'Hoboes,' by Mark Wyman

Hoboes

Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West

By Mark Wyman

(Hill and Wang; 336 pages; $28)

Itinerant workers have been called all sorts of names - from hoboes to bindlestiffs to tramps - and American writers and singers such as Jack London and Ry Cooder have paid homage to the hobo, but no hobo has lent his or her name to fame. Mostly nameless and faceless, the only well-known hoboes have been mythical characters like the lumberjack Paul Bunyan.

The veteran historian of the West, Mark Wyman, aims to change that in his new book, "Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West." He gives as many names and faces to the sea of anonymous agricultural workers as he can, and connects their stories to the heartland, and to crops, and machines. His book will be eye-opening, even for students and scholars familiar with the history of hoboes in agriculture from the end of the Civil War to the 1920s.

Like Jack London, who wrote about hoboes in "The Road," and Ry Cooder, who sang about them in "Into the Purple Valley," Wyman loves the men, women and children who picked and packaged crops that went to markets and homes thousands of miles from farmers' fields. Using contemporary newspaper accounts, statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and reports by crusading investigators, he presents a wealth of information and brings readers to fields, farms and forests.

"Hoboes" offers a taste of what it was like to be a migrant worker, often forced by sheriffs to move from place to place, sometimes attacked by angry citizens, and even locked in jail. Wyman organizes his material both by region and by crop; he moves from the Pacific Northwest to the Southwest and from dense forests to parched deserts. He traces the vital role of the U.S. government in the economic development of the West, and he explains the primary role of the railroads in transporting goods and people and linking isolated communities to the global economy.

Now and then, he repeats himself, and the chapter about conditions in California - which Carey McWilliams wrote about in "Factories in the Field" (1939) and John Steinbeck described in "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939) - is the least comprehensive in the book. That's unfortunate because migrant farm workers have long played a major role in making California the largest U.S. producer of vegetables and fruits. For the most part, "Hoboes" moves ahead with energy and clarity. There are wonderful anecdotes throughout. The author recounts the essential role of American Indians in the agricultural economy of Washington. He highlights the reporting in 1907 by Annie Marion MacLean, who traveled to Oregon from New York to write about what she called "the democracy of the hop field."

Diversity runs through Wyman's spirited account: diversity of crops and the ethnic diversity of hoboes, too. The men, women and children who chopped cotton, harvested hops and picked apples came from Japan, China, Russia, Germany and Mexico. The West of farmers and ranchers - as opposed to the West of hunters, trappers and miners - was largely won, Wyman shows, by immigrant laborers and their families who shared hardships and joys.

The United States has come a long way since the days of the hoboes who traveled by train, often illegally, and who followed the crops season by season. Thanks to the United Farm Workers, and Cesar Chavez, conditions have improved. I learned that lesson firsthand when I worked on farms alongside farmworkers in 2006 and 2007. But in many places agribusiness continues to run roughshod over migrant laborers.

Wyman missed the opportunity to connect the history of the hoboes to migrants today. He also might have interviewed members of the Industrial Workers of the World, better know as "the Wobblies," the union that organized more migrant workers in the West in the 20th century than any other union - and that still exists.

Wyman writes well about the IWW in "Mexicans, Wobblies, War." He returns to the Wobblies in the last chapter and eulogizes the Wobbly bard, Joe Hill, who appears in the folk song with the refrain, "I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night alive as you and me." Read Wyman's heartfelt book and you might sing the song if you haven't already. You might also appreciate the hobo, in Wyman's words, as "one of the heroic figures of the frontier."

Jonah Raskin is the editor of "The Radical Jack London" and the author of "Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California." E-mail him at books@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle