Hard Travellin' : The Story of the Migrant Worker

by KennethAllsop (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $7.63

  Twelve miles from a crossroads store and gas station, given on the map the unwarranted importance of being named Spotted Horse, and fifty miles more from the nearest small town, a dilapidated 1950 Plymouth is juddering along the switchbacks of Highway 14 between the rocky hills of Wyoming. The Plymouth's fender and chrome radiator grill hang and shake like a broken jaw, and across the flaking eau-de-Nil paintwork on the doors, boot and bonnet is stencilled in black capitals six times over WORK ANYTHING WANTED.' The hobo was the shock-trooper of American expansion, the man who free-lanced beyond the community redoubts, building the canals and roads, spiking rails, felling timber, drilling oil, digging mines, harvesting wheat and fencing prairie. His origins go back to the early pioneer days and his spirit survives to the present. But during the years of the Depression he became a legendary figure. Revered and romanticised by some as the prototype of the free man, he was hated and feared by other for his nonconformity. His tough, reckless, radical and sardonic style has deeply impregnated his country's culture and outlook. Kenneth Allsop travelled 9,000 miles through America in his reconstruction of the old hobo routes. He talked to contemporary nomads - the rootless, the alienated, the outsiders of the Great Society. He gives us the history of the hobo and his place in the American dream. Harsh and turbulent, it is also a vital and compelling story.