Hobo Armies, Chain Gangs and Wobblies: The Grand Valley and the Golden Age of Vagabonds

Hobos, bindle-stiffs, tramps, coxeyites, transients, yeggs, vagrants, bums, scatterlings, wobblies, migrants laborers, vagabonds, roofless mother f#8%rs, okies and/or the un-housed have always been a part of the Grand Valley’s history. Regardless of the what the dispossed are called at the time, Grand Junction’s story is interwided with a story of dispossession. From the ‘golden age of vagabonds’ of the 1880’s thru the 1930’s; to the unsolved ‘transient’ murders of the 1980s, and the police firings in 2010, the Grand Valley has struggled with how to ‘deal’ with the the ‘problem’, only to have the community’s humanity reflected back to it.

They came in waves, some for seasonal work on the farms and orchards, others to avoid the snow of the high mountains and northern latitudes; others came thru during massive periods of political upheavles and economic dislocation. At times these folks were met with open arms, at other times pitch-forks, and more often a mix of both.

Grand Junction was just three years old in 1884 when the first vagrancy law was enacted. The law was vauge and could be applied liberally to those demmed undeseriable.

“Any person able to work and support himself in some honest and respecatble calling or business, who shall be found loitering or strolling about, frequenting public places, or leading an idle, immoral or profligate course of life, or not having any visable means of support, or who are found lodging in tippling houses, out-houses or houses of ill-repute, sheds, stable, or in wagon or boxes, or in the open air….and not giving a good account of themselves, or wandering abroad and begging, or going about from door to door begging…shall be deemed vagrant.” June 7^th Grand Junction News 1884.

Charging people with vagrancy served a double purpose; at the time the City Marshal also had a duty to maintan the roads and sidewalks.

Chain gangs of hobo’s would of been a regular sight along side horse-drawn wagons. The Grand Junction News in 1891 opined “To arrest a tramp and confine him in jail is to provide hime with the luxuries of his life. The thing he dreads is the chain gang and to be sentenced for several days at hard labor on the streets is about the only punishment that will give a tramp an earnest desire to avoid our city.”

“Cannot these cattle be driven on?”

Grand Junction News

Tramps and hobos first started arriving with the first trains in 1882, the joy and the freedom of the open road called many young men to join the legions of vagabonds riding America’s rails in box-cars, or on the pins beneath, or in the “blind passenger.” Hobo’s stayed in ‘jungles’ usually near a town, a river, and a train-yard. Grand Junction was no different. When the population of the jungle got large enough it would become a ‘convention,’ and the party was on. But there would always be a backlash. In 1891 the News bemoaned “the fact that we are accumulating a very considerable population of that nondescript gentry popularly known as “tramps.’” and wondered aloud “Is there no chain gang” And if no chain gang, cannot these cattle be driven on?”

In 1893, the economy fell off a cliff. People were out of work, hungry, and there was zero social safety net. In the spring of the following a year a protest of the un-employed and dispossessed went viral. In what was the first march on Washington DC. Dozens of “Coxey Armies’ formed and began heading to the capital. Grand Junction played host two of these hobo armies in May and June of 1894. The army of ‘General’ Fredrick Denning Smith, was starving and without water on its long march from Salt Lake City. Only the generosity of Grand Valley citizens, local government, and even the Daily Sentinel saved Smith’s ‘army ‘ from a slow death in the desert. The Coxey movement was pushing a Good Roads bill that would have put the unemployed to work fixing America’s roads. The idea, radical in 1894, would be put to good work during the public works programs of the 1930s

In the late 1890’s and 1900’s there was one door that all the hobos knocked for food. The alley door of Agnes Hoel Shores. The irony being that her husband was the legendary lawman and lead railroad detective, C.W. “Doc” Shores. His job was to enforce the law on the railroads including catching hobos. Meanwhile his wife was feeding them out of the back door. Populist poet, and one-time Grand Valley resident, Jacob Huff, wrote about Mrs. Shores’ well known generosity in his nationally syndicated column “The Philosophy of Jake Hayden:”

“Every hobo who stole rides over the railroads of the West heard of her, and the moment they alighted at the tank or freight station they started uptown to hunt the backdoor where the charity of Agnes Shores flowed out spontaneously to all who asked.”

Sweeps and crackdowns would be followed by a lull in enforcement. 1904 saw a major crack down on the ‘tramps.’ The Sentienl, as it was prone to do, called for a ‘drag-net’ in July of 1904. “There is enough to do in cleaning the city of weeds to make every hobo who shows his face in the town sick of an expierence in Grand Junction.” The Sentinel’s appeal got results. Not two weeks later the Sentinel reported: “Five more hobos were locked up in the city bastile Saterday night. The addition of the five makes 17 in all……quarters were a little crowded and the rations were somewhat short over Sunday.” There were so many ‘tramps’ in the city lock-up and on the chain gang that a special officer had to be hired. Frank Butler, a prominent African-American, was appoint to oversee the chain gang. Making Butler Grand Junction’s first African-American police office.

A case from 1911, shows that it was more then transients and hobos living unsheltered. On July 12^th, 1911, four children found Clark. A Wolfkill drowned in the Colorado River. Three of the children were homeless. Virgil Wilson, Gladys Thompson, Lillian Osborn all lived together in a tent on the river. The death of Wolfkill could not easily be explained, so all four children were arrested for murder and taken to jail. After 10 days in jail the case was dissmissed.

In 1909, a socialist ticket was elected to Grand Junction City Council. Grand Junction also had a new chief of police and he too was a socialist. A more humane approach was tried here. The Grand Junction socialist along with James Bucklin’s Municipal Ownership League attempted to socialize industries of basic needs. They sought to operate a city owned coal mine to provide cheap fule for Junction’s laboring classes cheap. The plan was for the city to provide jobs to unempolyed locals as well and transient workers. The coal mine never got off the ground, but the city did create a municipal wood-lot where the dispossed could split wood for food. This humane approach to the houseless was siezed upon by Walter Walker and the Daily Sentinel, and wildly exaggerated.

In 1913, a contingent of around 140 wobblie (members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)) street preachers came to Grand Junction. The city council fed the radicals while they were in town. (not that unrealistic, considering that back in 1894 local government feed the Coxeyite ‘armies’ that passed through the city). Walter Walker and the Daily Sentinel made mountians of molehills, as part of a well documented war of the words between Walker and area socialists. S.B Hutchinson (former member of the short lived IWW local #35 here in Grand Junction in 1905-1907) ended up having to resign, socialist Mayor Todd survivied a recall attempt, and the wobblies were driven from the town, “by special policemen armed with shotguns and revolvers.” AP, April 22, 1913

By the 1930’s organizations were forming to provide aid to those in need. Needs would increase leading up to the harvest(s) as migrant farmworkers poured into the city ahead of the work. St. Mary’s hospital fed the hungry, the GoodWill house helped the needy children, the Methodist Church ran a seasonal soup kitchen, and the Salvation Army helped place men in positions of employement.

The 1930’s also saw massive dislocation of farmers in the mid-west as the dust bowl buried farms and dreams. These ‘Okies’ worked as labor in Grand Valley farms and orchards, often on their way to destinations to the west. They camped by the river with whole families in tow. Some ‘okies’ put down roots and made the Grand Valley home.

By the mid 1930’s at the height of the Great Depression, as part of the New Deal, the government created a ‘transient camp.” There transients would be fed, housed, and given work.

Merian (Sedalnick) Rosenthal, in an oral history describes the system of ‘hobo code,” employed during the Great Depression. She said that was how the hobos knew they could get milk from Enstroms (then a dairy and ice cream shop) and baked goods at the Sally Ann Bakery. She also said that it became known that her dad would give money to those who asked. One tramp, when asked how he knew to come to their house said, “Give me a pocket knife and I’ll go take your name off the pole.”

There is a certain romance to the golden age of Vagabonds. Hobo memoirs like Jack London’s “The Road,” Jim Tulley’s “Beggers of Life,” Jack Black’s “You Can’t Win,” and “The Autobiographies of Boxcar Bertha,” as recorded by Dr. Ben Reitman are windows into this secretive sub-culture. Dalton Trumbo spoke to this romance in his, locally based, novel “Eclipse.” The protagonist, after losing all his fortune, stumbles down to the river in a stupor. There he is taken in and cared for by and old woman living in a “cabin rising crazily out of a clump of weeping willows.” Trumbo continued, “She had discovered the secret of how to live…with the river and the willows and the cottonwoods and the chant of bullfrogs for companionship.”