Timeline

Civil War ends; veterans and workers move by rail. Transcontinental railroad completed (1869).

About 35,000 miles of new U.S. track laid; railroads dominate employment and investment.

Panic of 1873 begins with Jay Cooke & Company's failure (Sept. 18). "Tramp" takes on its modern sense of the mobile unemployed.

Great Railroad Strike; federal troops clash with workers. Tramp panic and anti-vagrancy politics intensify in the decade.

Word "hobo" attested in Western U.S. English (exact etymology unknown).

Panic of 1893 and depression; "hobo" enters wider vernacular for migratory workers.

Jack London rides with Kelly's Industrial Army and freights; later material for The Road.

Charles Noe and Onion Cotton organize Tourist Union No. 63; Chicago and Danville conventions.

First Britt, Iowa, hobo convention (Tourist Union No. 63).

Jack London publishes The Road.

Buffalo nickel issued; hobo-nickel carving tradition begins.

Nels Anderson publishes The Hobo, foundational Chicago sociology of homeless men.

Harry McClintock records "The Big Rock Candy Mountains."

Great Depression; freighthopping surges; FSA photography; youth migration documented.

Britt Hobo Days resume on an annual footing (exact restart year cited variously as 1933 or 1934).

Ben Reitman publishes Sister of the Road (Boxcar Bertha)—literary composite.

Dieselization and postwar prosperity shrink classic hobo numbers.

Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha film.

PBS American Experience: Riding the Rails.

Death of Steam Train Maury Graham, five-time Hobo King.

Death of Utah Phillips.

Britt Hobo Days continue each August; a smaller rail-rider culture persists; museums and archives (including Iowa's Hobo Archive) preserve the record.