Westward hoboes — Edition Insights

The Car as Character and Comic Foil

The automobile, referred to as “the old lady,” is a persistent source of trouble and personality. The author describes its mechanical failures with affectionate exasperation: the engine dies in water, the car sags “drunkenly on one side,” and repairs require improvised hardware. This personification extends to the driving itself—Toby’s hesitation at the ford is read as a “tactical error,” and the car’s submersion is treated as a baptism. The vehicle’s unreliability structures the journey, forcing detours and delays that produce the book’s most vivid scenes. Unlike a modern road trip where the car is a transparent convenience, here it is a recalcitrant companion, demanding constant attention and shaping the narrative’s pace.

Recurring Images of Water and Sand

Two elements dominate the physical descriptions: water and sand. Rivers are crossed with trepidation, their depth and current unpredictable; the Nambé episode is one of several fording scenes. Sand appears as a sea: the author dreams of “a sea of sand,” and the car struggles through sandy roads that threaten to swallow it. These images create a sense of a landscape that is fluid and unstable, where solid ground is an illusion. The recurrence of these motifs—water that rises, sand that shifts—gives the journey a dreamlike quality, as if the travelers are moving through a world that resists permanent tracks. The photographs, though not described in detail, likely reinforce this visual theme of elemental forces.

Encounters with Pueblo and Mexican Communities

The travelers’ interactions with local people are marked by a mixture of curiosity and condescension. At Nambé, the Indians are described as “poor Lo” (a pun on “pueblo”) and their mechanical ineptitude is mocked: “he has not the sense of a backward child of three years.” Yet the author also notes their patience and good nature, and the bedroom they provide is furnished with a piano and lace, indicating “pueblo aristocracy.” Similarly, Mexicans are portrayed as lazy (“too lazy to light the inevitable cigarette”) but also as sources of antiques and local knowledge. These observations are ethnographically imprecise but reveal the travelers’ assumptions; the book is as much a record of early 20th-century Anglo attitudes as of the places visited.

Movement Between Scenes and the Role of Photography

The narrative moves rapidly between set pieces: a sandstorm, a bandit scare, a visit to a mission, a breakdown. This episodic structure mirrors the jerky progress of the car itself. The photographs by Katherine Thaxter and Rollin Lester Dixon punctuate the text, offering visual anchors—the silver bracelet at Walpi, the church at Isleta, the Grand Canyon. The author occasionally references the act of photographing, as when cameras are ruined in the Nambé ford. The images serve as evidence of what was seen, but the text often undercuts them with humor or mishap. The interplay between word and image suggests a desire to document, even as the journey’s chaos threatens to overwhelm that impulse.

The Narrative Voice: Self-Deprecation and Understatement

The author’s tone is consistently wry and self-mocking. When the car stalls, she lapses into “profanity” that amounts to “Oh, devil, devil, darn!”—a comic anticlimax. She admits to being “used to going supperless to bed,” and describes her own dreams as burdens she forces on Toby. This voice prevents the book from becoming a mere travelogue; it is a record of incompetence and endurance. The humor is often at the expense of the travelers themselves, not just the locals. This self-awareness gives the narrative a modern feel, as if the author knows that the journey’s value lies in its failures as much as its successes. The reader is invited to laugh at the party’s misfortunes, not just admire their pluck.

The book’s title, Westward Hoboes, signals a deliberate rejection of the grand tour in favor of a more haphazard, improvised mode of travel. Readers should approach it not as a guidebook but as a series of anecdotes, each one a small drama of human and machine against an indifferent landscape. The photographs offer a counterpoint to the text’s humor, capturing the beauty that the narrative often treats as backdrop. For those interested in early automobile travel, Native American ethnography, or the Southwest as seen through 1920s eyes, this account provides a lively, if partial, record.

That old Ford in Westward Hoboes kept breaking down mid-desert, yet the author never sounded bitter—just quietly amazed at the people who helped him. It reminded me how place seeps into you slowly, much like wandering through a familiar woodland. I think of The Forest of Dean: An Historical and Descriptive Account — Reading Notes that way too, a patient old companion.