Some scholars believe hoboes communicated mostly by word-of-mouth - suggesting that homes, churches, dwellings or businesses frequented by hoboes were called upon quite logically because of their proximity to railroad tracks or railway stations - not because of any clandestine signage scribbled in code. Which begs the question: If a hobo draws a symbol in chalk or charcoal and the rain washes it away, did the hobo ever exist in first place? Yet there remains little concrete anthropological evidence that the code was actually widely used. The story goes that hoboes typically tagged tree trunks or scrawled impermanent coded messages in chalk, charcoal or grease pencil in boxcars, under bridges, on water tower bases, walls, fences, sewer trestles and other surfaces in or near railroad yards where other hoboes were likely to pass by. Other hoboglyphs were easier to decipher - a cross meant that there was a church in the vicinity and the possibility of scoring a free meal and perhaps shelter for the night. ![]() Hash marks or crossed lines generally depict some form of danger, whereas a curly line inside a circle meant that there was a courthouse or police station nearby. The pictographic code contains several elements that appear in more than one symbol, like the circles and arrows that comprise the directional symbols. Given the overwhelming challenges of surreptitiously train-hopping and the unpredictability of individual circumstances, the code was purportedly devised as an easy-to-understand, universal hobo language that helped fellow hoboes keep one another safe. Never staying in one place for very long, hobo lore suggests that during their cross-country travels hoboes developed a secret symbol-based system for sharing information with one another about, say, where to find a paying gig, which roads were good or bad to follow, or what potential dangers or hostilities (like police or railroad bulls) lurked up ahead. Hoboes were a widely displaced brotherhood (and sisterhood) of Depression-era itinerant workers who illegally hopped trains and journeyed across the country taking odd jobs wherever they could find them. Heck, why not just think of it as (copyright!) hoboji? Think of it as a form of graffiti that's sometimes called hoboglyphs. Think of it as enciphered hieroglyphics doodled in America's margins by down-and-out train surfers to other down-and-out train surfers. ![]() Think of it as a fringe culture emoji and hashtag moment that emerged and played out during the way-before-social-media-times of the post-Civil War railroad construction era and lasted well through the Great Depression. ![]() Felix Man/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images The mark served to tell others that they had treated him well (from "The Life Of A Tramp," Picture Post magazine, 1939). Hobo John Walpole draws a chalk cross on the wall of a farmhouse where they gave him food April 1, 1939.
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