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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 [203], (15) Lines: 137 to ——— 6.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [203], (15) 12. Hoboes across the Border Itinerant Cross-Border Laborers between Montana and Western Canada Evelyne Stitt Pickett Between 1870 and 1920 a vast army of floating workers roamed the American and Canadian Wests servicing the natural resource industries of mining, lumbering, and grain and livestock production. They worked in the fisheries, in railroad construction, and on irrigation projects. Such industries provided work for hundreds of thousands of people who, lured west by gold, adventure, or the possibility of land, became enmeshed in the industries’ transitory hire-and-fire cycle. The literature on these itinerant laborers—their contributions and exploitation—has been steadily growing in the past few years.1 To this transient labor force, the international boundary meant little. To be sure, the forty-ninth parallel has in many ways represented a division of the two countries’ ideas and events, but similarities abound. Montana , which shares an extended border with British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, has a long history of resource extraction. Its mountain ranges, extending into British Columbia and Alberta, initiated mining and logging industries, and its eastern plains invited hay-hands to follow the grain harvest north into Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Livestock production developed concurrently on both sides of what Indians called the Medicine Line, and the extension of railroads—the Northern Pacific across Montana in the 1880s, the Great Northern Railway’s expansion to Seattle by 1893, and the Canadian Pacific’s reach westward to Vancouver by 1885—all stimulated regional development north and south of the international boundary. 204 | Stitt Pickett 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 [204], Lines: ——— 0.0pt ——— Normal PgEnds: [204], The experience of the casual labor force was much the same on both sides of the international border. Whether north or south of the boundary , itinerant workers in the West encountered great distances between places of employment. In this, the western casual laborer differed from his eastern counterpart. Set like islands in a vast ocean of land, western resource industries in Canada, Montana, and elsewhere required geographic mobility. Workers who came west tended to stay, but they moved freely across the boundary because the industries that employed itinerant workers were the same whether north or south of the border. Just as Montanans and other Americans sought wage work in Canadian natural resource industries, Canadians ventured to Montana for the same reason. To be sure, Canada tried to stop the influx, but with little consistent success. Although they provided significant services for casual laborers in both countries, women seldom traveled with the wandering men. Romantic myths evolved about the free lifestyle of hoboes, but in reality their lives were harsh, and they were usually exploited. Poor working conditions, corrupt employment agencies, low wages, and union turmoil were the rule, not the exception, and workers tended to blame people of color for the inequities. While government committees investigated their plight, workers gravitated to Canadian skid rows in Edmonton and elsewhere as readily as they did to such havens in Billings, Montana, and other American cities. Loneliness, death, and dismemberment threatened them, whether they rode the Canadian Pacific or the Northern Pacific. In cities and towns, they might simply be used. Charging them with vagrancy, civil authorities in both countries frequently put itinerants to work without pay. To express their dissatisfaction, thousands of casual laborers, drawn to the ideas of radical syndicalism, helped swell the membership of the Industrial Workers of the World (iww) and Canada’s One Big Union. Work in most resource industries was cyclical: grain was harvested, timber was cut, bridges and railroads were completed, and mining bonanzas turned to bust. When work finished at a particular place, and often before, workers moved to another locale. Carleton Parker, executive secretary of the California State Immigration and Housing Commission, submitted figures to show that in 1912 some 3.5 million casual laborers moved from one job to another in the American West. Lumber camp workers, he said, stayed fifteen to thirty days on average; they remained in...

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