Distinctly Montana Magazine

DISTINCTLY MONTANA MAGAZINE • WINTER 2022-23 36 T he invention and proliferation of the railroads changed American life (to say nothing of the rest of the world) suddenly and profoundly. As the net- work of rail lines spread like a web across the nation, we were able to imagine, for the first time, new ways of life. On the rails, you could leave the harbor in New York and ar- rive in San Francisco in four days, a trip that would have taken six months by wagon. Beguiled by a heretofore unimaginable degree of mobility, Americans invented new words to describe the strange new kinds of people who followed in the wake of the railroad. Names were given to ways of life that would have seemed fan- tastic at the dawn of the previous century: hobos, tramps, yeggs or yaggmen, bums, bindlestiffs, gentlemen of the road, knights of the tie and rail. You didn't want to call a hobo a "bum." The latter connoted someone who didn't work, who lived on the dole. Work was at the center of the hobo's life. He traveled across the country to find it. A "bum" would probably be an inveterate alcoholic, desperate for his next drink, but a hobo was a distinguished traveler who may very well enjoy a drink, if you offered it to him, thank you, but wasn't about to beg for it. In fact, the con- cept of work was so essential to the hobo's métier (as was their disdain for those who didn't work) that they had a derogatory term for the idle rich: bums on the plush. Thus, the hobos rode the rails and followed the work. As the En- cyclopedia of American Railroads says, "This meant following the construction season. No hobo in his right mind would head to Montana on the Great Northern in December; winter was the time to head south, where buildings were under con- struction, or where there were crops to pick." Life on the rails may have been an adventure, but it was never easy. More often, it was brutal. The hobo's natural enemy was the railroad bull, private security employed by the railroads first to guard against train robberies and later to address the millions of transients trying to sneak into boxcars and freight trains. In many ways, railroad bulls were the late 19th and early 20th century equivalent to today's private military contractors. They were tough men, heavily armed, often veterans who had seen combat (in the Civil War, at first, and others as the years went on) and had no compunction whatsoever about employing their mar- tial skills for pay. Many were deputized or granted quasi-law enforcement powers, such as the Union Pacific Railroad Police, who had their own badges. of the and Tie R ail K nights by JOSEPH SHELTON

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