An Introduction to the Hieroglyphic Language of Early 1900s Train-Hoppers

Summary

Many of us now use the word hobo to refer to any home­less indi­vid­ual, but back in the Amer­i­ca of the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, to be a hobo meant some­thing more. It meant, specif­i­cal­ly, to count your­self as part of a robust cul­ture of itin­er­ant labor­ers who criss-crossed the coun­try by hitch­ing ille­gal rides on freight trains. Liv­ing such a lifestyle on the mar­gins of soci­ety demand­ed the mas­tery of cer­tain tech­niques as well as a body of secret knowl­edge, an aspect of the hey­day of hobodom sym­bol­ized in the “hobo code,” a spe­cial hiero­glyph­ic lan­guage explained in the Vox video above. “Wan­der­ing from place to place and per­form­ing odd jobs in exchange for food and mon­ey, hobos were met with both open arms and firearms,” writes Antique Archae­ol­o­gy’s Sarah Buck­holtz. “From ille­gal­ly jump­ing trains to steal­ing scraps from a farm­ers mar­ket, the hobo com­mu­ni­ty need­ed to cre­ate a secret lan­guage to warn and wel­come fel­low hobos that were either new to town or just pass­ing through.” The code, writ­ten on brick walls, bases of water tow­ers, or any oth­er sur­face that did­n’t move, “assigned cir­cles and arrows for gen­er­al direc­tions like, where to find a meal or the best place to camp. Hash­tags sig­naled dan­ger ahead, like bad water or an inhos­pitable town.” Hash­tags sounds a bit Mil­len­ni­al for hobo cul­ture, but on some lev­el the term does make sense. Some of the abstract­ed sym­bols of the hobo code look a bit more like emo­ji: a loco­mo­tive mean­ing “good place to catch a train,” a build­ing with a barred door mean­ing “this is a well-guard­ed house,” a cat mean­ing “a kind lady lives here.” But how much use did the hobo code actu­al­ly see? “The prob­lem is, all this infor­ma­tion came from hobos, a group that took pride in their elu­sive­ness and embell­ished sto­ry­telling,” says the Vox video’s nar­ra­tor. “The truth is, there real­ly isn’t any evi­dence that these signs were as wide­ly ...