Following the Moniker Trail: Hobo Graffiti and the Strange Tale of Jack London, Skysail, and A-No. 1

Susan Phillips

In his book The Road, Jack London describes his experiences living as a hobo. From hopping trains, begging, and doing time to writing graffiti, London’s book recounts his experiences traveling across North America in the 1890s. During this period, London was known by several monikers, including Frisco Kid, Sailor Kid, and Sailor Jack due to his work on ships and his home in the Bay Area of California, near San Francisco. Based on London’s 1894 diary and experiences, The Road describes encounters with fellow hobos, wanderers, gypsies, lawmen, and trainmen, as well as his adventures with Kelly’s Industrial Army, a migratory group protesting unemployment and labor issues in the United States. Within this rich backdrop, London writes about the importance of tramp communication. While London’s writings about the Klondike and other topics put him on the literary map, his hobo writings remain lesser known.[1]

Hoboing or tramping was rooted in post-Civil War infrastructural, railroad, and urban development.[2] Distinct traditions of cultural expression emerged among both hobos and railroad workers in the mid-to-late 19th century that followed the wake of railroad construction. References to hobo graffiti from this period are well known in literature, but less is known about works documented in photography, or carvings that survive at various sites around the United States. After finding a wall of intact hobo writing in Los Angeles in 2000 dated 1914-1921, I began research into the topic across a broader geographical range and during an earlier time period.

Analysis of hobo graffiti—or any graffiti for that matter—necessitates an embrace of the tension between conjecture and empiricism. Graffiti can be tricky analytical ground. The self-sequestering nature of hobo populations has led to everything from academic erasure to a surrounding literature that toggles between meticulous observation and extreme lack of rigor. In his writing about hobos, for example, musicologist Graham Raulerson says that, in part due to their Wobbly philosophies, hobos tend to mistrust linear notions of history in favor of a “more spontaneous, place-bound view of time…partly because of the centrality of boredom and waiting in the hobo lifestyle.”[3]

Enter graffiti—craft of boredom and icon of lives temporally and physically in between. Graffiti is a singularly well-suited device for analyzing hobo and other fringe groups. It’s a self-produced medium of expression defined by absent authors, idle time, and encoded evasions. For these reasons, graffiti remains a neglected but particularly useful form of primary source data that can be analyzed across multiple historic circumstances.

In the 20th century United States, urban graffiti has been one manifestation of what it means to claim space on the part of fringe populations. Taking over city-space is often less overtly political than it is a key ingredient in what I think of as “soul survival.” By this I mean that graffiti is not only used in functional ways that insure the physical survival of marginalized people. Writing graffiti also does something bigger: it feeds the internal self on a steady diet of insider status, special knowledge, and the communal joy in one another’s company. The importance of that usually outweighs whatever direct benefits come from the messages themselves.

Even before the 1890s and well past the 1920s, hobo graffiti was the equivalent of what more common graffiti tagging is today—the main kind of subcultural writing inscribed in public locations other than on bathroom walls. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, hobos had created styles of writing directed at one another that were placed in or near rail yards, on wooden sheds or water tanks, under bridges, on sewer trestles, or sometimes on residential dwellings, fences, or other structures. For hobos, writing or carving monikers was a way for a transient population to remain connected despite the unpredictability of clandestine railroad travel, a lack of telecommunications, and frequent incarceration. Carved or written traces stayed in place, acting as clues for other hobos as to the past and future locations of the writer. That was the functional part. The messages also meant that people were connected, that they had a place, and that they were part of something, even when they had been rejected from everything else. Soul survival.

Popular understandings of the “hobo code” fixed most prominently in the American imagination are largely limited to unsubstantiated, self-referencing accounts of an intricate system of communication across the hobo ranks, most commonly associated with the depression era. Comparatively little attention has been paid to the more prolific, simpler, and corroborated forms of writing on the part of hobos at the turn of the century. In his work on hobos and Jack London, John Lennon argues that it is not enough to consider what London “wrote” but what London “did.” I wish to take this impulse one step further by analyzing hobo graffiti not only through literary texts on the subject, as has been the case in the past, but through the actual marks that hobos themselves created. So far, no treatment of this phenomenon has looked to actual graffiti marks in order to analyze this subject. And while surviving hobo graffiti is rare, pockets of it remain around the United States, along with photographic documentation of writings that no longer survive.[4]

Using graffiti to analyze hobo practices does not eliminate the tension between conjecture and empiricism. However, graffiti provides a productive nexus between the two that can drive more informed lines of questioning, empirically grounded research trajectories, links to specific archival and historical materials and, ultimately, the creation of more reliable forms of knowledge. Graffiti, and what I think of metaphorically as “following the moniker trail,” tells us where to look and the sorts of questions we might ask. As with many kinds of folkloric materials, graffiti is a playful form of evidence due to its illicit nature and absent authors. Jeff Ferrell writes that traditional methodologies are inadequate to the task of studying fringe, transient populations as whole. Hobo history, he argues, is a case study in “ambiguity and absence” and requires methods that match the ethos of insider communities. [5] The grounding graffiti provides is invaluable for a topic that has been plagued by assumptions, misinformation, and romanticized mythologizing.

Contemporaneous with London, Leon Ray Livingston, better known as “A-No. 1,” claimed to be the most famous hobo in the United States by the beginning of the twentieth century. He had travelled across the world, purportedly logging over 500,000 miles on just $7.61.[6]  He recounted his journeys in over a dozen books. A-No. 1 was a hobo tagger extraordinaire. He had carved his moniker all over the United States: in boxcars, on walls, on water tanks, on fences. He once served a five-month sentence in a San Francisco jail for carving his moniker into the wood of fancy hotels and bars. A lifelong rambler, he is credited with consolidating the entire system of hobo communication through his publications. Despite his romantic writings on the subject, he urged kids on the road to avoid the tramp life and often paid their return fares home. Dozens of newspaper accounts detail his graffiti-related escapades. Despite his notoriety in the early twentieth century, Leon Ray Livingston is today a relatively unknown figure.

Even lesser known is the relationship between Jack London and A-No. 1. In his book From Coast to Coast with Jack London, Livingston described a series of farfetched adventures with London as a young man. In the book, Livingston hopes to return London home to the Bay Area, to cure him of a life of wandering. From Coast to Coast was published just one year after Jack London’s death with the permission of London’s widow, Charmian London. A-No. 1’s account, though entirely fictitious, was later made into a 1973 film, Emperor of the North, which starred Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine. [7] Both the book and film cemented the false impression that the two had hoboed together, but archival evidence definitively refutes this notion. They did eventually meet and maintain a relationship until London’s death, but this was long after either of them was on the road. While A-No. 1’s accounts are full of exaggeration, his stories communicate a passion for the road and its problems and abuses.

London’s and Livingston’s accounts of the system of graffiti communication are in close alignment, and their core descriptions of this practice are supported by ample photographic documentation of hobo writing from this same period. Before introducing a key site of California-based hobo graffiti, I want to position that work within the broader history of trail and town marking in the United States and Europe to contextualize the pre-cursors of hobo graffiti, including vagabond marking, frontier identity, and colonial expansion.

Pioneers, “Gypsies,” Beggars, and Thieves

Several forms of what might be called “trail marking” pre-date the culture of hobo writing that developed in the nineteenth century. First is the practice of carving out the west as a frontier landscape by marking trails beginning in the seventeenth century on the part of pioneers and colonizers.[8] Individuals with Anglo and Spanish surnames left names, dates, and messages in places now named for the graffiti on them, such as Pioneer Register in Utah, Signature Rock in Wyoming, Inscription Loop at El Morro National Monument in New Mexico, and Register Cliff or Independence Rock on the Oregon Trail. These “pioneers” following westbound or northbound routes carved either on pristine desert rock or next to the in-situ rock art of indigenous populations as a form of claiming or communion. In addition to carved letters, early pioneers sometimes left trail markings in tar—axle grease from their wagon wheels. Pioneer graffiti is aberrant in its association with what would become a dominant population but very much in line with people using graffiti to mark waypoints on a journey. The project of westward expansion and trail marking continued into the twentieth century and is carried forward today by contemporary hikers following some of the same routes.

A second example of trail marking that acts as a precursor to hobo graffiti is the polar opposite of the pioneer graffiti above. These are the sometimes-mythologized codes in the US and Europe associated with fringe populations that were not tied to property, and that were connected to work in a way that was like the people at stake—itinerant. The history of this type of code writing is linked to wandering and labor, and to how vagabonds, tramps, “gypsies,” or travelers, and what were called “the roving unemployed” created interconnections despite their continual movement. [9] Early accounts of this practice exist among Romani people in Europe, for example, and scholars of the subject describe the way Romani would scatter grass or leaves, or arrange sticks in certain ways that gave meaning to the raw landscape. Romani also marked houses with so-called “chine” codes that judged the inhabitants and their habits to note where opportunities might be profitable or work welcome. Paola Toninato argues that

Nature supplies the Roma with a ‘semantic space’ onto which they can symbolically ‘inscribe’ the ephemeral messages conveyed via their non-alphabetic graphic practices. This semantic relationship with nature enables the Roma to survive among the non-Roma by providing them with a separate communication system and thereby a means of distinguishing themselves from the non-Roma.

Toninato pulls from various sources, including ethnographic accounts from the mid nineteenth century.[10]

A type of coding similar to the Roma chine codes was also utilized among non-Roma English and Scottish beggars and thieves. For example, John Camden Hotten’s 1865 The Slang Dictionary includes a chapter entitled “The Account of the Hieroglyphics Used by Vagabonds.” Hotten details the manner in which English tramps would not only mark doorsteps or other areas with signals, but also affix paper maps to tramp lodging house interiors in order to provide neighborhood, street, and house determinations regarding these areas or their inhabitants. Hotten includes a reproduction of one such map along with an explanatory key (see Fig 5). He notes that the widespread “English practice of marking everything, and scratching names on public property, extends itself to the tribe of vagabonds.”[11] In other words, Hotten describes a generic graffiti tradition at that time in England, which makes the contents and placement of the writing, rather than the generic practice of writing, an insider as opposed to outsider practice.

In the cases above, the notion of migration or movement is key, wherein people use graffiti to claim space for different reasons, to leave messages for one another, and use writing to anchor themselves temporarily in place. In the first case, graffiti associated with pioneers and colonizers helped to create a vision of the west as a blank slate. In the second case, the unknowns of towns for wandering populations inspired marking traditions that were both functional and that signaled reciprocity within disempowered populations. Because all of the above people were in motion, these examples of graffiti practices counter the ephemerality of movement and outsider status with concrete symbolic productions.

 Hobo Culture

Hoboing was initially a post-Civil War phenomenon. The Civil War had helped to develop railroad lines to carry troops, and the post-War era accompanied the shift from an agrarian to an industrialized economy. So-called “tramping” transformed from a largely foot-based, walking endeavor with the development of the railroad, which expanded opportunities for long-range travel. The Civil War had both absorbed the ranks of existing wanderers and created many more by simply shoving people post-war into a world that had undergone significant transformation. This shift caused a generation of individuals to take to the road—people who could no longer find their place economically or socially, and who sought out opportunities where the newly built railroads could carry them. They soon developed a culture of the road shared among fellow travelers. Much of the travel was structured around itinerant work opportunities, and a network of so-called “jungles,” or hobo camps, soon developed across the U.S. and Canada. The boom in the tramping population aided the building of roads, bridges, railroads, houses, buildings, water infrastructure, and sewer lines. Hobos partially made up the labor for these endeavors, and had on again off again relationships to municipalities and law enforcement.[12]

Several excellent scholarly accounts depict hobo social groups this period, including Nels Anderson’s 1923 sociological-practitioner classic The Hobo, Todd DePastino’s Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America, Tim Cresswell’s The Tramp in America, and John Lennon’s Boxcar Politics. [13] Analyzing everything from the road to hobo sexual practices, this scholarship is rich in aspects of the culture and includes some references to carvings and monikers. Complimenting this work are many first-hand accounts of hobo life, including most notably the writings of Jim Tully and Josiah Flynt, as well as A-No. 1 (Leon Ray Livingston) and Jack London.[14] Among these, A-No. 1’s works are as questionable as they are prolific. While Nels Anderson, for example, discounts the writings of A-No. 1 as exaggerated and unpopular among an insider hobo readership, he also bases his entire discussion of nicknaming on A-No. 1’s work.

Little is known about hobo practices of marking towns and cities other than the “fake folklore” versions of the mythologized hobo code one can find on the Internet.[15] The most simplified versions of this use some of the same symbols as did the cadger’s code or Romani Chine codes above, and for the same purpose. In an early text from the United States, detective, spy, and author Allan Pinkerton describes a hobo code that he indicates is derived directly from these earlier traditions—and that was popular among multi-generational begging families with roots in “the old country.”[16]

Pinkerton is a complicated figure in American history. He was a spy during the Civil War and a slave abolitionist whose house was a stop on the Underground Railroad. He also engaged in union busting, particularly by exposing union corruption among the railroads. His writing exhibits a street-worthy judgment of tramping and its life of hard knocks, but he is unexpectedly sympathetic to the cause of tramps due to his own experiences tramping as a youth. He approaches the culture as someone who wishes to rectify the misunderstandings surrounding it. In his 1878 book Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives, Pinkerton describes what he calls “mendicant freemasonry” on the part of tramps to help them find a pathway, to rely on one another not to start from scratch, and to get the lay of the land before entering a new town. Pinkerton writes that:

Among this class every possible art and device is resorted to. Charts of the country, showing the best routes for travel, and of cities, designating the most benevolent neighborhoods, are common. This same class have a regular system of operation. In the cities they beg during the winter, and when summer comes, one of a party will start out in advance and “work a route” as a peddler or tinker. In this way, as he stops at nearly every house on a designated route, he will have learned the character of the inmates, whether they are benevolent or rude, and he seldom takes his departure without leaving some pre-arranged sign to indicate to him who follows after, just where, and where not, to make application. These scamps become such keen and correct judges of people and surroundings that they scarcely ever commit an error; and if one could read the hieroglyphics upon door, steps, gate, fence, or tree, which is usually laid to the chalk or jackknife of the bad boy of the neighborhood, they could ascertain just what opinion was had of them by the tramps who have passed that way.[17]

Pinkerton stops short of deciphering specific codes utilized in this practice, saying that “deciphering these symbols is simply impossible.”[18] Groups would routinely change the signs in order for others not to take advantage of their labor. Without providing specific descriptions, Pinkerton describes only a generic tradition linked to earlier European practices that communicate about conditions on the road and the temper of towns where police were on the prowl or where inhabitants might trade labor for food or a place to sleep. Like Hotten’s example before him, Pinkerton’s account is difficult to substantiate as a singular source of unverifiable information.

It is almost certain that tramps in the United States left some sort of signage on fences, signposts, post boxes, and so forth in towns and urban centers—and the contents of the simplified codes in European and U.S. cases are startlingly similar. There are simply too many stories and nostalgic remembrances to discount it entirely. But little direct evidence exists of this practice aside from the kind of unsubstantiated writing in which Pinkerton engages, some newspaper accounts, references in literature, and the memories of people who grew up seeing such marks.

As with many hobo practices, this sort of signage has been most subject to fabrication. Graham Raulerson writes that in general, since World War II, “the concept of the hobo has trended toward mythology.”[19] In his exploration of hobo graffiti, John Lennon argues that he has never found convincing evidence of an advanced symbolic system among hobos, but rather a strong tradition of names, dates, and directions: “Although it seems reasonable that some hobos could have used common symbols – especially in populated urban centers – to communicate certain information, my research has shown that hobo graffiti is comprised of much more basic materials: monikers, dates, and logos.” Giving examples from Jack London, writer and hobo Jim Tully, and hobo composer Harry Partch, Lennon discusses the need to “remove hobo graffiti from a pedestal of a sophisticated language system that supposedly revealed a secret coded history of hobos. Instead, these writers’ examples place hobo graffiti within the larger overall history of graffiti, where wall markings are about illegally emplacing a name on property, symbolically stating their presence as a member of minority subculture.”[20]

As Lennon observes, hobo graffiti has been subject to uncritical circulation, especially via the Internet, but comparatively little grounded research. I have never seen a firsthand photograph or example featuring any symbols said to be part of the hobo code.[21] Each time I have been introduced to a new site with surviving hobo writing or its documentation, I wonder whether it might contain evidence of this practice, but so far I have encountered nothing remotely similar to it. A skeptic’s view of this phenomenon is supported due to the amount of surviving hobo graffiti whose contents are not linked to such practices. Seen another way, however, the places and media that hobos would have used to create coded markings—such as fences or sign posts marked in chalk or charcoal—were less likely to survive than the carving they produced on wooden sheds or fences.

Hobo Graffiti

As argued above, the mystique of the hobo codes has eclipsed the well-documented, prolific writing practices in which hobos engaged at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, hobo graffiti was the equivalent of what more common graffiti tagging is today—the main kind of subcultural writing inscribed in public locations other than on bathroom walls. Carved nicknames, or monikers (sometimes written as “monicas”), were based on personal characteristics and places of origin, and hobo writers often included dates with arrows and letters (N, S, E, or W) indicating the direction of travel. They placed these writings in or near rail yards, on wooden sheds or water tanks, or sometimes in hobo jungles under the shelter of bridges or in other locations near the railroad. The basic hobo equation of a nickname, a direction signified by an arrow and sometimes place name, and the date would become a foundational graffiti tradition in the United States in the twentieth century.

For hobos, writing or carving monikers was a way for a transient population to remain connected despite the unpredictability of clandestine railroad travel, a lack of telecommunication, and frequent incarceration. Carved or written traces stayed in place, acting as clues for other hobos as to the past and future locations of the writers. Hobos created a society of insiders through nicknames and special knowledge that included a tradition of clandestine writing as well as distinctive forms of dress, song writing and storytelling traditions, and other forms of carving, such as potato or wood carving, that might earn a modest income.[22] Hobos also created a unique community of practice with intimate knowledge of train schedules, methods of hopping and riding the rails, tricks to avoid police or railroad “bulls,” and the uncanny ability to earn the sympathy of kind-hearted housewives. “Sit down” dinners, handouts, or care packages acted as counterweights to police brutality and targeted incarceration that were frequent companions to hobo life.

Montana Slim’s carving in the image above hosts a discrepancy between the carved date 1875 and the recorded date of this building’s construction in 1880. The graffiti casts doubt upon the officially recorded date not just because of the presence of the 1875 carving, but because of one key piece of contextual information: The Southern Pacific Line to Red Bluff was completed in December 1871.[23] This date of completion makes Montana Slim’s northbound journey in April of 1875 possible, and it provides a potential new construction date for the building that would support a place to query the veracity of official documents. Graffiti and official records are equally reliable and equally full of error. To render these two forms of recording equivalent flips power hierarchies on their heads by questioning information entered into official records and by considering in the same breath what is carved by the hands of fringe populations.[24]

Following the Moniker Trail

Jack London first tried hoboing in the summer of 1892 at sixteen years of age.[25] After getting his feet wet with mostly local trips, he began a cross continental journey in 1894 when he was eighteen. During these periods, he first went by the monikers Frisco Kid, Sailor Kid, and, in 1894, Sailor Jack. London wrote of the moniker tradition in his 1907 memoir The Road, which recounted his travels in 1894:

Water-tanks are tramp directories. Not all in idle wantonness do tramps carve their monicas, dates, and courses. Often and often have I met hoboes earnestly inquiring if I had seen anywhere such and such a “stiff” or his monica. And more than once I have been able to give the monica of recent date, the water-tank, and the direction in which he was then bound…I have met hoboes who, in trying to catch a pal, had pursued clear across the continent and back again, and were still going.[26]

Both Jack London and Leon Ray Livingston wrote of “following the moniker trail” of people with whom they sought to connect. A-No. 1 recounts two stories of chasing missing boys across the country by following out their monikers. Jack London wrote of his desire to link up with a man named Skysail Jack. London had heard that Skysail shared his own Bay Area origin and had worked in the harbor—hence the distinctive appellation so similar to London’s own. London imagined they would get on famously together:  “I was a ‘comet’ and ‘tramp-royal, so was Skysail Jack; and it was up to my pride and reputation to catch up with him. I ‘railroaded’ day and night, and I passed him; then turn about he passed me.”[27] In his treatment of the hobo in U.S. culture and literature, John Lennon describes London’s tale “as a hyper-masculine competition where there were neither prizes nor even rules—just who could get farther ahead of the other”—all “marked by a trail of graffiti left in each other’s wake.”[28] To me, London’s pursuit of Skysail always reads as full of longing—he recounts a series of missed opportunities, all signaled by carvings, that ultimately indicate the loss of potential male communion as opposed to competition. For London, Skysail’s carvings were simply not a good enough stand in for the real person: “Skysail Jack and Sailor Jack – gee! if we’d ever got together.”[29]

My own version of following the moniker trail began inadvertently in 2000. I was with a group of friends in 2000 looking for historic graffiti in Los Angeles. Tommy Maron, artist Chaz Bojórquez, Ben Higa and I had formed a team whose quest was to find older graffiti in the city. One day, we hit pay dirt, finding an intact wall of hobo graffiti under a bridge just above the confluence of the L.A. River and the Arroyo Seco. The wall included names such as Kid Bill, Chito the Tuscon Kid, Harden, Kid Smith, and Oakland Red, with dates from August 1914, July 1919, or 1921. Over a decade later, I realized that the wall included one notable name: A-No. 1. I had thought the name was Spanish, for Año, and had thus read over it for many years without realizing its significance. After I gave a presentation at the Autry Museum of the American West on behalf of the L.A. History & Metro Studies Group of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, the news of A-No. 1’s name and the hobo wall in general generated national and international media attention. It all came as a bit of a surprise, especially so many years after the initial find.

The news coverage put me in touch with people who wanted to recount childhood memories or who wanted to tell me about places they knew of that might have similar markings. One of those people was Joel Reinhard of Red Bluff, California. Reading the news coverage about A-No.1, Reinhard contacted me regarding a photo archive of hobo carvings that had been documented by amateur photographer Robert Ranberg in 1969. Upon Ranberg’s death, Reinhard had recognized the importance of these images along with a 16mm film of hobo carvings. He literally plucked them from the trash heap and then turned them over to the Tehama County Genealogical and Historical Society, where they remained in storage for several years. I travelled to Red Bluff to meet with Reinhard, eager to see the collection. Upon viewing slides and film, I was surprised to recognize some of the names carved onto the walls—including several monikers Jack London refers to in The Road. These included Buck Kid, Midget Kid, Skysail himself, the date 1894, and one of London’s own monikers, Frisco Kid. I eventually helped to digitize these materials for the Tehama County Genealogical and Historical Society and spent a great deal of time analyzing the photographs and film and their contents.

A great deal of beautiful lettering appears on the wall—the word “Portland” carved in Old English font, creative letterforms, various monikers and hometowns, and two carved birds. The most prolific carver was Kid Wing, who also wrote his full name, Wing Foey. Wing Foey was related to an original Chinese family in Red Bluff. The Foeys still make their home there, including Bill Foey, a prolific author and artist who was interested to find out more about his Uncle Wing. I was able to meet with Bill after a presentation for the Tehama County Genealogical and Historical Society in summer 2018. Because Bill’s father and grandfather had children at older ages, Bill is just the third generation beyond the founding members of the Red Bluff Foeys. At one point Kid Wing carved “Import Tokay” next to his name, referencing the cheap wine in which hobos might partake. Broken bottles of Tokay wine appear in the final cuts of Ranberg’s film, and Bill Foey believed that his Uncle Wing may have struggled with substance abuse. Kid Wing’s story, recounted here in only a cursory manner, hints at a more complete picture of hobo life during the latter 1800s and early 1900s.

Other keystone carvings bring the tale back to the somewhat complex relationship between London, Skysail, and A-No. 1. In 1892, 1894, and 1905, respectively, each of these individuals seems to have carved their monikers into a wall off the sheds along Red Bluff’s Southern Pacific Line. Prolific hobo graffiti writer Tex-KT (Tex King of Tramps) carved his name there too, probably much later, making it a veritable wall of hobo graffiti superstars. One of London’s road-kid names appears as well: “Frisco Kid” was a moniker he used in the summer of 1892 when he was taking baby steps in freight hopping. There is no way to attribute this mark to him definitively.[30]  But the other writing on the wall does settle one minor discrepancy associated with London’s work. While recounting his pursuit of Skysail in The Road, London confused the dates, writing that Skysail carved his initials on 9-15-94. But London transcribed that as being October 15, 1894 instead of September of that year. Richard Etulain notes that this is a mistake on London’s part, but he doesn’t tell us how he knows this.[31] One piece of evidence in favor of that interpretation comes from the walls themselves.

In October 1894, a crew of hobo notables passed through Red Bluff, leaving their names together on the wall. One of them was Skysail, who appears along with carver Den. Brook. (Den. is for Denver; I am unsure why a period appears after Brook), Midgit Kid (whose name appears in the image above as Miget Kid), Scoty Sho. (meaning unknown), Colo. Slim (for Colorado Slim), Det. Kid (for Detroit Kid) and Sailor YT (YT is occasionally used in hobo writing but I have been unable to determine the meaning). This carving indicates that the crew was southbound by the depiction of a large letter S, along with the date 10/16/94. This date makes it impossible for Skysail to be in Canada pursued by Jack London just one day earlier, and lends credibility to the interpretation that London’s Canadian pursuit of Skysail took place in September. It’s a small example of the way that graffiti can both complicate temporalities and settle them through an altogether different kind of evidence, constructed by hobos themselves.

The year 1894 was the same year as London’s journey, and the year of Kelly’s Army/Coxey’s Army, in which London participated and about which he wrote. The October date would have been after the army disbanded in August of that year after their months of organizing and the march on Washington as labor protest.[32] The October 1894 date works well temporally and geographically based on London’s pursuit of Skysail through Canada that he recounts as taking place that September, a few weeks earlier.

Graffiti invites conjecture, which begs the question about how to distinguish the suggestive from the empirical. One can hint at connections that remain unsubstantiated—such as Jack London as the Frisco Kid on the wall in Red Bluff. But the best graffiti analysis blends conjectural statements with more definitive ones—such as a group of hobo monikers appearing on a wall and whose “noms-de-rail” Jack London subsequently writes of, including Buck Kid, Midget Kid, and Skysail himself.

After his return from tramping in 1894, London wrote about a hobo youngster in a series of stories entitled “The Frisco Kid” and “The Frisco Kid Comes Back” in which he captured some of the linguistic parlance of hobo road kids of the time. He penned these stories while still in high school and utilized the appellation that he himself had taken on in his early travels. While it is impossible to definitively link the carving of Frisco Kid to London’s own hand, the dates, geographic location, and proximity to other characters of which London writes add veracity to this interpretation. In this case, the tension between empiricism and conjecture is productive as opposed to mythologizing. The questioning that emerges from it is connected to historical events and archival data as opposed to guesses that lead to further speculation or self-referencing conclusions.

In the case of A-No. 1, his own fictitious representation of the association between him and Jack London has muddied the analytical waters surrounding their relationship for nearly a century. After London’s 1907 publication of The Road, A-No. 1 had admired the famous author from afar and eventually penned a ten-page letter to him. A-No. 1’s reason for writing was his concern for the plight of tramps in the convict lease system—a practice he compared to slavery that targeted northern tramps and tramps of African American origin in the Southern United States. Livingston attempted to enlist the help of London, whom he considered had the ear of the public and could possibly galvanize change around this issue. While convict leasing may have been the stated reason for the correspondence, my guess is that A-No. 1 simply wanted to connect to London, whose work wound up inspiring Livingston’s own literary career. He wrote: “Perhaps you have heard of me many a time while ‘rambling’ up and down ‘lines’ and across lots. I am known everywhere under the ‘monika’ of ‘A-No. 1.” This letter began their relationship long after their hobo years had ended. They did meet in person eventually and maintained a relationship until London’s death. The archival information related to their story evidences somewhat of an uneven relationship between the two, and a bit of a wet-blanket reception regarding the idea of a piece on convict leasing on London’s part. But A-No. 1 continued to correspond with Jack and then with Charmian London after Jack’s death. He eventually gained permission from the widow to write From Coast to Coast.

A-No. 1 accidentally got on Charmian London’s bad side after Jack’s death. In a letter to her, A-No. 1 described his publication plans in From Coast to Coast that seemed to include a mention of alcohol in conjunction with Jack’s name. Then, in attempted praise for Mrs. London, A-No. 1 suggested that she, Charmian, might have had a hand in some of Jack’s writing.[33] Charmian did not take kindly to either suggestion. On June 10, 1917, she wrote: “My dear Mr. Livingston (A-No. 1): I am going to give you a scolding, and I am sure that you will feel that I am justified.” She admonished him never, ever to write about Jack in association with alcohol, to change the electrotype of his forthcoming book at any cost, and never to insinuate that anyone penned Jack’s works but Jack himself. After this tirade, Charmian threatened A-No. 1 in a post-script: “be careful of what you say about JL now.” If she were “nasty,” she might choose to give up the entire story about him and Jack not actually being companions on the road. A-No. 1 must have had that kicked-in-the-gut feeling we’ve all had from time to time. He plead misunderstanding and begged forgiveness via telegram from Erie, Pennsylvania to Glen Ellen, California.[34]

As complex as life can be, the walls offer a welcome simplicity. For all the drama of A-No.1’s relationship with Jack and Charmian, for all the unrequited longing between Skysail and Sailor Jack, graffiti cuts life down to its bare essentials. Complex stories are always behind the statement “I was here.” In this case, the “here” turned out to be Red Bluff.  In 1905, A-No. 1 came through town, leaving a trail of carvings in his wake.[35] While London, Skysail, and A-No. 1 were never on the road together in the conventional sense, they actually did wind up together, on this one wall, on this one shed, off the Southern Pacific Line in Red Bluff, California. London, Skysail, and A-No. 1 were connected in place but disconnected in time. The walls held convergence nonetheless.

The buildings where these carvings resided burned down in 1969, shortly after Robert Ranberg filmed and photographed them. Ranberg’s documentary work puts the unassuming Northern California town of Red Bluff on the map as one of the most significant sites of hobo writing in the United States.

Hobo Legacies in Contemporary Graffiti

Hobo writing is often given a nod in compendia that attempt to chart the history of graffiti in the United States, but the specifics of its impact are seldom elaborated.[36] Turn-of-the-century hobo graffiti directly influenced at least two contemporary graffiti genres: gang graffiti and freight train moniker writing. Below, I review hobo influences on gang writing in Los Angeles (the example I know best), spend some time with the widespread and wildly popular genre of freight train graffiti known as moniker writing. I then touch upon hobo connections to contemporary New York style graffiti that has now spread across the United States and globally.

Gangs and hobos occupied similar social spaces in their day. They were subject to hostile news media treatments, police brutality, mass incarceration, and public ostracism. Turn-of-the-century hobo associations with Wobbly labor groups linked hobos to paranoid discourses regarding anarchism and socialism, which further vilified their forms of sociality, political potential, and collective living. Similarly, gang youth in Los Angeles in the 1940s were subject to a paranoid gaze due to their social groups and distinctive clothing. They were said to be ripe for Axis exploitation and reminiscent of bloodthirsty Aztecs or wolves hunting in packs. They constructed neighborhood space differently, and they were legally penalized as collectivities rather than as individuals.[37]

In Los Angeles, gang members co-generated graffiti stylistic conventions alongside hobos in the early twentieth century. From the turn of the century through the 1940s, connections to hobos on the part of Latino and other youth occurred in the environs of the Los Angeles River and other waterways, where gang members had direct connections with hobos and visual access to their graffiti as well as materials for writing: railroad tar, railroad spikes, and occasional flares. Gang members in the late 1940s frequently wrote in tar, which had been a common hobo medium, and before that a pioneer writing medium. Gang members also adopted several hobo stylistic elements, such as arrows, pluses, quotations, or sometimes scrolls to surround their compositions. As with hobos, gang members took on monikers—nicknames—as part of marking out elements of landscape. And like the hobo term “moniker,” the name gang members used for nicknames—the placa—meant both the name itself and the graffiti form of the name.[38] Some hobo practices – such as drawing arrows, the backward “N,” the use of negative lettering, and even use of the term “Crip” – remain in use in gang graffiti and contemporary graffiti forms today. And my sense is that at least some of the angularity of early gang writing must have been inspired by hobo graffiti that was initially carved. Hobos had a stylistic influence on gangs in cities like Los Angeles that seems to have carried forward through today.

Another contemporary graffiti tradition directly influenced by hobo writing is freight train moniker writing, which has its initial history in the graffiti of railroad workers. Hobos and trainmen were both produced by the same factors: the Civil War, the shift to an industrialized society, urban development, the expansion of the frontier, and, of course, the construction of the North American railroad. Within this context, twin and opposite brotherhoods developed—like a Cain and Abel, though it was hard to tell who was the evil one and who was the good one at times. Hobos could be seen as either hard-luck cases or parasitic opportunists, and trainmen as either hardworking souls or sadistic bullies. Much of the time, they were both. Tramps and trainmen were subject to similar kinds of media paranoia. Union membership was contentious in its early days because of the way that it undermined capital accumulation. Railroad fraternities held the trappings of secret societies and union labor was fundamentally in opposition to bootstrapping or rugged individualism—ideologies hobo lifestyles also violated. At the same time trainmen, hobos, and the railroad itself symbolized other core American principles of freedom, movement, frontier, and the value of hard work. Even as opposites, both groups were simultaneously reviled and revered.

For both railroad workers and for hobos, waiting was part of the primum mobile of graffiti production. For railroad workers, waiting came in the yards. There would be a flurry of work, and then nothing. This fallow period became a creative nexus. Workers had the medium at hand, a sequestered place to write, and the time to do it. Railroaders were prolific writers, creating what they called “chalk marking,” “writing,” or “boxcar art.” They didn’t use the word moniker—even though the rail tradition that gave birth to what we know now as the moniker tradition. Moniker was a hobo word. The chalk markings of railroaders helped to express other aspects of the world of labor—getting a nickname, jockeying for position, dealing with subordination, being tied to the drudgery of the job, navigating union politics. Railroaders through time wrote a great deal on various surfaces, as well as on the trains themselves. In so doing, they created the inversion of what happened with hobos. Switchmen or car knockers who performed inspections with chalk in hand would stay in the yard and write on train cars. The marks they produced would then travel without them, while hobos frequently left graffiti near railroad locations as they themselves travelled.

At some point in the latter part of the twentieth century, these two opposed brotherhoods of hobos and trainmen gave birth to a third brotherhood, that is sometimes called the “folklore brotherhood.” In this contemporary brotherhood, freight hoppers (would-be contemporary hobos), railroad workers, and other people interested in trains or art are engaged in co-producing this tradition. In his book, Mostly True, Bill Daniel writes that: “The rail tag was born the bastard child of two warring parents; the working stiff and the shiftless wanderer. […] This duality is manifested in the astonishingly elegant and modest drawing modality that tramps and rail workers have spent the last 100 years co-evolving.”[39]

Contemporary moniker writing consists of an insignia written in paint stick usually with a saying of some kind, the date, and select additional information. Moniker writing today was carried through from the turn of the century to today by a few key railroaders, including Bozo Texino, Herbie, JB King, and Colossus of Roads (some of these names represented more than one individual writer).[40] Their work developed into a recognizable rail-based graffiti art form with national and international devotees and a robust following on digital platforms such as Instagram. So-called “benchers”—people addicted to freight train writing of all kinds—document these marks as they roll by on lumbering freights. As documentarians rather than producers, benchers create zines and digital video compilations, and at least some of them use analogue means to circulate their productions to those with like-minded interests. Today, moniker writing mostly involves people who choose to be part of it rather than those who are using the markings as a creative outlet based on their labor or social position.

Javier Abarca writes that many accounts of contemporary moniker writing ideologically link this practice to 1930s depression-era hobos, while ignoring “the phenomenal hobo roaming and graffiti culture that developed in the late nineteenth century.”[41] Despite changes within the culture, the moniker practice remains based in its original context and continues to be practiced by graffiti-writing communities, which in this case continues to include both tramps and trainmen whose traditional graffiti practices are rooted in deeper history.

In all its guises, graffiti counters the tension between ephemerality and permanence. This tension is a fundamental aspect of what it means to be part of graffiti-producing communities. That liminality of the in-between drives carving in place while wandering, or writing on trains that are moving while workers stayed put.

In the United States, major graffiti traditions have emerged during times of significant economic transformation. Hobo culture and the hobo writing system developed during the transition from an agrarian society to an industrialized society in the nineteenth century. In case of contemporary writers, the emergence of graffiti that began on New York subways in the 1970s bridged the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial society. Javier Abarca further traces the linkages between the New York style contemporary graffiti and hobo writing. Both, he says, are based in the subversion of an alienating capitalist environment, both make use of nicknames and networks of communication based on the graffitied name, and both incorporate the ethos of going “all city,” of getting one’s name up in a way that can stand apart from the person. Linkages to the hobo tradition included intimate understanding of transportation systems and urban infrastructure, knowledge of which is still relevant among contemporary graffiti writers regardless of their city of origin. Writes Abarca, “as a carrier of names and as a carrier of people, the giant and alienating train detourned into a vehicle for fantastic, free mobility is at the core of both moniker writing and New York graffiti.”[42]  As with “moniker” and “placa,” the “tag” represents both the nickname and the graffitied version of the name.

Though much of the above treatment remains preliminary, ample evidence supports the role of hobo graffiti as a keystone graffiti genre with ongoing influences in graffiti practices today.

Conclusion

In writing graffiti, people through time have carved out pathways for survival through economic changes, created alternate forms of livelihood and sociality, and nurtured the camaraderie that has seen writers through the physical and emotional challenges of the road, of poverty, or of neighborhood life in places whose violence stems as much from law enforcement as from internal sources. Soul survival. As with most graffiti–centered subcultures, hobo groups directed their messages toward themselves. In the process they created rich genres of expression with aesthetic and grammatical sensibilities that that influenced subsequent graffiti traditions.

In California, hobos provided the link between traditional American folk culture and contemporary street culture. During the so-called “tramp era” at the turn of the twentieth century, hobos took on monikers and developed a form of written communication that shared information about identity, location, and travel. The basic hobo equation of a nickname, a direction signified by an arrow and sometimes place name, and the date would become the foundational graffiti tradition in the United States in the early twentieth century.  In cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Sacramento, this culture of the American road directly informed nascent traditions of gang writing. California cities with hobo influences and emergent gangs helped to incubate some of the earliest forms of street culture in the United States.

In his books, A-No. 1 writes about the “lure” of the tramp life. To some degree, his musing on the subject holds true today. People in the United States and abroad feel a visceral sense of connection to the hobo mystique. That lure has accompanied widespread circulation of ungrounded stories and mythical understandings regarding hobo life. At the same time, a well-elaborated practice of hobo writing connected to firsthand documentation and literary references provides fodder for heretofore under-examined aspects of hobo life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Graffiti is an untapped form of primary source data that brings further clarity to several aspects of hobo culture, including the lives of notable individuals such as Jack London or A-No. 1. It also offers scope and purpose to hobo written communication. Analysis of hobo graffiti also opens further lines of questioning and necessitates deep cushioning within archival, historical, infrastructural, and narrative contexts. As examined above in the case of Red Bluff, California, hobo carvings give shape to the kinds of questions to which scholars can seek answers in order to extend reliable flows of information. Due to its absent authors and ephemeral nature, graffiti is never a wholesale solution to speculative problems—in fact the opposite is true. A degree of ambiguity is one of the delightful things about graffiti research and an important reminder of the tentative nature of knowledge production in general. But the ambiguity in this case is generative. It invites further inferences but in a manner that is both informed and fabled. In the cases above, graffiti provides a unique lens into an obscure practice by helping to ground questions as well as caution answers.

Notes

[1] With thanks to: Javier Abarca, Thomas Chambers, Owen Clayton, Bill Daniel, Bill Foey, Devon Hanofski, Tony Johnson and the Medford Railroad Park, Carol Mieske and the Tehama County Genealogical and Historical Society, Becky Nicolaides and the USC-Huntington Metro Studies Group, Robert Ranberg, Joel Reinhard, and Charles Wray. Jack London, The Road (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1907); Richard W. Etulain, Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1979). Some segments of this material were previously published in Susan Phillips, Javier Abarca, and Thomas Chambers. Tramp Directories, Noms-de-Road, and Unwritten Codes: A Souvenir of Hobo Graffiti (Madrid: Urbanario, 2017).

[2]Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion Books, 2001); Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Mark Wyman, Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011).

[3] Graham Raulerson, “A Fountainhead of Pure Musical Americana: Hobo Philosophy in Harry Partch’s Bitter Music,” Journal of the Society for American Music 11/4 (2017): 454.

[4] John Lennon, “Trains, Railroad Workers and Illegal Riders.” In Jeffrey Ian Ross (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art (2016), 27-35; John Lennon, “Can a Hobo Share a Box-Car? Jack London, the Industrial Army, and the Politics of (In)visibility” American Studies (2007 48/4): 7. Charles and Michael Wray and Devon Hanofski have (separately) conducted the most thorough investigations of hobo sites in the United States, and they have identified and documented multiple sites across numerous states.

[5] Jeff Ferrell, Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 73.

[6] Leon Ray Livingston, Life and Adventures of A-No. 1, America’s Most Celebrated Tramp (Erie, Penn.: The A-No. 1 Publishing Company, 1910).

[7] Leon Ray Livingston, From Coast to Coast with Jack London. (Erie, Penn.: The A-No. 1 Publishing Company, 1917). The Robert Aldrich film is Emperor of the North Pole (20th Century Fox 1973).

[8] Stephen Benz, “A Grave on the High Plains.” River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative (2017 17/1):135-141; Stanley B. Kimball, Stanley B. 1988. Historic Sites and Markers along the Mormon and Other Great Western Trails. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988; Timothy Rostov Urbaniak, Historic Inscriptions of the Northern Plains: Identity and Influence in the Residual Communication Record (University of Montana, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2014).

[9] Eric Monkkonen, (ed.) 1984. Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790-1935. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984): 2.

[10] George Borrow, The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain. London: Murray 1841); Paola Toninato, Romani Writing: Literacy, Literature and Identity Politics. London: Routledge, 2014), 59.

[11] John Camden Hotten, The Slang Dictionary (London: Piccadilly, 1865), 29.

[12] Monkkonen, Walking to Work; Kelly Lytle Hernández, Kelly Lytle, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

[13] Nels Anderson, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923); Cresswell, The Tramp in America; DePastino, Citizen Hobo. John Lennon, Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in U.S. Culture and Literature, 1869-1956 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).

[14] Josiah Flynt, 1891, “The American Tramp,” Contemporary Review (60/August 1891); Jim Tully, Beggars of Life (New York: A. & C. Boni, 1924); Livingston, Life and Adventures of A-No. 1; London, The Road.

[15] Richard M. Dorson, Folklore and Fakelore: Essays Toward a Discipline of Folk Studies (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1976); Alan Dundes, “Nationalistic Inferiority Complexes and the Fabrication of Fakelore: A Reconsideration of Ossian, the ‘Kinder-und Hausmärchen’, the ‘Kalevala’, and Paul Bunyan,” Journal of Folklore Research (22/1, 1985): 5-18.

[16] Allan Pinkerton, Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives (New York: Carleton and Co. Publishers, 1878), 57.

[17] Pinkerton, Strikers, Communists, Tramps: 57-58.

[18] Ibid, 58.

[19] Raulerson, Graham. 2011. The Hobo in American Musical Culture, x.

[20] Lennon, “Trains, Railroad Workers, and Illegal Riders,” 34. Several authors note the confusion between genres of hobo graffiti and railroad moniker art produced by railway workers. Mistaken impressions about authorship abound in the history of graffiti.

[21] Charles Wray and Devon Hanofski, mentioned in footnote 5 above, have similarly indicated to me that they have never encountered first-hand evidence of such markings in their explorations of hobo sites in the United States. Personal communication via email, April 3, 2019 (Hanofski). Personal communication via telephone, April 4, 2019 (Charles Wray).

[22] Laura M. Addison, ed. No Idle Hands: The Myths & Meanings of Tramp Art. (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2017).

[23] Erle Heath, Seventy-Five Years of Progress: An Historical Sketch of the Southern Pacific: 1869-1944 (2014). Accessed on April 2, 2019 at http://www.cprr.org/Museum/SP_1869-1944/

[24] In my work on Hollywood sound stages, I have encountered similar temporal discrepancies between graffiti and recorded dates of construction and concluded that the graffiti were the more reliable source that created a more nuanced history of the site in question.

[25] Etulain, Jack London on the Road. Earle Labor, Earle. Jack London: An American Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013);

[26] London, The Road, 68.

[27] Ibid, 123.

[28] Lennon, Boxcar Politics, 33.

[29] London, The Road, 68.

[30] I emailed Earle Labor about the find and Labor said, despite there being no way to know for sure, that the mark was “highly likely” to be London’s. Personal communication via email, August 22, 2017.

[31] Etulain (1978) includes a map with specific dates but doesn’t cite where his knowledge of the dates comes from. Because they are not included in London’s tramp diaries, which end in April, this leaves the mistake open to interpretation. Thanks to Owen Clayton for pointing out this discrepancy.

[32] Carlos A. Schwantes, Coxey’s Army: An American Odyssey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).

[33] Letter from Livingston to Charmian London, Utah State University Jack and Charmian London Collection.

[34] These materials are housed at Utah State University’s Jack and Charmian London Collection at the University Libraries.

[35] A-No. 1’s visit is corroborated by a 1910 newspaper article about him, which references his previous 1905 visit to town. “World’s Greatest Tramp Was in Town,” The Red Bluff News, August 25, 1910.

[36] See for example Caleb Neelon and Roger Gastman, History of American Graffiti (New York: HarperCollins, 2011).

[37] Mauricio Mazón, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (University of Texas Press, 2010).

[38] Bill Daniel first pointed this similarity out to me regarding hobo monikers.

[39] Bill Daniel, Mostly True, second edition (Microcosm Publishing, 2012), 1.

[40] See Bill Daniel’s film Who Is Bozo Texino? The Secret History of Hobo Graffiti (2005) for the best treatment of this genre of moniker writing.

[41] Javier Abarca, “Foreword.” In Susan Phillips, et al Tramp Directories, 8.

[42] Abarca, Foreword, 10.

Susan A. Phillips has studied graffiti, gangs and the U.S. prison system since 1990. She has published two books: Wallbangin: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A. (Chicago, 1999) and Operation Fly Trap: L.A. Gangs, Drugs, and the Law (Chicago, 2012), and co-authored a small volume on hobo graffiti in 2017. Phillips was named a Soros Justice Media Fellow in 2008 and received a Harry Frank Guggenheim research grant in 2005. She has been in residence twice at the Getty Research Institute—most recently in 2016. Her new book, The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti, will be published by Yale University Press in fall 2019. Phillips received her PhD in anthropology from UCLA in 1998 and is currently a Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pitzer College in Claremont.