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Trivia and did you know

Verified facts drawn from the exhibit rooms, each linked to its chapter.

Short, verified facts drawn from the exhibit rooms. Each points back to a chapter; contested numbers stay labeled as estimates.

• The word “hobo” is younger than the practice. Migratory rail riding surged after the Civil War and the Panic of 1873; the word itself is securely attested only around 1889–1890 in the American West. See Origins.
• Etymology unsettled. Despite confident folklore (“homeward bound,” “hoe boy”), professional etymologists have not settled the origin of “hobo.” See Origins.
• Tramp acts followed the scare. New Jersey’s 1876 antitramping statute—jailing people who begged door to door without a “reasonable account”—became a template for state laws over the next decade. See Hobo, tramp, and bum.
• Coxey and Kelly, 1894. Industrial armies of the unemployed marched and rode toward Washington in the depression after 1893; Jack London’s ride with Kelly’s Army later fed The Road. See Distinctions and Notable figures.
• Anderson’s triad has a paper trail. The tidy “hobo works and wanders / tramp dreams and wanders / bum drinks and wanders” formula reaches readers through Nels Anderson’s 1923 Chicago study quoting Ben Reitman—not as a timeless folk proverb without a source. See Distinctions.
• Chicago’s main stem. West Madison Street was among the busiest labor exchanges for migratory workers heading to harvests, woods, and construction—Hobohemia’s thoroughfare. See Hobo College.
• Water tanks as directories. Jack London described monikers on water tanks as a way travelers tracked one another across the continent. See Moniker wall.
• Pictographic “code” vs. monikers. Historians find strong evidence for name-date-direction graffiti; the cute symbol charts are poorly evidenced in the field and often trace to showmen such as A-No. 1. See Signs and symbols.
• Hotel de Gink washed cups. Mutual-aid lodging for hoboes and the unemployed asked chores for a roof—main-stem hospitality, not a souvenir pictograph. See Culture and Code.
• Bisbee’s freights were cages. On 12 July 1917 a posse forced roughly a thousand strikers and IWW sympathizers into cattle and boxcars and dumped them in New Mexico. See The IWW and the rails.
• Hobo College taught vagrancy law. Chicago’s college (Reitman, How’s IBWA orbit) offered lectures on hygiene, jobs, and the statutes that jailed migratory men—mutual aid with a chalkboard. See Hobo College.
• Teenagers on freights. Research tied to PBS Riding the Rails estimates on the order of more than 250,000 Depression-era teenagers left home to ride—an order-of-magnitude figure, not a census. See The boxcar kids.
• CCC favored family addresses. The Civilian Conservation Corps (1933) pulled some young men off freights, but allotment rules often excluded unattached homeless transients who could not prove a household. See The boxcar kids.
• Partch’s “personal Great Depression.” Composer Harry Partch spent roughly 1935–43 on and off as a transient; Bitter Music, Barstow, and U.S. Highball grew from those years. See Music and literature.
• Boxcar Bertha is literature. Ben Reitman’s 1937 “autobiography” is a composite fiction later adapted by Scorsese—not a single verified life. See Women on the rails.
• Hobo nickels post-date 1913. The craft exploded with the Buffalo nickel’s large profile—not with Civil War tokens. See Art and trade.
• Britt since 1900. The Iowa town hosted Tourist Union No. 63 in 1900 and still crowns a Hobo King and Queen each August. See Tourist Union No. 63.
• The 1889 code date is tradition. Popular reprints date the Hobo Ethical Code to a St. Louis Tourist Union meeting in 1889; Holm’s reconstruction of the union’s origin (c. 1896) makes that attribution contested. See Ethical code.
• Diesel changed the ride. Faster, less stop-prone diesel freights after WWII made classic freighthopping harder even as prosperity reduced the labor pool that fed hobohemia. Trespassing remains illegal. See Then and now.
• Mulligan stew. The communal jungle meal took whatever contributors brought—stew as mutual aid, with etiquette against the “jungle buzzard” who stole from the pot. See Language and slang and Ethical code.

See Sources for the scholarship behind these facts.