The Great Depression Read online

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  Boxcar cowboys

  By 1932, Canada had become a nation of hoboes. The hordes of transients being shuffled back and forth across the country represented a new and unprecedented phenomenon. Nothing like it had ever been seen before; nor would it be seen again. Between seventy thousand and one hundred thousand men, almost all young and single, were riding the freights along the traditional Canadian east-west axis, using the traditional Canadian mode of travel, the railway. Here was an army of the deprived – undisciplined, ragged, hungry, and often desperate, but an army nonetheless, roughly the size of the Canadian Corps of 1917 whose four divisions had, for the first and last time, fought under a single command to capture Vimy Ridge.

  This legion of vagrants has provided us with the enduring images of the Depression: the homeless men begging for food at the back door and then moving on; the panhandlers selling pencils on the streets; the multitudes squatting on the roofs of the CPR freights. These are the wan symbols of hard times, but it must also be remembered that the majority were in their teens and early twenties, that most were single, and that to many riding the rails was a lark. For thousands, the chance to jump aboard a moving freight was also a chance at freedom, at adventure, at excitement and even danger. The Depression gave them the perfect excuse to get away on their own, to escape the drabness of life in some Canadian backwater – a drabness rendered gloomier by economic disaster – and to travel the country from sea to sea. In other circumstances they might have stayed put, married early, and settled down. Now they were off on what used to be called “the open road.”

  The very fact that they were moving helped to temper for them the harshness of those times. For everybody else, except for the very rich, the thirties was a static decade. Who else could cross the country? There was no time and there was no money; for some, a streetcar ticket was a luxury. The jobless families couldn’t go anywhere. If they moved, they lost their chance for local relief and had to wait six months to a year (three years in Montreal) to qualify for the dole. Those who were lucky enough to have steady work didn’t dare move. In the thirties you clung to your job as a drunk clings to a lamp post. You hung on in spite of brutal bosses, long hours, pay cuts, and shortened vacations. Eaton’s clerks had their two-week annual holidays reduced to one week and all but two of their statutory holidays cancelled – a deprivation that rendered them even less mobile. Sometimes it was as much as your job was worth even to leave your house briefly. Most five-and-dime clerks were hired on a part-time basis, which meant they had to stay close to home, praying that the phone would ring and summon them back for a few hours. But single young men could take off at any time for anywhere, as long as they stayed a step or two ahead of the railway police. It can be argued, too, that they had fewer worries than those who were tied down by their responsibilities.

  Charles Wesley Sherwin, who began riding freights when he was sixteen, would always remember sitting at his ease in the open boxcars, waving at people at the level crossings, as the train pounded through the small prairie towns. The people always waved back. “Maybe we were lucky,” Sherwin recalled. “We didn’t have to worry about whether the crop was seven bushels to the acre or fifty or whether the cow calved … or mortgages and taxes. All we had to worry about was the cops and our immediate welfare.”

  The freight trains gave thousands of young men a chance to see from coast to coast a land they had experienced only vicariously in the school geography classes. Most were introduced for the first time to the glories of the cloud-draped Selkirks (never mind the cinders in the Connaught Tunnel), to the winding ribbon of the North Saskatchewan River, to the industrial cities of Central Canada, to the apple orchards of the Annapolis and Okanagan valleys, to Fundy’s tidal bore and the Fraser’s sprawling delta. The boxcars provided an education in the endless diversity of the nation as well as an adventure.

  Harry Mavis and his friend Albert Lockwood, both in their early twenties, decided to gamble on just such an adventure in July. They couldn’t get work and were tired of loafing around Vancouver. Some of their friends had already been east and told them there was nothing to it – all you needed was a few clothes, blankets, and a little money. Lockwood and Mavis scraped up seventeen dollars between them, mainly by selling a few belongings. On July 31, they hopped a freight out of Coquitlam. On August 16 they were in Nova Scotia and on September 22 back again in Vancouver.

  It was a journey that neither man would ever forget, and a fulfilling one. Mavis said that if he ever went east again, that was the way he’d want to travel. They never got over being tired and they were often hungry, but that did not bother them unduly. They ate bananas at ten cents a dozen and stale buns given them by sympathetic counter clerks in bakeries. They picked up the odd meal visiting relatives. They slept in railway waiting rooms, in the boiler room of a roundhouse, on top of a tank car (an arm hooked around a ladder rung), in empty boxcars, in the tall grass by a siding, or flat on their backs, legs astraddle like a child in a crib, roped to the top of a freight car. At the end of their journey, while washing up in the restrooms of the B.C. Electric depot, they recounted their adventures to a group of streetcar workers their own age and told them how they had travelled 8,142 miles on their grubstake of seventeen dollars. “They said they wished they weren’t working so they could go on a trip such as ours,” Mavis remembered. “Imagine anyone wishing they were not working in the hungry thirties.”

  Although it was technically illegal to ride the freights, the railway companies took a lenient view until the summer of 1932, when the government announced that the practice was to be stopped. The RCMP began to block harvest workers who had ridden the freights to the west in the early summer from returning east – an action that caused a storm of protest from the prairie towns that now faced the problem of thousands of young men being dumped on their doorsteps.

  In fact, the ban had very little effect. A kind of moccasin telegraph swiftly identified the good towns and the bad towns, the mean “bulls,” as the railway police were universally called, from the easy-going ones. The mythology of the transient era is rich with tales of bulls beating up young men; but, as Charles Sherwin discovered, some were remarkably understanding. One day in Schreiber, Ontario, when Sherwin stepped off a boxcar to get a breath of fresh air, a CPR policeman nabbed him. But when Sherwin said he’d left his suitcase with his personal effects aboard the vanishing freight, the accommodating bull wired ahead to Nipigon to have it sent back by the next train. In Edmonton, Sherwin asked permission to sleep in the city jail, a common request, especially in winter. A policeman, who learned he’d had nothing to eat, bought him a pound of butter and a loaf of bread, which he devoured on the spot.

  Sherwin spent the decade riding the freights. As far as can be determined, he holds the record for boxcar travel in the thirties. By the time the Depression ended for him and he found work as a miner, he had crossed the country no fewer than sixty-five times and knew every town, city, and hobo jungle in Canada.

  On his first trip out of his home town of Hillier, Ontario, at age seventeen, he didn’t even bother to carry a toothbrush but simply climbed aboard a mixed train heading north to Trenton. Clinging to a pitching flat car, he felt sad and alone – a green kid who’d never been out of his home community; nonetheless, it was something he felt he had to do. At Trenton, the divisional point, he rode the front end of a tank car, protected from the wind and flying cinders by the bulk of the car ahead. The speed terrified him; he had never travelled so fast before, and his knuckles were white from clinging to the rail as the car pitched and jerked beneath him.

  By the time he reached Montreal, he was starving. An elderly bachelor took him home, fed him bacon and eggs, and asked him to stay. It was not a homosexual proposition; his host was a war veteran suffering from bleeding hemorrhoids and terrified that, if he were alone, he might bleed to death. Young Sherwin was so naïve he thought the affliction was contagious. He caught a CPR freight back to Belleville.

 
He didn’t go home, for he was hooked. Instead, he caught another freight going north. At Peterborough, he stayed in his first jungle, on the Trent Canal, and there he began to learn something of the art of survival on the road. As the new kid, he was sent to the butcher shop to ask for leftovers and bacon ends. Others who had asked once too often picked up wilting vegetables while one man entered a café, ordered a cup of coffee, and left with the salt and pepper. The result was Sherwin’s first, but by no means his last, mulligan stew.

  Charlie Sherwin learned by picking up tips from older and wiser men on the road – the best way to board a freight, for instance, and the trick of greasing the rails to make the train slow down. With his last quarter he bought a dozen packages of black shoelaces at Woolworth’s and began peddling them door to door at whistle stops. He took the advice of his new-found friends and decided to ride the coal-and-water tender of a CNR passenger train west, for that was the preferred spot on a freight, albeit a dangerous one because it exposed the rider to the railway police. When he tried to climb aboard, the fireman saw him and waved him off. When he persisted, the man turned a hose on him. None of this bothered Sherwin, who returned home, elated at his first adventure, laughing at the system, full of new confidence.

  He and his friend Mac Hardy decided to head west to see a buddy who was homesteading north of Edmonton. They hopped a freight into Toronto, walked across town to the West Toronto station, and caught the nightly fast freight at eleven. He and Mac were the first to leap into a “reefer” (refrigerator car) followed by twenty-seven others, all of whom fell hungrily on a pile of bananas left behind on the floor.

  Sherwin had learned in his first journey that reefer cars were the warmest because they were so well insulated. He also knew enough to tie the door down in such a way that it couldn’t be locked from the outside. Men had been known to die, locked in reefers. At Chapleau, he unwired the door, only to step into the beam of a railway bull’s flashlight. He, his buddy, and all the others were lodged in jail and charged with trespassing on CPR property. In lieu of a ten-dollar fine, they were sentenced to thirty days and shipped off to Burwash Provincial Jail in chains. Their parents bailed them out, but that was enough for Mac Hardy. Charlie Sherwin, however, had no intention of going home. He was small enough to climb into the toolbox of a passenger tender, and so off he went, heading west, swearing he’d never travel with a mob again.

  By this time he was a dyed-in-the-wool boxcar cowboy, an enlisted soldier in the growing army of amateur hoboes who were teaching each other how to beg, steal, outwit the authorities, and go without eating. Bob Drouin, who spent four of his teen years riding the freights, once existed for five and a half days by eating dandelion heads. Bill Mitchell, of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, a future Canadian novelist, found that if necessary he could go without food for three days. Mitchell disciplined himself never to eat more than one meal daily while on the road. In cheap restaurants, where you could get a three-course meal for a quarter, he’d take all the extra bread and pats of butter and save them for the following day. No matter how hungry he was, he never removed the five-dollar bill he kept hidden in his sock. When charged with vagrancy he could produce it to prove that he did have “visible means of support.”

  These men were not “bums” in the traditional sense, nor did they resemble the stereotypes that appeared in the cartoons of those days. Rosella Diduck, who lived on a farm near Kamsack, northeast of Regina, watched them arrive from the west, leaping off the train before it reached the station to avoid the railway police. In the jungles down by the river they occupied themselves making furniture and baskets out of willow, which they sold. When they asked for food at the Diducks’ back door they offered to split wood in return for a meal, and before they ate, Rosella noticed, they’d ask for a bar of soap and go to the well to wash their hands. “Everybody thought very kindly of these men, even though they hadn’t had a hair cut … they had a dignity about them. As soon as they could they went to the barber’s to be trimmed.”

  They soon became wise in the ways of the road. Joe Zacher, known as the Vermilion Kid because he hailed from Vermilion, Alberta, was taught the art of begging by an old-timer, Paddy the Priest. Paddy was sixty, and he’d been a professional hobo all his life. Joe Zacher was twenty-one, “green as a poplar tree and as hard to burn.” To be a good beggar, Paddy told him, you must be kind, grateful, and polite, must choose your words and responses carefully. Joe learned to say, “Pardon me, sir, could you kindly help a fellow out with a small amount of change for a bite to eat?” Whether the answer was yes or no (and it was usually no), he always replied with a polite thank you.

  Paddy the Priest taught the Vermilion Kid how to keep the law off his back. Zacher learned to keep a magazine or newspaper under his arm, to walk at a fast snappy pace, and never to look back over his shoulder. In that way he established himself as a man, if not of substance, at least of a fixed address and visible means of support.

  “Good afternoon, lady,” the Vermilion Kid would say. “I’m sorry to bother you. May I ask if your name is May James?”

  It wasn’t, of course.

  “I’m sorry, lady, that I made this mistake. I thought you were a lady I knew. My bad luck. Lady, I haven’t had anything to eat since yesterday.” Six times out of ten he was called back and offered some change.

  In Winnipeg, young Zacher found he could buy fifteen nickel-sized washers for fifteen cents and use them to beat the illegal slot machines in the Chinese cafés. He learned to buy a loaf of stale bread and then ask if he could have a can of beans to eat with it. Another trick – Sherwin did well with it in Winnipeg, too – was to write a letter home and then beg money for a stamp.

  In spite of the common phrase “riding the rods,” scarcely anybody dared to use that method of travel except a few old-time hoboes who carried a cleated board which they slid beneath the car above the rods. It was very dangerous and it wasn’t necessary.

  There were other dangers. If you stuck your feet out of the boxcar door, you stood a chance of having them chopped off at the next bridge; some men suffered unexpected amputation as a result. If you rode “blind baggage” on the couplings between the cars, you could be seriously hurt or even killed if the train jerked to a sudden stop. Men asleep on top of a boxcar sometimes rolled off and were killed when the train swayed around a curve. The smart ones roped themselves on. Bob Drouin and twenty-five others were once locked in a boxcar by a Mounted Policeman for three days and almost starved. On some of the older cars the wheels had become worn down on one side. This couldn’t be detected until the train gathered speed. On such cars, sleep was impossible because, as Sherwin noted, “half the time you were in mid air.” The continual bucking, however, did keep the riders warm when the weather outside was freezing.

  Nonetheless, the cold could be a killer, as Robert Brodie discovered one bitter winter’s night when he tried to board a freight in Saskatchewan. Brodie, nicknamed “Steve” after the sporting Irishman who was said to have jumped off Brooklyn Bridge on a bet, was twenty-two years old. He had been hiking all day and now, having reached a railway water tower, waited for the freight to slow down so that he could leap aboard. It was too cold; his hands could not maintain their grip on the railing. He was about to fall when a pair of strong arms reached down and pulled him into the boxcar.

  His saviour was quite obviously an ex-soldier.

  “Get those damn leather boots off!” he barked. “Make yourself some shoes out of newspaper; tie them with binder twine and start walking or you’ll lose your feet!” Steve Brodie obeyed.

  The stranger ordered him to trudge up and down the boxcar, but warned him away from the far end, which Brodie assumed was being used as a latrine. Finally Brodie could walk no more. The stranger bullied him, kicked him, told him he’d die in the forty-below weather unless he kept moving.

  Brodie was exhausted, but when he tried to lie down he found himself dragged to the forbidden end of the boxcar. The stranger directed the flame of his light
er at a dark bulk on the floor, and there, in the flickering light, Brodie looked in horror upon the forms of three young men, all in their teens, huddled together, frozen to death.

  “It saved my life,” said Brodie, who was to play a key role in unemployed demonstrations in Vancouver later that decade.

  In addition to suffering from cold the transients were plagued by grit, smoke, and cinders. They could easily be identified by their eyelashes. In Drouin’s words, “you’d swear it was mascara.” In Calgary, the men who leaped from the freights tried to wash off the soot in the Elbow River, knowing that if the police spotted the black rings around their eyes, they were candidates for jail. At the Water Street Mission in Ottawa, it was just the opposite. Because the mission discouraged repeat visitors, the stiffs would blacken their faces at the coal yards to fool the man at the door into thinking they’d just got off the train.

  They quickly learned the argot of the road. They were all “stiffs” or “bindle stiffs.” A freight was a “drag”; a stiff who asked for a handout at the front door was a “ding dong beggar”; at the back door he was a “lump bandit.” A scrounger was a “jungle buzzard,” a village policeman a “town clown,” a city cop a “harness bull.” A “winter Christian” was anyone who took refuge in a Salvation Army hostel for the cold season, professed to give his life to “Jerusalem Slim” (Jesus Christ), and turned agnostic as soon as the weather warmed. A “gay cat” was a happy young innocent; a “scenery hog” was a green transient. A “tap” was a sucker; anybody who rode the boxcars was a “john”; a “McGoof hound” drank fortified wine. A “wolf” was an older man whose male lover was a “gazooney” or a “prushun.” A “dino” was a daredevil who took a chance, ordered a three-course meal in a restaurant, and then announced he was broke. The friendliest restaurants were run by Greek and Chinese immigrants; generally, they let the dinos work out the bill washing dishes. Others called the police.