Twelve miles from a crossroads store & gas station, given on the map the unwarranted importance of being named Spotted Horse, & fifty miles more from the nearest small town, a dilapidated 1950 Plymouth is juddering along the switchbacks of Highway 14 between the rocky hills of Wyoming. The Plymouth's fender & chrome radiator grill hang & shake like a broken jaw, & across the flaking eau-de-Nil paintwork on the doors, boot & bonnet is stencilled in black capitals six times over WORK ANYTHING WANTED.' The hobo was the shock-trooper of American expansion, the man who free-lanced beyond the community redoubts, building the canals & roads, spiking rails, felling timber, drilling oil, digging mines, harvesting wheat & fencing prairie. His origins go back to the early pioneer days & his spirit survives to the present. But during the years of the Depression he became a legendary figure. Revered & romanticised by some as the prototype of the free man, he was hated & feared by other for his nonconformity. His tough, reckless, radical & sardonic style has deeply impregnated his country's culture & outlook. Kenneth Allsop travelled 9, 000 miles through America in his reconstruction of the old hobo routes. He talked to contemporary nomads
- the rootless, the alienated, the outsiders of the Great Society. He gives us the history of the hobo & his place in the American dream. Harsh & turbulent, it is also a vital & compelling story.