From North Carolina to Southern California Without a Ticket and How I Did It

This is the true story of one man's desperate cross-country journey through an America that no longer exists. Determined to reach the West Coast with empty pockets, the author abandoned respectable society for the lawless life of a freight train hopper, riding the rails from small-town North Carolina through the heart of a young nation. Along the way he witnesses a continent in transformation - boomtowns and ghost towns, migrant workers and drifters, the strange beauty of a country still wild at its edges. The book pulses with danger. Jumping between moving cars, hiding from railroad detectives, crossing into Mexico with nothing but nerve, every mile offers the chance of arrest or death. Yet there's dark humor here too - the camaraderie of road companions, the absurdity of poverty, the peculiar pride of surviving on one's wits. From San Francisco in the aftermath of disaster to the mining camps of Arizona, from El Paso to Los Angeles, this is both a ripping adventure and an inadvertent historical document, capturing American life in the early 1900s from the perspective of someone who moved through it invisibly, outside the law, outside the economy, but very much alive.