reasonable account of themselves.” See Hobo, tramp, and bum.
5. 1877
   Great Railroad Strike; federal troops clash with workers. Anti-vagrancy politics intensify. See Origins.
6. c. 1889
   Word “hobo” attested in Western U.S. English (etymology unsettled). Popular tradition dates a Tourist Union ethical code to St. Louis this year—marked as tradition, not proven parchment, in Ethical code.
7. 1893–97
   Panic of 1893 and depression; “hobo” enters wider vernacular for migratory workers. See Origins.
8. 1894
   Coxey’s Army and western industrial armies (including Kelly’s) march and ride toward Washington; Jack London freighthops with Kelly’s Army—later material for The Road. See Hobo, tramp, and bum and Notable figures.
9. 1896–99
   Charles Noe and “Onion” Cotton organize Tourist Union No. 63; Chicago and Danville gatherings precede Britt. See Tourist Union No. 63.
10. 1899
    W. H. Davies loses a leg under a train at Renfrew, Ontario, ending his North American freight years; The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp follows in 1908. See Notable figures.
11. 1900
    First Britt, Iowa, National Hobo Convention under Tourist Union No. 63. See Tourist Union No. 63.
12. 1905
    Industrial Workers of the World founded in Chicago; migratory harvest and timber hands become a core constituency. See The IWW and the rails.
13. c. 1905–08
    International Brotherhood Welfare Association and Chicago Hobo College take shape under James Eads How and Ben Reitman—lectures on law, hygiene, and jobs. See Hobo College.
14. 1907
    Jack London publishes The Road. See Life on the rails and Notable figures.
15. c. 1913
    Hotel de Gink mutual-aid lodging for hoboes and the unemployed (washing cups, chores, a roof on the main stem). See Culture and Code.
16. 1913+
    Buffalo nickel issued; hobo-nickel carving tradition begins on the large profile. See Art and trade.
17. 1915–17
    IWW Agricultural Workers Organization uses freights as recruiting space; Joe Hill executed (1915); songbooks circulate. See The IWW and the rails and Music and literature.
18. 1917
    Bisbee deportation (12 July): roughly a thousand strikers and IWW sympathizers forced into cattle and boxcars. Espionage Act and wartime raids batter the open Wobbly presence. See The IWW and the rails.
19. 1923
    Nels Anderson publishes The Hobo, foundational Chicago sociology of homeless men and the hobo/tramp/bum typology. See Hobo, tramp, and bum.
20. 1924
    Jim Tully publishes Beggars of Life; filmed in 1928. See Life on the rails.
21. 1928
    Harry McClintock records “The Big Rock Candy Mountains.” See Music and literature.
22. 1929–39
    Great Depression; freighthopping surges; FSA photography; federal surveys and PBS-linked research document youth on the road. See The Great Depression and The boxcar kids.
23. 1931
    Scottsboro case begins after a freight-train arrest in Alabama—Jim Crow justice colliding with Black and white youth on the rails. See Black travelers & Jim Crow.
24. 1933
    Civilian Conservation Corps authorized—an off-ramp for some young men who can still prove a family address. See The boxcar kids.
25. 1933–34
    Britt Hobo Days resume on an annual footing (restart year cited as 1933 or 1934). See Tourist Union No. 63.
26. 1935
    National Youth Administration created; Harry Partch begins the transient years he later called his “personal Great Depression.” See The boxcar kids and Music and literature.
27. 1935–43
    Partch’s jungles, shelters, and freights yield Bitter Music, Barstow, and U.S. Highball. See Music and literature.
28. 1937
    Ben Reitman publishes Sister of the Road (Boxcar Bertha)—a literary composite. See Women on the rails and Notable figures.
29. 1940–41
    Partch copies hitchhiker inscriptions near Barstow (1940) and rides San Francisco–Chicago freights for U.S. Highball (1941). See Music and literature.
30. 1945+
    Dieselization and postwar prosperity shrink classic hobo numbers; trespassing remains illegal and deadly. See Then and now.
31. 1972
    Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha adapts the Reitman composite. See On screen.
32. 1996
    Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild documents Chris McCandless (“Alexander Supertramp”) as a later echo of tramp tradition. See Notable figures.
33. 1999
    PBS American Experience: Riding the Rails (Uys/Lovell) airs oral histories of Depression youth. See The boxcar kids.
34. 2006
    Death of Steam Train Maury Graham, five-time Hobo King. See Britt today.
35. 2008
    Death of Utah Phillips, singer and keeper of road songs. See Music and literature.
36. Today
    Britt Hobo Days continue each August; museums and archives (including Iowa’s Hobo Archive) preserve the record. This museum honors the culture without teaching illegal boarding. See Britt today and Then and now.

See Sources for works behind these dates.