Wagons West Chronicles October Issue 2016 October Issue | Page 9

October 2016

Wagons West Chronicles

“HOBO JACK”

The Migratory Miner
April 2, 1892, Phoenix Daily
Herald, AZ — I want to say something about the migratory miner of
Arizona. There are hundreds of
him. But a single specimen suffices
for our description. There he
climbs, cheerily up in the rear steps
of the company bunkhouse and lays
a huge bundle of timeworn blankets
tenderly down on the platform. He
is a fleshy, good-looking son of
Adam. He is decked out in a good
black hat, a heavy blue flannel shirt
and overalls, and miners’ shoes, with
soles an inch thick, and he is known
only by the euphonious title of

“Hobo Jack.” Other names
he may have had when a
loving mother shared his
baby cares in some eastern
home. But what that name
is, no one between the
waters of either Ocean has
the faintest idea, even with
himself it is largely a matter
of conjecture. All he knows
is that he is just from Globe,
dead broke and he “wants
on.” When he “wants on”
he “wants on” bad. He goes
to the foreman and
addresses him as “mister,”
in meek and lowly tones
that imply dire distress in the applicant’s make up. The foreman may
understand English, but he can’t
speak it very well. If he could, he
would never get to be foreman in
Arizona.
The foreman is a big chief and
Jack is a supplicant; figuratively
speaking he gets down and licks the
dust from off the Boss’ shoes for a
job. Such abject homage is sweet to
the imperious foreman, his high
aldermanic authority is vindicated,
his pride is satisfied and “Hobo Jack”
gets his “lay out,” $2.50 per day and
grub. Boiler iron steak broiled by a
Chinaman and warmed over for
seven hours before Jack puts in a
shift on it. Cabbage, boiled roots

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and all. Butter that you had to chain
fast in the summer, and spread with
a soldering iron in the winter.
Coffee brewed above a sediment,
the age and nature of which no science could ever determine. Besides
this, he has the privilege for $2.00
per month of laying his weary frame
to rest in one of the Company’s hard
wood bunks, there to be confronted
with a chorus of disjointed snores,
and bed bugs as big as Arkansas
snapping turtles. The Company
saves him the trouble of paying his
poll tax and road tax by taking $4.50
out of his wages for that purpose.
Thus he contributes to educate the
children of men who would refuse
him admission to their back yards.
Then again the Company deducts
$2.00 per month from his payroll for
hospital services; yet if he wends his
way sick and weary u nto the
Company physicians, he is straightway informed that his is a 45 calibre
case brought on by his own indiscretions, in using hard names or rambling in the storms as the case may
be and so he is entitled to no maintenance. He gets $2.00 worth of
moral advice and dies or gets well
according to the tenor of his constitution and the extent of his determination. After a few months,
despite every disadvantage, he is
able to count up a couple of hundred dollars to his credit. Word goes
around the camps that “Hobo Jack”
has got a “long sack” and is negotiating for the purchase of a drinking
joint over in “Cutthroat Band.” He
is no longer the same Hobo Jack
with sheet iron overall and socks,

the forerunner of yellow fire. But
Jack the Daisy. The foreman is a different proposition in Jack’s eyes
now. He has to deliver his orders to
Jack in very even tones and look
pleasant while he is doing it or the
latter will “smack’m one and hit the
trail.” Jack’s prosperity is at its high
tide. At its zenith, in fact. He sometimes talks of women, babies, home;
a mere allusion of this kind is as
high as he gets. The next day, Jack’s
“pard” is “fired” for wearing too
much on the gable end of his overalls in the foreman’s absence. His
pard goes downtown to arrange for
his departure. After supper, Jack
goes down to assist him. They both
“come up ox-eyed” before midnight.
Jack hunts up the foreman and
demands time with a John L.
Sullivan glare.
The foreman
implores him to be merciful and not
break up the company by leaving.
But Jack is inexorable. Takes his
pay, breathes vengeance on the
company in general and the foreman in particular, and with his pard,
mounts the Rocky Mountain Snail
of a stage the next morning and
glides away in all his glory. Six weeks
at most will see him crawling up
another flight of back stairs in the
rear of another Company boarding
house. In another and distant camp
in this blessed Territory, another
bundle of blankets on his back, the
remnants of his recent greatness,
and this is the life of Hobo Jack
from year to year, and of a thousand such in Arizona as the snows
settle and melt and as the
Bluebirds come and go.