His personal journals, many of which were lost or not kept up on a regular basis, fill in some other areas. I have tried to get as close to the story that I will be telling as is feasible. Yet for all of its differences today there is a haunting similarity to the end of the 1920s. The stock market is booming, driven by wild speculation. Society has turned on it's bad habits, smoking and drugs, rather than alcohol this time, with a moralizing vengeance.
Unemployment is low but whole sections of the population are left out of our economic miracle.
So far, I have traveled the trail that Louis followed when he was forced to walk out of the Mojave Desert. I've searched out the homes, hotel rooms, boarding houses, auto courts, lumber piles, and hobo jungles where Louis slept as a youth. I've talked my way through the security gates that now seal the waterfronts and rail yards. I've turned off the interstate and driven miles on the forgotten dirt roads that our nation had instead of highways seventy years ago. I have followed the winding route that my grandparents, my father and his adopted brother traveled between 1923 and 1931 when they packed their last possessions in an old touring car and set out across the American west on a fruitless search for a better life.