The book is well researched and well written but the title is a bit misleading. The hoboes and other rootless wanderers are depicted as playing a secondary role in the agricultural settlement of the western US, so really what the story is about is settlement of the US West. The immigrants, the farmers, the influence of the railroads and how the whole agricultural part of the history of the region came together. Worth reading, but you are not going to find out too much about the hoboes, and really nothing much about them in the Great Depression - the time period covered is nineteenth century settlement, on into the 1920's. ( )