Hoboes, Wheat, and Climate Precarity, 1870–1922
Journal: Agricultural History
Year: 2023

Abstract This article explores the role of early migrant workers (“harvest hands” or “hoboes”) in the American wheat industry. It argues that the constant threat of drought and other climatic disasters created a state of climate precarity for workers. In the variable climate of the Great Plains, these disasters could not be forecast, and employers instead shunted climatic risk onto impoverished migrants, whose contracts were ad hoc, informal, and could be made, completed, or broken in a matter o