Two Thousand Stiffs
A "stiff" is a tramp. It was once my fortune to travel a few weeks
with a "push" that numbered two thousand. This was known as "Kelly's
Army." Across the wild and woolly West, clear from California, General
Kelly and his heroes had captured trains; but they fell down when they
crossed the Missouri and went up against the effete East. The East
hadn't the slightest intention of giving free transportation to two
thousand hoboes. Kelly's Army lay helplessly for some time at Council
Bluffs. The day I joined it, made desperate by delay, it marched out
to capture a train.
It was quite an imposing sight. General Kelly sat a magnificent black
charger, and with waving banners, to the martial music of fife and
drum corps, company by company, in two divisions, his two thousand
stiffs countermarched before him and hit the wagon-road to the little
burg of Weston, seven miles away. Being the latest recruit, I was in
the last company, of the last regiment, of the Second Division, and, furthermore, in the last rank of the rear-guard. The army went into camp at Weston beside the railroad track--beside the tracks, rather, for two roads went through: the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, and the Rock Island.
Our intention was to take the first train out, but the railroad
officials "coppered" our play--and won. There was no first train. They
tied up the two lines and stopped running trains. In the meantime, while we lay by the dead tracks, the good people of Omaha and Council Bluffs were bestirring themselves. Preparations were making to form a mob, capture a train in Council Bluffs, run it down to us, and make us a present of it. The railroad officials coppered that play, too. They didn't wait for the mob. Early in the morning of the second day, an engine, with a single private car attached, arrived at the station and side-tracked. At this sign that life had renewed in the dead roads, the whole army lined up beside the track.
But never did life renew so monstrously on a dead railroad as it did
on those two roads. From the west came the whistle of a locomotive. It was coming in our direction, bound east. We were bound east. A stir of preparation ran down our ranks. The whistle tooted fast and furiously, and the train thundered at top speed. The hobo didn't live that could have boarded it. Another locomotive whistled, and another train came through at top speed, and another, and another, train after train, train after train, till toward the last the trains were composed of passenger coaches, box-cars, flat-cars, dead engines, cabooses, mail-cars, wrecking appliances, and all the riff-raff of worn-out and abandoned rolling-stock that collects in the yards of great railways. When the yards at Council Bluffs had been completely cleaned, the private car and engine went east, and the tracks died for keeps.
That day went by, and the next, and nothing moved, and in the
meantime, pelted by sleet, and rain, and hail, the two thousand hoboes
lay beside the track. But that night the good people of Council Bluffs
went the railroad officials one better. A mob formed in Council
Bluffs, crossed the river to Omaha, and there joined with another mob
in a raid on the Union Pacific yards. First they captured an engine, next they knocked a train together, and then the united mobs piled aboard, crossed the Missouri, and ran down the Rock Island right of way to turn the train over to us. The railway officials tried to copper this play, but fell down, to the mortal terror of the section boss and one member of the section gang at Weston. This pair, under secret telegraphic orders, tried to wreck our train-load of sympathizers by tearing up the track. It happened that we were suspicious and had our patrols out. Caught red-handed at train-wrecking, and surrounded by twenty hundred infuriated hoboes, that section-gang boss and assistant prepared to meet death. I don't remember what saved them, unless it was the arrival of the train.