The tramp or hobo (the tramp's name for himself) refers to a wandering foot traveler, often a vagrant, thief, or beggar with no fixed abode or destination. The term hobo, originally a migratory American worker hitching rides on freight trains, has disappeared as modern society increasingly controlled the outcast individuals who chose the itinerant or homeless life.

In the 1870s, American Civil War veterans and immigrants swelled the ranks of unemployed boys and men traveling from job to job, and the "tramp menace" alarmed newspaper editorialists and civic leaders concerned about the growing number of homeless vagrants descending on towns and cities. Tramps were often driven from town or sentenced to the jail or the workhouse for vagrancy; even skilled craftsmen, such as itinerant or tramp printers, were unwelcome in small towns. Allan Pinkerton, the legendary American detective, warned of the danger tramps posed in his 1878 book Strikers...