Hobos on the Trains During the Great Depression Essay Example

had either cut their workforce or had gone out of business during the depression.

The unemployment rate was about 25 percent and the economy had reached its low by 1933. The economic recovery during this time was slow, uncertain, and far from being over”(“Compensation from before World War I through the Great Depression. ”). Without a job to pay for their homes, millions of people were homeless. Children and teenagers could not even go to school because schools had been forced to close. People had nowhere to go, they started to drift from one town to the next and they took to the rails in a desperate search for work, food and a new place to live.

The people who rode the trains were known as hobos. Hobos could be men, women or even teenagers. When they were not riding in a box car, the hobos might go to a mission church to spend the night for free or they would spend time in a hobo jungle or hobo camp. If a teenage hobo was lucky he/she would get to stay at the Civilians Conservations Corps and work a temporary job for six months or more (“Teenage Hoboes in the Great Depression. ”).

Hobos would have to often beg for their food because hey often did not have any money. It was not uncommon for them to frequently go without any food at all for days. One of the places they would beg for food was at a farmhouse. If a hobo was able to find food at a farmhouse from a generous farmer, the Hobo would mark the lane of the farmhouse so the other hobos knew

that it was a good place for them to beg. Another place that a hobo was able to find food was when a hobo stayed at a hobo jungle. The Hobos would all share the food that they each had.

Sometimes the food at hobo jungle was stolen and other times it was from hobos that had bought it from a local general store (“Sarah White. ”) Walter Ballard was a man who was a hobo as a young man. He remembers the Depression getting so bad that his family didn't have enough to eat. “At least in the hobo jungles, they would share food with each other”, he said (“Riding the Rails”). The life of a hobo was not at all an easy one just as one former 1930s hobo stated, “The road was an education about the ways of the world, full of harsh lessons”.

One harsh lesson was hopping the trains. Hopping the trains could be very dangerous because most times the hobos had to hop the trains after the trains had already started moving down the track. The reason they did this was because they did not want to get caught by the “bulls”. The “bulls” were men that were hired by the railroad companies to keep off hobos and people that did not pay their fare. If the hobos would get caught, the bulls would often beat them up.

Hopping trains could also be dangerous because you could fall underneath the train and lose a limb (“Riding the Rails”). Before the Great Depression hobos lived a normal life. Hobos had a job, home, and had a family to go home to everyday. This

was what was called living the American dream. As a result of the depression it took everything that Hobos had, their jobs, homes, and food to feed their families they felt they had no choice but to live the lives they did. They rode the rails everyday looking for a way to get back to their American dream.