February 8, 2023 • 39 mins
Danelle heads to Colton, CA, a freight crossroads where anything that can happen to a hobo usually does, and has questions for the cops. Danelle gets news about her book deal, and uncovers Colton’s creation by some of the Wild West’s most crooked capitalists. After a visit with a gold miner, she starts to see things differently. A hospital bill arrives for Ruby, and Danelle plans for a visit.
Want to see Colton? Check out @flipturnpods. Have a question or comment? Leave us a voicemail – our number’s in the credits.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Just heads up. This episode has a lot going on, violent,
strong language, guns. It's a train yard, after all, I
can't second. It can't be driving around with the cops,
so that sometimes and I'm trying to figure out of town.
I asked the cops to show me around today. That
(00:25):
town is Colton, California, train Town, USA, as it says
on the city Seal. When I asked the Colton Police
Department for a ride along, they assigned Lieutenant Raymondendez, a
nineteen year veteran, to show me around. We're in the
south part of Colton, east of Rancho Avenue right here,
which is a main thoroughfare. I've asked Lieutenant Menendez to
(00:48):
take me to Southside Colton, the neighborhood next to the
train yard where hoboes from all over the country mix
it up. And Menendez says he's met plenty of writers
by virtue that our city has trains running through both north,
south and east west, which is obviously conducive to having
people jumping off the train and visiting our city and
(01:09):
not really knowing where they're at when they get off
the train. So it's kind of an interesting contact. But yeah,
Colton is like a lot of train towns around the country,
but I had heard it was a rougher place than
most for a hobo, a place where gangs ruled, and
hobos had to be extra careful if you're a tramp here.
They just they come down here for their initiation rights
or whatever, and they just they mess people up. He
(01:30):
beat the ship out of them, and then he went
and stole a bunch of ships for me, like the
Who's who goes and riding trains. Eventually going to come
to ranch over and this is about as good Medendez
steers us to Pepper Street, a narrow strip of land
overlooking the train yard, dotted with hobo tents. And then
(01:51):
I just saw a little camp over here. We're here,
but oh right, look there is a camp right there.
It's not a huge source of crime, this hobo encampment. No, no,
we try not to have big in caps at home.
This is when I start wondering if I'm getting a
straight story from Menendez. I'd heard Colton was the wild West,
(02:11):
a place where the extremes of hobo life were right
out in the open, and those extreme state back to
Colton's corrupt beginnings. But according to Lieutenant Menendez, Colton isn't
like that at all. It's just another small town with
small town problems. So who was telling the truth? Where
the hobo's exaggerating or was Menendez blow and smoke? And
(02:31):
how the hobo survived here? I'm Donel Morton and this
is city of the Rails. After Mike sent me a
(03:09):
copy of the Crew Change, that hobo guide book, I'd
looked up the city I had heard so much about.
The Crew Change describes Colton is wide open and recommends
dark hours best. It's a hub city for the railroad
and for hoboes. Josh Brack, a long time writer who
I met through another trap, told me every writer at
some point ended up in this patch of sand fifty
(03:30):
miles east of l A like Colton, Like who gives
the funk about Colton, California? Right? Like, like what the
fun was Colton? But me, to a train rider west,
Colton is a fucking capital city. The place was so
rough that hobo's bragged about surviving it. And I heard
about one tough guy who had s sc south side
(03:52):
Colton tattooed on his neck. And Colton I used to
sleep with the act by my sleeping bag, like everybody's
gonna get thrown, and everybody's gonna fistfight like hard, like
people were going to beat the ship out of each
other like Paul might. If I wanted to know what
Ruby and her friends were dealing with town to town,
I could see the worst of it in Colton, you
(04:14):
know I think that. So here I was with a tenant, Menendez,
in the Durango. I asked him to show me places
where train riders hopped out. I could tell he was
choosing his words carefully. So we're actually the ten here
at Rancho Um. And then I will take you to
the main switching yard off of Pepper. Pepper and Rancho
are two main bridges where city streets crossed over the
(04:35):
train tracks in Colton. We can get a bird's eye
view from Pepper. Josh told me a lot went down
under those bridges. It was like one of the most ridiculous,
like you will come across the craziest fucking tramps. Rancho
Bridge used to be like the most dangium splot. The
who's who both riding trains is like eventually going to
come to ranch over yourself. And this is an old
(04:57):
old bridge. So there's the truck so I was with
Menendez at Rancho, but he wasn't given me much. Oh,
and I can see there's a chain link fence up there,
but it's got to cut in it. So if you
were gonna if the train was stopped there, you could
go through that cut and get on the train potentially. Yeah,
Colton is a small town with a population of about
(05:19):
fifty thou seems unlikely that a veteran cop wouldn't know
what went down there. So far, Menendez wouldn't give me
a straight yes or no about anything, but I hoped
he would at least know about this I'd heard. Colton
isn't just a hub for hoboes in the railroad. It's
also a gang battleground. The area south of the train yard,
south Side Coulton has a notorious gang, the Colton City
(05:42):
Crips or Three C's, has territory running right up to
the edge of the train yard. One hobo told me
the Colton gangs are so infamous that there are songs
written about them south Side in the plate with east Side,
and if they know the fra The Colton branch of
the Crips was so violent that part of the city
was under a gang injunction for more than a decade,
(06:04):
ending in cold and like totally like this tolo like
baflo local town. Like I guess they think you're a punk.
Like they'll try you, like they'll try to like fucking
basically like fuck your girl and like take your ship
and like make you by from them. So I asked
the tenant, Menendez, about the gangs in Coulton. If the
(06:26):
gang violence was as bad as i'd heard, I figured
you'd have a few stories to Um, let's get back
to the gang's ansers. We're about to go to southside Coulton. Um,
how bad was the gang problem before? I honestly don't know. Uh,
you know, I think that Um. I think they had
(06:47):
their fair share of shootings and violence and and turf wars. Um,
but maybe no more than any other city or smaller city. UM,
nothing that would stand out more than anything else. UM.
(07:07):
With each question ev aided, I grew more and more
suspicious of Menendez. I'd heard that the gangs in Colton
fought turf wars and sometimes hobos were targeted as part
of their initiation rights, and I had met one Zoe.
He took me through the Roseville Yard introduced me to
her friend Lee, who grew up around Colton, and for Lee,
the turf wars and initiation rights weren't a rumor, they
(07:30):
were a reality. That was my home yard. When I
left Colton, I was leaving home. When when I rolled
into Colton, I was coming home. I would hang out
around Rancho Pepper or the yard if I was feeling
it that night, but usually I would try to wait
around and outside of the yard. It felt a little better.
As a local, Lee believed he knew how not to
get tangled up with the street gangs of the south
(07:52):
side Riverside County. So it's very true. It's a different
street politics. There's rules. What are those rules? Keep your
head down, I don't know. Just don't cost trouble, you know.
The old timers just say hey man. Every now and
again there's a beat down or killing and they come
down here for their initiation rights or whatever. And these
attacks happened in the past few months and uh the
(08:14):
past few years steadily. Lee experienced this firsthand. Six years ago,
he found himself on the wrong side of the Southside
Culton gang. He was in the train yard with a
friend when a gang member came up like three in
the morning. Let me just roll by and shot you. Well,
he puts it to my face through the chain link
fence and he pulls the trigger and it just goes
(08:35):
click click, and then he cocks it or gets it
right or whatever, and then it turned to blah blah blah,
and he just unloaded on me and he struck me twice.
The bullet passed in and out of my hat twice
and grazed my head, and the other one went through
my back, through my lungs and my ribs and came
out of my chest. Lee ran for his life as
(08:56):
the gang member chased after him, still firing off rounds.
As I was running, blood was just dripping out of
my mouth and breathing blood, and it just didn't really
know where it came from. Little see the sparks flying
all around me. I thought maybe they're gonna finish me off,
because they were running after me, still firing. Once the
shots rang out and we ran, a getaway car screeched
(09:17):
up to pick him up, and the woman that he
was with was cheering them on and saying, yeah, I
get them and choose us, laughing, And he just shot
me in the head and shot me in the tor show.
We stumbled to a nearby house and got a guy
in the neighborhood to call him an ambulance. And yet
it somehow gets worse. Once Lee arrives at the hospital,
he was hooked up to half a dozen machines with
(09:38):
his stomach stitch together. When the Colton cops arrived, they
asked him some routine questions, but didn't take Lee's assault seriously. Yeah,
they interviewed me in the hospital, told me they didn't
believe the witness, my friend who was also being fired upon,
and uh, they just wrote a couple of things down,
rolled their eyes and laughed. I never heard from him again. Yeah,
(10:03):
I don't know. It just basically was swept under the rug.
Just the home police report. I don't I don't know.
It seems like the police wanted to pretend the Hobos
and the violence and Colton didn't exist. But I tried
Menendez one last time. I'd made a public record request
for LEAs police report, so I pulled it up on
my phone and started reading. Transported to Arrowhead Regional Medical Center,
(10:28):
where he was treated for his wounds. Witnesses were contacted
and evidence was booked into the Colton Police Department. No
suspects were contacted. So there's a lot. So there's a
lot it's missing here, there's a lot that's redacted. The
(10:49):
truth is, I don't know, and I don't think that,
like you had said before, there was some initiation and uh,
you know, to get into the gang. I think you
said that they had to kill or beat up a
train rider or something. I've never heard that in the
(11:11):
years I've been here. Um, now, does south Side Colton
Gang exist? Yes? Have we had any activity in years
with respect to them and train riders? I can't think
of any within the past fifteen plus years. I just,
(11:32):
I honestly think that's probably an urban legend. Nineteen years
on the force years is a detective and Lieutenant Menendez
said he didn't know much about the gangs, but that
bullet that went through Lee in the train yard wasn't
a myth. So no justice for Lee and no getting
shot apparently wasn't worth investigating. Hobos are on the lowest
(11:52):
run of the ladder, ignored, doubted, and discounted, But this
issue of not being seen or heard isn't so black
and white. Of course, ly deserves justice, but choosing to
live a life apart away from scrutiny and society comes
at a cost. Hobo's don't trust the cops and one
of them gets beat up in a fight. Mostly they
nurse their own wounds rather than go to the hospital,
(12:13):
and people can be shunned if they call the cops. Yeah, um,
hopefully that helped. It did help? Yes, thanks? Menendez was
not much help to me then or later. Before I left.
He said he'd connect me to more knowledgeable detectives, even
retired ones who knew more about the gang beat, but
(12:34):
he ignored me as soon as we parted ways. It
was clear and Colton, the hoboes and the cops both
wanted to pretend the other didn't exist. A fight between
vagabonds and gang members. Both of them went to stay
in the shadows. Just how do you follow up with
a witness who could be states away tomorrow? But even still,
if you get shot, you want the police to take
you seriously. On this trip, I was starting to see
(12:57):
the cost of life in the Shadows, that people in
power value your life and wouldn't do a whole lot
to help you protect it. But I had more people
to talk to in train Town, USA, even if Menendez
hadn't heard them. I heard wild stories about hobo life
and Colton, and about the life of Colton himself and Colton.
(13:30):
I kept thinking about Lee and how if he'd been
a high school student instead of a hobo, maybe the
cops would have taken his shooting more seriously. But Colton
has always been a place where the powerful decide who's
in and who's out. Lieutena. Menendez told me during our
ride along that Colton was one of the few places
where the tracks of rival railroads Union Pacific in BNSF crossed.
(13:51):
That made Colton and battleground. Back in eighteen seventy, the
two railroads paid armed security to battle it out at
the spot where the tracks crossed, so Colton was born
in conflict. After my time with Menendez, I stopped by
the San Bernardino Historical Society, a little Victorian near the rails,
to ask their president, Nick Catalbo, how Colton came to be.
(14:12):
I feel like I know you. Starting out, many railroad
towns were just little stopping places along the tracks where
the engine could get more wood and water to continue
on their journey. Those places never amounted too much, but
a place where two railroad tracks crossed. That was a
(14:33):
place where there might be some trouble. This part of
the California Desert isn't much. It's not the beach ball
vision of the Golden State. It's the edge of the
Mojave Desert, an hour east of Los Angeles, a piece
of land that wasn't worth very much to anyone until
the railroad came after the Civil War. The railroads were
the high tech of their time. They could bring the
(14:54):
country together and create a faster, more connected world. At
least that was the hype of the people who ran
the railroad. And just like tech, a lot of money
was made by the founders and a lot of money
was lost by the average joe who wanted in on
the deal. The founding of Colton is a good example
of these schemes. The story in Coulton starts after the
Central Pacific finishes the first transcontinental railroad through the center
(15:17):
of the country, and the race is on to build
another one in the South. In the early eighteen seventies,
Southern Pacific Railroad was running eastbound from Los Angeles, and
their their role was to connect with the eastern lines
as they laid track east across the California Desert. They
sold off the locations of the train stations and rail
(15:37):
yards to the highest bidders. Oh yeah, there's always money
involved somehow, you know, somehow, the railroads, they're working with
the cities and these land speculators, real estate barons. So
Samberdandino was the only city out here. So Sambordino, they
really wanted Southern Pacific to run through their town, and
(15:58):
they had a spot already, really wanted us to happen.
The wealthy landowners of San Bernardino County as Southern Pacific
executive David Daddy Colton, how much it would cost them
to get a train yard. David Colton, an experienced railroad man,
gave them an exact number. They said that they can
work out a deal. If the supporters from Sanardino would
(16:20):
buy a hundred thousand dollars worth of Southern Pacific bonds,
this could happen, but there's still no guarantee that would
actually go into San Fardino. A hundred thousand dollars back
then would be three million today. So that the people
in Sanmardino said no, So they turned down the hundred thousand,
and that's why the Southern Pacific continued on in a
(16:43):
straight route by bypassing this city, and what feels like
a middle finger to San Bernardino, Southern Pacific plunk the
train station down in the dusty clearing just four miles away.
They named it after David Dowdy Colton, who was at
the vice president. So that's how you get Colton. So
Colton was established, Semonino lost out, and thus Colton is
(17:08):
born at the will of the mighty Southern Pacific Railroad
and the cherry on top vice President. David Daddy Colton
never breathed a single breath of that desert air he
died in and the town had already been, uh, you know, established.
But I don't believe he had ever visited his namesake.
(17:31):
Even if he never stepped foot of the town. It's
no coincidence Colton was named after David Daddy. At the time,
he was a big deal in the railroad world. He
was the go to guy for the Big Four, the
corrupt group of Robert Barons who founded the Southern Pacific Railroad.
He might recognize some of their names, especially if you
live in California. Stanford Huntington's Crocker and Hopkins. David Daddy
(17:54):
Colton became so critical to their operations that he was
adopted as the fifth member of the Big Four. At
one time, the Big Four was the Big Five, and
David Colton was the fifth Guy. Stanford historian Richard White
told me about the rise and fall of David Colton.
Colton was a big guy, broad shouldered, with bright red hair,
the kind of bloviator who, after he earned the honorary
(18:15):
title of General, demanded that everyone after that call him
the General. He was an insider, one of the original
lobbyists who spread money around Washington, d C. For the
Big Four. He winded and dying congressman at the Willard
Hotel trying to get them to grant tax breaks or
subsidized construction. And then there were his illegal activities. David Colton,
(18:36):
in fact, was an embezzler and was embezzling money out
in ways that the Big Four were all too familiar with.
They did it to other people, but they didn't do
it to themselves. This is where Colton got greedy. He
broke the cardinal rule of the Big Four. We cheat
other people, we don't cheat each other. David Colton cheated
the Big Four. Once they began looking at the books,
(18:59):
they realized how how much money Colton had taken. They
will um go after Colton. Colton will die. The story
goes that early in October of eight seventy eight, David
Colton's carriage pulled up in front of his mansion on
Knob Hill in San Francisco. He was slimped in the back,
beating nearly to death. The driver said Colton had fallen
(19:21):
off a horse, but it was obvious that no fall
could have done that. And that's not where the Big
Four stopped. They're not gonna let his wife keep it.
They didn't go after his wife, and they pretty much
break his wife, bring the money back in, and David
Colton is going to be expunged from the corporation. After
David Colton died, the Big Four bankrupted his estate, seized
(19:43):
his house, and threw his widow out into the street.
And then one of the biggest of the Big Four,
Collis P. Huntington's, moved into it. You don't mess with
the railroads. Colton tried and paid for it. So David
Colton is a brook even among crooks. He's the proof
of the adage to live outside the law, you must
(20:04):
be honest, at least with each other. That's the man
that Colton, California is named after, a crook betrayed by
his fellow crooks. It maybe honor among thieves and among hoboes,
but apparently not Robber Barrens. I was starting to appreciate
this during my trip to Colton. How once you were
no longer useful, like David Dawdy Colton, he became an outsider,
(20:25):
someone who was powerless and vulnerable. Maybe you chose this position,
or maybe it's thrust upon you, but either way, you're
on your own. The Hoboes and Colton knew this better
than anyone. Maybe my sympathy for this part of hobo
life was convenient timing. As I was learning about what
it meant to be an outsider, I was becoming one myself.
(20:45):
My place in the world suddenly was in free fall.
Seven months after Ruby left, I found out my book
The Single Mom Effect had been rejected after I missed
my first deadline. The book had been knocked around and
landed on the desk of an edit or, my third
who hated single moms. In her rejection, she wrote, You've
(21:06):
wasted a considerable amount of sympathy on the problems of
poor women. And when are these women going to start
accepting responsibility for their unplanned, unwanted children. Okay, got it.
After that rejection, reality set in. When the publisher buys
your manuscript, they advanced you part of the money, and
(21:27):
when they cancel it, they want that money back. Well,
mine was long gone. With that and my credit card bills,
I was circling the financial drain. I was a hundred
and forty dollars in debt. The afternoon I got the rejection.
I sat at my dining room table, looking out at
the view of the lake. I could feel the last
(21:48):
pillars of my identity falling away. I was a writer,
or had been. And I was a mom, and I
used to think I was a pretty good one. And
I was the woman who hosted dinner parties in my
beautiful apartment, but clearly not for much longer. Here in
the dining room, I felt how big institutions, big corporations
(22:08):
could destroy your sense of your value in the world
in one rough move, and the decision could be up
to one person. So who's in and who's out? I
read about this very idea and the single mom effect,
no wonder it got canceled. One of the chapters was
set in a housing project in Oklahoma, and it was
all about surviving as an outsider. The bonds single moms
(22:31):
created there kept them above water and built a stronger community.
If one mom needed money for her electricity bill, she
could get it from one of the other moms, And
if another mom needed some high hill shoes for a date,
she knew who she could borrow them from. Now I
was beginning to see my circumstances as connected to these
savvy single moms and to the bonds that travelers made
(22:52):
on the rails. What came first as outsiders was a
different kind of debt, one they owed to each other
and always assume that depending on other people, not our
financial and legal systems, was a gamble. But I spent
my whole life striving and where had that landed me?
So as I sat at my dining room table, I
almost couldn't believe the thoughts I was entertaining that with
(23:15):
the Hobos and Ruby's friends said about stepping away from
the status quo actually seemed logical. Were you really that
much more at risk when you reject all of that?
All outsider groups have something in common, going against the grain,
surviving despite those are the stories. I've always been drawn to,
the stories of alliances between outsiders, like the single moms
(23:37):
banding together. That same camaraderie exists in the hobo community
and in Colton, I was going to see the extreme
forms that camaraderie could take. Oh. My trips to the
(24:04):
train yards and the conversations I've been having with hobo's
ever since we be left had sucked me into the
city of the rails. But it wasn't until Colton that
I saw its harshest realities. To survive into town like Coulton,
hobo's had to rely on each other for protection. There
was a coat, they made alliances and enforced their values
with vigilante justice. Just having a traveling family and knowing
(24:27):
where the squads were may not be enough to make
it in Colton. Like Richard White said, when you live
outside the law, you have to be honest at least
with each other, and if you're a hobo in a
town like Colton, that honesty takes extreme forms. Well. Sylvia, Yeah,
Sylvia was one of the train hoppers I spoke with
(24:47):
while investigating Colton. I got her number through Lee, the
hobo who got shot near the Colton Yard. Did he
tell you what I'm up to? One of the stories
Sylvia told me about Coulton Stuck with Me showed just
how far hoboes will go to protect each other. Sylvia
described the cold winter night when she and her boyfriend
(25:07):
got off the train at the edge of the West
Colton Yard and immediately started looking for other people at
the usual hobo spots. So we were going down to Rancho.
She's like, smoke coming from underneath the bridge. They needed
a warm place to camp, so they approached from out
of the darkness, trying to get a sense of the situation.
(25:29):
When they saw that smoke, they walked toward it. There's
fire going He stopped, like whatever, sucking homebomb because he
was burning railroad sides underneath the bridge. Sylvia sized him up,
sim he was probably a local burning wood from the
rail yard. But she and her boyfriend were about to
be in another legend of the train world. She was like, hey, guys,
(25:51):
like you guys, just get off. That train comes from
the north and it's like, yeah, what's up, dude. He
was like, watch out, there's some dude or around here
going around killing people, and I was like, yeah, we
don't give a funk, We're just trying to get out
of the rain. Dude. We finally got underneath the bridge
and it's dirty Mike, the same dirty Mike who pulled
(26:12):
a gun in camp before looking for his friend's lost dog.
Mike was testing Sylvia and her boyfriend, but they weren't
the kind of people who scared easily. They passed Mike's test.
Then we introduced ourselves and then we just like lung
out and then like we had like ten bucks to
go get beer, and we bought beer and just hung
(26:33):
out with him. But as they huddled around the fire
with Mike, Sylvia saw that this wild man enforced his
own idea of justice. Sylvia had a terrible cold, and
Mike took matters into his own hands. I was like,
super Ship, I had a really bad fever, and like
he was pissed that my boyfriend at the time went
(26:54):
to paying care of me, and he beat the ship
out of him and then he went and stole, like
day cool Nichael Vick a bunch of ship for me
for me to get better. This was part of the
hobo code. If a man was traveling with a woman
(27:15):
and didn't take care of her. Another writer would remind
him of his responsibilities. You're not going to do that,
but you'll get fucking greenlighted. Green Lighted means the word
got around that you should be beaten or worse on site,
especially if your girl you're like a real fucking like
train writer and like like you did her and like
something bad happened to her, or like she gets great
(27:37):
and you don't stand up for her, like you'll get greenlighted,
like they're gonna like her friends are gonna fuck you up.
Travelers rarely called the cops on each other when something
goes wrong because they can't be certain the cops would
side with them. Maybe they'd all get arrested, so they
police each other. It was as simple as that. Sylvia's
(27:57):
boyfriend wasn't taking care of her, so dirty My showed
him he better change his ways, and the next day
Dirty Might kept looking out for Sylvia. I went to
bed by the fire, woke up about like I don't know,
three or four o'clock. I went and like welu a
sign flying a sign as hobo speak for panhandling. Sylvia
(28:19):
didn't know she was standing on someone else's turf and
tome Bomb comes up and was like, what the funk
are you doing? This is my fucking fly spot. And
I was like, no, dude, like it's my turn fly,
like you weren't here, and he's like, I've been here
ten years, and I was like, I don't get full
long you've been here. I just trying to make enough
for a half gallon or twelve bucks. Got tiger mark
(28:42):
and then I'll be done. Are homeless in the train yard,
many of them older retired hoboes. They defended their turf.
They guy yelling at Sylvia got physical and then he's
like no and grabbed my shine and I was like
you should fucking do that, dude. He's like, you're a
girl by yourself. What the fuck you gonna do about it?
(29:02):
And I was like, oh yeah, motherfucker, and I yelled
dirty Mike's name. She comes growning up. She's the dude
has my sign and you fucking punches them, throws them
over the off ramps. He goes flying down the hill
and then like, I get my sign back and then
(29:24):
we were friends ever since. But surprisingly mossed about that
story outside of a guy getting tossed over an off ramp.
Is just how quickly Mike decides to help Sylvia. She
was a total stranger to him, but just hours after
meeting her, he's stealing meds and fighting a home bum
to protect her. But that helped came with some expectations.
(29:47):
Sylvia told me she knew that she'd need to pay
Mike back. We're all hanging out underneath the bridge, so
I think there was like kind of us underneath Rancho.
We're all just like hanging out. Then Mike had found
out that I do stick and poach, and I had
a bunch of needles and ink on me and he
was like, hey, you should do train tracks on my face.
(30:09):
And I was like, yeah, sure, whatever, I don't care.
And then he was like really like pissed me off
that day, And I really didn't want to do a tattoo,
but Sylvia owed Mike, so she agreed. She took out
her bundle of needles and her pot of ink and
sat down by the fire. So I was just like
pretty much doing a tattoo to hurt him. We're shent
(30:32):
down and he just had his face on my lap,
but I was just tattooing his face to try and
track down a space while from like his eyebrow down
his cheeks. I did that. Even though Sylvia didn't feel
like tattooing this maniac resting his face in her lap,
she knew she had to do it to keep a
good reputation, and reputation was everything in the train hopping community.
(30:56):
Lee told me the same thing. You had to size
each other up, pay each other back, and spread the
word when people didn't do right by you. That's how
we check each other, you know, gossip in storytelling, it's
like how we weed people out. Like, no matter where
you're at on the totem pol, there's gonna be a
different little way that humans are weaning out the worst
(31:17):
of mankind and the good will of man fucking manifest.
Surviving on the edges unsupported by society, you have to
be resourceful. Knows all about this. He's been off the
rails for a while and keeps his distance from the
regular world, meaning he has to support himself in an
unconventional way. Instead of writing, Lee decided he'd strike gold.
(31:41):
That's pretty much the only thing that keeps me off
the rails right now is searching for goal. Zoe and
I met Lee outside a country store in Oroville, Spanish
for gold Town, where he lives in the summer. He
wanted to show me some places most people never see.
We hiked underneath the freeway covered with graffiti and down
a steep hill to a spot where trains cool their
breaks after sending the Sierras. Jonathan Esposito had described this
(32:04):
place to me. Lee was crashing at a friend's place
and spent a lot of summer nights camping out by
the streams where he searched for gold in the old
veins in northern California. In the winter, he head south
mining gold, platinum, and gemstones in the desert out past
Joshua Tree, where he sleeps under his truck in the
heat of the day. There was actually being a hobo
(32:24):
that brought Lee here in the first place, well, hopping
trains and uh coming out to this part of the
country for seasonal work. Started meeting a lot of the
locals out here, and it's just a part of their heritage,
and they shared their culture and their their methods with me.
Lee met old guys mining the public lands in the Sierras,
using the same methods miners from the gold rush did
(32:47):
running water through a sluice and examining the heavy pieces
that sink to the bottom for spects of gold, and
just like hopping a train. Lee started as an apprentice.
It's not too many young people into it. Kind of
a grum field van hobby. Uh Miners don't like talking
to each other all the time. It's kind of a
weird thing. And Lee told me, all the easy gold
(33:07):
is gone, so if he's gonna make enough to get by,
he has to look carefully. I found as much as
like six hundred dollars in a weekend, but sometimes in
a day, you know, it could just be a matter
of sense or a couple of dollars. But it's a
lot of work. What did you call that snowflakes? Or
what I call a fly poop? The really tiny, invisible
(33:29):
gold is the fly poop. But at the end of
the day, that could be your bread and butter. So
I I got to recover the small stuff and the
big stuff. But Lee told me he wasn't frantic about
his yield. From the hours he spent huddled over the sluice,
he could be delighted by even the tiniest speck of
fly poop. He sold the biggest pieces he mind and
melted down the rest to make jewelry. And the thing
(33:51):
I like about Lee is how he sees the world
living this way. Lisie's potential everywhere. It is a lot
of work. It's a process start to finish, and that's
why it's not for everybody. Or that's also why everybody
doesn't know that they're surrounded by gold everywhere, because we're
sitting here right now. It's like we're surrounded by gold.
It's all over. It's just a process to get it out.
(34:13):
You gotta work it out of the ground, you know,
either out of the soil or the wrongs. And Colton
I was beginning to see how the rails changed people,
and sometimes change them in ways that meant they couldn't
come back to regular life. Life on the rails was naked,
not covered by platitudes and promises. To step inside the
train yard is to realign your sense of power and
(34:36):
your sense of honor. I kept thinking about least sleeping
under his truck in the desert. That's how far he
went to stay away from the false promises of life
on our side of the tracks, until the day my
book got canceled I'd been an insider. Now I was
becoming an outsider just like Ruby. But I still wanted
her back. How do you bring an outsider back in
(34:59):
and how do you at them to stay? I had
a chance to find out when Christmas rolled around. Ruby's
father was trying to figure out how to get her
to come home for the holidays. But it was a
logistical crisis. She lost her I D so she couldn't
take a plane or a train. He finabled her an
Amtrak ticket from Houston, but she had already left and
gone to Austin. On top of that, I knew there
(35:22):
was more trouble in Ruby's life on the rails than
she was letting on. Right around Thanksgiving, I found hospital
bills in the mail addressed to Ruby. I ripped one open,
not a bill, but a receipt for medication. I called
a nurse friend to ask about the drugs, strong antibiotics.
Ruby must have had a pretty serious infection, my friend said,
(35:43):
emergency injun carrot A County hospital. This is my first
evidence of Ruby slipping into the cracks. What was going
on with her? My heart sank thinking about just how
hard it was to get someone off the rails. But
if father was able to get her a bus ticket,
and Ruby was taking the Greyhound from Austin to Oakland.
(36:06):
She was coming home for Christmas. This guy knew her,
he was one of the elders in that eighteen Street gig.
And then she's gone. And during that time she became
someone that I didn't know anything. I slept in the
backyard with the dogs, just like being inside. I felt claustrophobic.
Come back here, be here tomorrow night, and I'll have
(36:27):
her here. That's what he said. I'm looking for my daughter.
I walked through the fires at hell. That's next episode
on City of the Rails, said Mocka, just drinking gastle.
(37:07):
Look what you've done. City of the Rails is written
and hosted by me than el Morton and developed in
partnership between Flip Turn Studios and I Heart Podcasts. Have
a Colton story. I think we got it all wrong.
Call in and tell us you might just end up
on the show. The number is seven oh seven six five,
(37:29):
three oh three three nine. And thank you to everyone
who's been calling us. We listened to every message and
they really give us a boost. I want to help
us out. You can do it. Very quickly by leaving
us a rating or review wherever you're listening to. This
will help more people find the show and it means
a lot to us. I want to follow along. Find
us on Instagram at flip turn Pods. Our team is
(37:52):
executive producer and showrunner Julian Weller and executive producer Mark Keeley.
Julian will Always have Colton and the World's Largest Pancake,
Senior producer and editing master abooz Afar and producers Emily
maronof Sina Ozaki and Zoey Denkla, who do not like
the fact that I keep calling them my lady squad. Well,
I've got the microphone, so you're outvoted. The lady squad
(38:14):
knows how tough some of this was to write, and
they were with me every step of the way, battling
it out and keeping the gin in the freezer for
when things got glum. So grateful to you three and
I will never forget you and the production support from
Marcy di Pina. Original music every episode by Aaron Kaufman.
Our theme music is Wayfaring Stranger, performed by Profane Sass.
(38:36):
Thanks to Scott Mischot at Flail Records. Our logo is
by Lucy Quinia and uses a photograph by Mike Brody,
the roving now phoneless photographer and at I Heart thanks
to Nikki Etre and Bethan Macaluso. We'll be back next
week in the days of Christmas past and also the
fires of Hell on City of the Rails.
Just heads up. This episode has a lot going on, violent,
strong language, guns. It's a train yard, after all, I
can't second. It can't be driving around with the cops,
so that sometimes and I'm trying to figure out of town.
I asked the cops to show me around today. That
(00:25):
town is Colton, California, train Town, USA, as it says
on the city Seal. When I asked the Colton Police
Department for a ride along, they assigned Lieutenant Raymondendez, a
nineteen year veteran, to show me around. We're in the
south part of Colton, east of Rancho Avenue right here,
which is a main thoroughfare. I've asked Lieutenant Menendez to
(00:48):
take me to Southside Colton, the neighborhood next to the
train yard where hoboes from all over the country mix
it up. And Menendez says he's met plenty of writers
by virtue that our city has trains running through both north,
south and east west, which is obviously conducive to having
people jumping off the train and visiting our city and
(01:09):
not really knowing where they're at when they get off
the train. So it's kind of an interesting contact. But yeah,
Colton is like a lot of train towns around the country,
but I had heard it was a rougher place than
most for a hobo, a place where gangs ruled, and
hobos had to be extra careful if you're a tramp here.
They just they come down here for their initiation rights
or whatever, and they just they mess people up. He
(01:30):
beat the ship out of them, and then he went
and stole a bunch of ships for me, like the
Who's who goes and riding trains. Eventually going to come
to ranch over and this is about as good Medendez
steers us to Pepper Street, a narrow strip of land
overlooking the train yard, dotted with hobo tents. And then
(01:51):
I just saw a little camp over here. We're here,
but oh right, look there is a camp right there.
It's not a huge source of crime, this hobo encampment. No, no,
we try not to have big in caps at home.
This is when I start wondering if I'm getting a
straight story from Menendez. I'd heard Colton was the wild West,
(02:11):
a place where the extremes of hobo life were right
out in the open, and those extreme state back to
Colton's corrupt beginnings. But according to Lieutenant Menendez, Colton isn't
like that at all. It's just another small town with
small town problems. So who was telling the truth? Where
the hobo's exaggerating or was Menendez blow and smoke? And
(02:31):
how the hobo survived here? I'm Donel Morton and this
is city of the Rails. After Mike sent me a
(03:09):
copy of the Crew Change, that hobo guide book, I'd
looked up the city I had heard so much about.
The Crew Change describes Colton is wide open and recommends
dark hours best. It's a hub city for the railroad
and for hoboes. Josh Brack, a long time writer who
I met through another trap, told me every writer at
some point ended up in this patch of sand fifty
(03:30):
miles east of l A like Colton, Like who gives
the funk about Colton, California? Right? Like, like what the
fun was Colton? But me, to a train rider west,
Colton is a fucking capital city. The place was so
rough that hobo's bragged about surviving it. And I heard
about one tough guy who had s sc south side
(03:52):
Colton tattooed on his neck. And Colton I used to
sleep with the act by my sleeping bag, like everybody's
gonna get thrown, and everybody's gonna fistfight like hard, like
people were going to beat the ship out of each
other like Paul might. If I wanted to know what
Ruby and her friends were dealing with town to town,
I could see the worst of it in Colton, you
(04:14):
know I think that. So here I was with a tenant, Menendez,
in the Durango. I asked him to show me places
where train riders hopped out. I could tell he was
choosing his words carefully. So we're actually the ten here
at Rancho Um. And then I will take you to
the main switching yard off of Pepper. Pepper and Rancho
are two main bridges where city streets crossed over the
(04:35):
train tracks in Colton. We can get a bird's eye
view from Pepper. Josh told me a lot went down
under those bridges. It was like one of the most ridiculous,
like you will come across the craziest fucking tramps. Rancho
Bridge used to be like the most dangium splot. The
who's who both riding trains is like eventually going to
come to ranch over yourself. And this is an old
(04:57):
old bridge. So there's the truck so I was with
Menendez at Rancho, but he wasn't given me much. Oh,
and I can see there's a chain link fence up there,
but it's got to cut in it. So if you
were gonna if the train was stopped there, you could
go through that cut and get on the train potentially. Yeah,
Colton is a small town with a population of about
(05:19):
fifty thou seems unlikely that a veteran cop wouldn't know
what went down there. So far, Menendez wouldn't give me
a straight yes or no about anything, but I hoped
he would at least know about this I'd heard. Colton
isn't just a hub for hoboes in the railroad. It's
also a gang battleground. The area south of the train yard,
south Side Coulton has a notorious gang, the Colton City
(05:42):
Crips or Three C's, has territory running right up to
the edge of the train yard. One hobo told me
the Colton gangs are so infamous that there are songs
written about them south Side in the plate with east Side,
and if they know the fra The Colton branch of
the Crips was so violent that part of the city
was under a gang injunction for more than a decade,
(06:04):
ending in cold and like totally like this tolo like
baflo local town. Like I guess they think you're a punk.
Like they'll try you, like they'll try to like fucking
basically like fuck your girl and like take your ship
and like make you by from them. So I asked
the tenant, Menendez, about the gangs in Coulton. If the
(06:26):
gang violence was as bad as i'd heard, I figured
you'd have a few stories to Um, let's get back
to the gang's ansers. We're about to go to southside Coulton. Um,
how bad was the gang problem before? I honestly don't know. Uh,
you know, I think that Um. I think they had
(06:47):
their fair share of shootings and violence and and turf wars. Um,
but maybe no more than any other city or smaller city. UM,
nothing that would stand out more than anything else. UM.
(07:07):
With each question ev aided, I grew more and more
suspicious of Menendez. I'd heard that the gangs in Colton
fought turf wars and sometimes hobos were targeted as part
of their initiation rights, and I had met one Zoe.
He took me through the Roseville Yard introduced me to
her friend Lee, who grew up around Colton, and for Lee,
the turf wars and initiation rights weren't a rumor, they
(07:30):
were a reality. That was my home yard. When I
left Colton, I was leaving home. When when I rolled
into Colton, I was coming home. I would hang out
around Rancho Pepper or the yard if I was feeling
it that night, but usually I would try to wait
around and outside of the yard. It felt a little better.
As a local, Lee believed he knew how not to
get tangled up with the street gangs of the south
(07:52):
side Riverside County. So it's very true. It's a different
street politics. There's rules. What are those rules? Keep your
head down, I don't know. Just don't cost trouble, you know.
The old timers just say hey man. Every now and
again there's a beat down or killing and they come
down here for their initiation rights or whatever. And these
attacks happened in the past few months and uh the
(08:14):
past few years steadily. Lee experienced this firsthand. Six years ago,
he found himself on the wrong side of the Southside
Culton gang. He was in the train yard with a
friend when a gang member came up like three in
the morning. Let me just roll by and shot you. Well,
he puts it to my face through the chain link
fence and he pulls the trigger and it just goes
(08:35):
click click, and then he cocks it or gets it
right or whatever, and then it turned to blah blah blah,
and he just unloaded on me and he struck me twice.
The bullet passed in and out of my hat twice
and grazed my head, and the other one went through
my back, through my lungs and my ribs and came
out of my chest. Lee ran for his life as
(08:56):
the gang member chased after him, still firing off rounds.
As I was running, blood was just dripping out of
my mouth and breathing blood, and it just didn't really
know where it came from. Little see the sparks flying
all around me. I thought maybe they're gonna finish me off,
because they were running after me, still firing. Once the
shots rang out and we ran, a getaway car screeched
(09:17):
up to pick him up, and the woman that he
was with was cheering them on and saying, yeah, I
get them and choose us, laughing, And he just shot
me in the head and shot me in the tor show.
We stumbled to a nearby house and got a guy
in the neighborhood to call him an ambulance. And yet
it somehow gets worse. Once Lee arrives at the hospital,
he was hooked up to half a dozen machines with
(09:38):
his stomach stitch together. When the Colton cops arrived, they
asked him some routine questions, but didn't take Lee's assault seriously. Yeah,
they interviewed me in the hospital, told me they didn't
believe the witness, my friend who was also being fired upon,
and uh, they just wrote a couple of things down,
rolled their eyes and laughed. I never heard from him again. Yeah,
(10:03):
I don't know. It just basically was swept under the rug.
Just the home police report. I don't I don't know.
It seems like the police wanted to pretend the Hobos
and the violence and Colton didn't exist. But I tried
Menendez one last time. I'd made a public record request
for LEAs police report, so I pulled it up on
my phone and started reading. Transported to Arrowhead Regional Medical Center,
(10:28):
where he was treated for his wounds. Witnesses were contacted
and evidence was booked into the Colton Police Department. No
suspects were contacted. So there's a lot. So there's a
lot it's missing here, there's a lot that's redacted. The
(10:49):
truth is, I don't know, and I don't think that,
like you had said before, there was some initiation and uh,
you know, to get into the gang. I think you
said that they had to kill or beat up a
train rider or something. I've never heard that in the
(11:11):
years I've been here. Um, now, does south Side Colton
Gang exist? Yes? Have we had any activity in years
with respect to them and train riders? I can't think
of any within the past fifteen plus years. I just,
(11:32):
I honestly think that's probably an urban legend. Nineteen years
on the force years is a detective and Lieutenant Menendez
said he didn't know much about the gangs, but that
bullet that went through Lee in the train yard wasn't
a myth. So no justice for Lee and no getting
shot apparently wasn't worth investigating. Hobos are on the lowest
(11:52):
run of the ladder, ignored, doubted, and discounted, But this
issue of not being seen or heard isn't so black
and white. Of course, ly deserves justice, but choosing to
live a life apart away from scrutiny and society comes
at a cost. Hobo's don't trust the cops and one
of them gets beat up in a fight. Mostly they
nurse their own wounds rather than go to the hospital,
(12:13):
and people can be shunned if they call the cops. Yeah, um,
hopefully that helped. It did help? Yes, thanks? Menendez was
not much help to me then or later. Before I left.
He said he'd connect me to more knowledgeable detectives, even
retired ones who knew more about the gang beat, but
(12:34):
he ignored me as soon as we parted ways. It
was clear and Colton, the hoboes and the cops both
wanted to pretend the other didn't exist. A fight between
vagabonds and gang members. Both of them went to stay
in the shadows. Just how do you follow up with
a witness who could be states away tomorrow? But even still,
if you get shot, you want the police to take
you seriously. On this trip, I was starting to see
(12:57):
the cost of life in the Shadows, that people in
power value your life and wouldn't do a whole lot
to help you protect it. But I had more people
to talk to in train Town, USA, even if Menendez
hadn't heard them. I heard wild stories about hobo life
and Colton, and about the life of Colton himself and Colton.
(13:30):
I kept thinking about Lee and how if he'd been
a high school student instead of a hobo, maybe the
cops would have taken his shooting more seriously. But Colton
has always been a place where the powerful decide who's
in and who's out. Lieutena. Menendez told me during our
ride along that Colton was one of the few places
where the tracks of rival railroads Union Pacific in BNSF crossed.
(13:51):
That made Colton and battleground. Back in eighteen seventy, the
two railroads paid armed security to battle it out at
the spot where the tracks crossed, so Colton was born
in conflict. After my time with Menendez, I stopped by
the San Bernardino Historical Society, a little Victorian near the rails,
to ask their president, Nick Catalbo, how Colton came to be.
(14:12):
I feel like I know you. Starting out, many railroad
towns were just little stopping places along the tracks where
the engine could get more wood and water to continue
on their journey. Those places never amounted too much, but
a place where two railroad tracks crossed. That was a
(14:33):
place where there might be some trouble. This part of
the California Desert isn't much. It's not the beach ball
vision of the Golden State. It's the edge of the
Mojave Desert, an hour east of Los Angeles, a piece
of land that wasn't worth very much to anyone until
the railroad came after the Civil War. The railroads were
the high tech of their time. They could bring the
(14:54):
country together and create a faster, more connected world. At
least that was the hype of the people who ran
the railroad. And just like tech, a lot of money
was made by the founders and a lot of money
was lost by the average joe who wanted in on
the deal. The founding of Colton is a good example
of these schemes. The story in Coulton starts after the
Central Pacific finishes the first transcontinental railroad through the center
(15:17):
of the country, and the race is on to build
another one in the South. In the early eighteen seventies,
Southern Pacific Railroad was running eastbound from Los Angeles, and
their their role was to connect with the eastern lines
as they laid track east across the California Desert. They
sold off the locations of the train stations and rail
(15:37):
yards to the highest bidders. Oh yeah, there's always money
involved somehow, you know, somehow, the railroads, they're working with
the cities and these land speculators, real estate barons. So
Samberdandino was the only city out here. So Sambordino, they
really wanted Southern Pacific to run through their town, and
(15:58):
they had a spot already, really wanted us to happen.
The wealthy landowners of San Bernardino County as Southern Pacific
executive David Daddy Colton, how much it would cost them
to get a train yard. David Colton, an experienced railroad man,
gave them an exact number. They said that they can
work out a deal. If the supporters from Sanardino would
(16:20):
buy a hundred thousand dollars worth of Southern Pacific bonds,
this could happen, but there's still no guarantee that would
actually go into San Fardino. A hundred thousand dollars back
then would be three million today. So that the people
in Sanmardino said no, So they turned down the hundred thousand,
and that's why the Southern Pacific continued on in a
(16:43):
straight route by bypassing this city, and what feels like
a middle finger to San Bernardino, Southern Pacific plunk the
train station down in the dusty clearing just four miles away.
They named it after David Dowdy Colton, who was at
the vice president. So that's how you get Colton. So
Colton was established, Semonino lost out, and thus Colton is
(17:08):
born at the will of the mighty Southern Pacific Railroad
and the cherry on top vice President. David Daddy Colton
never breathed a single breath of that desert air he
died in and the town had already been, uh, you know, established.
But I don't believe he had ever visited his namesake.
(17:31):
Even if he never stepped foot of the town. It's
no coincidence Colton was named after David Daddy. At the time,
he was a big deal in the railroad world. He
was the go to guy for the Big Four, the
corrupt group of Robert Barons who founded the Southern Pacific Railroad.
He might recognize some of their names, especially if you
live in California. Stanford Huntington's Crocker and Hopkins. David Daddy
(17:54):
Colton became so critical to their operations that he was
adopted as the fifth member of the Big Four. At
one time, the Big Four was the Big Five, and
David Colton was the fifth Guy. Stanford historian Richard White
told me about the rise and fall of David Colton.
Colton was a big guy, broad shouldered, with bright red hair,
the kind of bloviator who, after he earned the honorary
(18:15):
title of General, demanded that everyone after that call him
the General. He was an insider, one of the original
lobbyists who spread money around Washington, d C. For the
Big Four. He winded and dying congressman at the Willard
Hotel trying to get them to grant tax breaks or
subsidized construction. And then there were his illegal activities. David Colton,
(18:36):
in fact, was an embezzler and was embezzling money out
in ways that the Big Four were all too familiar with.
They did it to other people, but they didn't do
it to themselves. This is where Colton got greedy. He
broke the cardinal rule of the Big Four. We cheat
other people, we don't cheat each other. David Colton cheated
the Big Four. Once they began looking at the books,
(18:59):
they realized how how much money Colton had taken. They
will um go after Colton. Colton will die. The story
goes that early in October of eight seventy eight, David
Colton's carriage pulled up in front of his mansion on
Knob Hill in San Francisco. He was slimped in the back,
beating nearly to death. The driver said Colton had fallen
(19:21):
off a horse, but it was obvious that no fall
could have done that. And that's not where the Big
Four stopped. They're not gonna let his wife keep it.
They didn't go after his wife, and they pretty much
break his wife, bring the money back in, and David
Colton is going to be expunged from the corporation. After
David Colton died, the Big Four bankrupted his estate, seized
(19:43):
his house, and threw his widow out into the street.
And then one of the biggest of the Big Four,
Collis P. Huntington's, moved into it. You don't mess with
the railroads. Colton tried and paid for it. So David
Colton is a brook even among crooks. He's the proof
of the adage to live outside the law, you must
(20:04):
be honest, at least with each other. That's the man
that Colton, California is named after, a crook betrayed by
his fellow crooks. It maybe honor among thieves and among hoboes,
but apparently not Robber Barrens. I was starting to appreciate
this during my trip to Colton. How once you were
no longer useful, like David Dawdy Colton, he became an outsider,
(20:25):
someone who was powerless and vulnerable. Maybe you chose this position,
or maybe it's thrust upon you, but either way, you're
on your own. The Hoboes and Colton knew this better
than anyone. Maybe my sympathy for this part of hobo
life was convenient timing. As I was learning about what
it meant to be an outsider, I was becoming one myself.
(20:45):
My place in the world suddenly was in free fall.
Seven months after Ruby left, I found out my book
The Single Mom Effect had been rejected after I missed
my first deadline. The book had been knocked around and
landed on the desk of an edit or, my third
who hated single moms. In her rejection, she wrote, You've
(21:06):
wasted a considerable amount of sympathy on the problems of
poor women. And when are these women going to start
accepting responsibility for their unplanned, unwanted children. Okay, got it.
After that rejection, reality set in. When the publisher buys
your manuscript, they advanced you part of the money, and
(21:27):
when they cancel it, they want that money back. Well,
mine was long gone. With that and my credit card bills,
I was circling the financial drain. I was a hundred
and forty dollars in debt. The afternoon I got the rejection.
I sat at my dining room table, looking out at
the view of the lake. I could feel the last
(21:48):
pillars of my identity falling away. I was a writer,
or had been. And I was a mom, and I
used to think I was a pretty good one. And
I was the woman who hosted dinner parties in my
beautiful apartment, but clearly not for much longer. Here in
the dining room, I felt how big institutions, big corporations
(22:08):
could destroy your sense of your value in the world
in one rough move, and the decision could be up
to one person. So who's in and who's out? I
read about this very idea and the single mom effect,
no wonder it got canceled. One of the chapters was
set in a housing project in Oklahoma, and it was
all about surviving as an outsider. The bonds single moms
(22:31):
created there kept them above water and built a stronger community.
If one mom needed money for her electricity bill, she
could get it from one of the other moms, And
if another mom needed some high hill shoes for a date,
she knew who she could borrow them from. Now I
was beginning to see my circumstances as connected to these
savvy single moms and to the bonds that travelers made
(22:52):
on the rails. What came first as outsiders was a
different kind of debt, one they owed to each other
and always assume that depending on other people, not our
financial and legal systems, was a gamble. But I spent
my whole life striving and where had that landed me?
So as I sat at my dining room table, I
almost couldn't believe the thoughts I was entertaining that with
(23:15):
the Hobos and Ruby's friends said about stepping away from
the status quo actually seemed logical. Were you really that
much more at risk when you reject all of that?
All outsider groups have something in common, going against the grain,
surviving despite those are the stories. I've always been drawn to,
the stories of alliances between outsiders, like the single moms
(23:37):
banding together. That same camaraderie exists in the hobo community
and in Colton, I was going to see the extreme
forms that camaraderie could take. Oh. My trips to the
(24:04):
train yards and the conversations I've been having with hobo's
ever since we be left had sucked me into the
city of the rails. But it wasn't until Colton that
I saw its harshest realities. To survive into town like Coulton,
hobo's had to rely on each other for protection. There
was a coat, they made alliances and enforced their values
with vigilante justice. Just having a traveling family and knowing
(24:27):
where the squads were may not be enough to make
it in Colton. Like Richard White said, when you live
outside the law, you have to be honest at least
with each other, and if you're a hobo in a
town like Colton, that honesty takes extreme forms. Well. Sylvia, Yeah,
Sylvia was one of the train hoppers I spoke with
(24:47):
while investigating Colton. I got her number through Lee, the
hobo who got shot near the Colton Yard. Did he
tell you what I'm up to? One of the stories
Sylvia told me about Coulton Stuck with Me showed just
how far hoboes will go to protect each other. Sylvia
described the cold winter night when she and her boyfriend
(25:07):
got off the train at the edge of the West
Colton Yard and immediately started looking for other people at
the usual hobo spots. So we were going down to Rancho.
She's like, smoke coming from underneath the bridge. They needed
a warm place to camp, so they approached from out
of the darkness, trying to get a sense of the situation.
(25:29):
When they saw that smoke, they walked toward it. There's
fire going He stopped, like whatever, sucking homebomb because he
was burning railroad sides underneath the bridge. Sylvia sized him up,
sim he was probably a local burning wood from the
rail yard. But she and her boyfriend were about to
be in another legend of the train world. She was like, hey, guys,
(25:51):
like you guys, just get off. That train comes from
the north and it's like, yeah, what's up, dude. He
was like, watch out, there's some dude or around here
going around killing people, and I was like, yeah, we
don't give a funk, We're just trying to get out
of the rain. Dude. We finally got underneath the bridge
and it's dirty Mike, the same dirty Mike who pulled
(26:12):
a gun in camp before looking for his friend's lost dog.
Mike was testing Sylvia and her boyfriend, but they weren't
the kind of people who scared easily. They passed Mike's test.
Then we introduced ourselves and then we just like lung
out and then like we had like ten bucks to
go get beer, and we bought beer and just hung
(26:33):
out with him. But as they huddled around the fire
with Mike, Sylvia saw that this wild man enforced his
own idea of justice. Sylvia had a terrible cold, and
Mike took matters into his own hands. I was like,
super Ship, I had a really bad fever, and like
he was pissed that my boyfriend at the time went
(26:54):
to paying care of me, and he beat the ship
out of him and then he went and stole, like
day cool Nichael Vick a bunch of ship for me
for me to get better. This was part of the
hobo code. If a man was traveling with a woman
(27:15):
and didn't take care of her. Another writer would remind
him of his responsibilities. You're not going to do that,
but you'll get fucking greenlighted. Green Lighted means the word
got around that you should be beaten or worse on site,
especially if your girl you're like a real fucking like
train writer and like like you did her and like
something bad happened to her, or like she gets great
(27:37):
and you don't stand up for her, like you'll get greenlighted,
like they're gonna like her friends are gonna fuck you up.
Travelers rarely called the cops on each other when something
goes wrong because they can't be certain the cops would
side with them. Maybe they'd all get arrested, so they
police each other. It was as simple as that. Sylvia's
(27:57):
boyfriend wasn't taking care of her, so dirty My showed
him he better change his ways, and the next day
Dirty Might kept looking out for Sylvia. I went to
bed by the fire, woke up about like I don't know,
three or four o'clock. I went and like welu a
sign flying a sign as hobo speak for panhandling. Sylvia
(28:19):
didn't know she was standing on someone else's turf and
tome Bomb comes up and was like, what the funk
are you doing? This is my fucking fly spot. And
I was like, no, dude, like it's my turn fly,
like you weren't here, and he's like, I've been here
ten years, and I was like, I don't get full
long you've been here. I just trying to make enough
for a half gallon or twelve bucks. Got tiger mark
(28:42):
and then I'll be done. Are homeless in the train yard,
many of them older retired hoboes. They defended their turf.
They guy yelling at Sylvia got physical and then he's
like no and grabbed my shine and I was like
you should fucking do that, dude. He's like, you're a
girl by yourself. What the fuck you gonna do about it?
(29:02):
And I was like, oh yeah, motherfucker, and I yelled
dirty Mike's name. She comes growning up. She's the dude
has my sign and you fucking punches them, throws them
over the off ramps. He goes flying down the hill
and then like, I get my sign back and then
(29:24):
we were friends ever since. But surprisingly mossed about that
story outside of a guy getting tossed over an off ramp.
Is just how quickly Mike decides to help Sylvia. She
was a total stranger to him, but just hours after
meeting her, he's stealing meds and fighting a home bum
to protect her. But that helped came with some expectations.
(29:47):
Sylvia told me she knew that she'd need to pay
Mike back. We're all hanging out underneath the bridge, so
I think there was like kind of us underneath Rancho.
We're all just like hanging out. Then Mike had found
out that I do stick and poach, and I had
a bunch of needles and ink on me and he
was like, hey, you should do train tracks on my face.
(30:09):
And I was like, yeah, sure, whatever, I don't care.
And then he was like really like pissed me off
that day, And I really didn't want to do a tattoo,
but Sylvia owed Mike, so she agreed. She took out
her bundle of needles and her pot of ink and
sat down by the fire. So I was just like
pretty much doing a tattoo to hurt him. We're shent
(30:32):
down and he just had his face on my lap,
but I was just tattooing his face to try and
track down a space while from like his eyebrow down
his cheeks. I did that. Even though Sylvia didn't feel
like tattooing this maniac resting his face in her lap,
she knew she had to do it to keep a
good reputation, and reputation was everything in the train hopping community.
(30:56):
Lee told me the same thing. You had to size
each other up, pay each other back, and spread the
word when people didn't do right by you. That's how
we check each other, you know, gossip in storytelling, it's
like how we weed people out. Like, no matter where
you're at on the totem pol, there's gonna be a
different little way that humans are weaning out the worst
(31:17):
of mankind and the good will of man fucking manifest.
Surviving on the edges unsupported by society, you have to
be resourceful. Knows all about this. He's been off the
rails for a while and keeps his distance from the
regular world, meaning he has to support himself in an
unconventional way. Instead of writing, Lee decided he'd strike gold.
(31:41):
That's pretty much the only thing that keeps me off
the rails right now is searching for goal. Zoe and
I met Lee outside a country store in Oroville, Spanish
for gold Town, where he lives in the summer. He
wanted to show me some places most people never see.
We hiked underneath the freeway covered with graffiti and down
a steep hill to a spot where trains cool their
breaks after sending the Sierras. Jonathan Esposito had described this
(32:04):
place to me. Lee was crashing at a friend's place
and spent a lot of summer nights camping out by
the streams where he searched for gold in the old
veins in northern California. In the winter, he head south
mining gold, platinum, and gemstones in the desert out past
Joshua Tree, where he sleeps under his truck in the
heat of the day. There was actually being a hobo
(32:24):
that brought Lee here in the first place, well, hopping
trains and uh coming out to this part of the
country for seasonal work. Started meeting a lot of the
locals out here, and it's just a part of their heritage,
and they shared their culture and their their methods with me.
Lee met old guys mining the public lands in the Sierras,
using the same methods miners from the gold rush did
(32:47):
running water through a sluice and examining the heavy pieces
that sink to the bottom for spects of gold, and
just like hopping a train. Lee started as an apprentice.
It's not too many young people into it. Kind of
a grum field van hobby. Uh Miners don't like talking
to each other all the time. It's kind of a
weird thing. And Lee told me, all the easy gold
(33:07):
is gone, so if he's gonna make enough to get by,
he has to look carefully. I found as much as
like six hundred dollars in a weekend, but sometimes in
a day, you know, it could just be a matter
of sense or a couple of dollars. But it's a
lot of work. What did you call that snowflakes? Or
what I call a fly poop? The really tiny, invisible
(33:29):
gold is the fly poop. But at the end of
the day, that could be your bread and butter. So
I I got to recover the small stuff and the
big stuff. But Lee told me he wasn't frantic about
his yield. From the hours he spent huddled over the sluice,
he could be delighted by even the tiniest speck of
fly poop. He sold the biggest pieces he mind and
melted down the rest to make jewelry. And the thing
(33:51):
I like about Lee is how he sees the world
living this way. Lisie's potential everywhere. It is a lot
of work. It's a process start to finish, and that's
why it's not for everybody. Or that's also why everybody
doesn't know that they're surrounded by gold everywhere, because we're
sitting here right now. It's like we're surrounded by gold.
It's all over. It's just a process to get it out.
(34:13):
You gotta work it out of the ground, you know,
either out of the soil or the wrongs. And Colton
I was beginning to see how the rails changed people,
and sometimes change them in ways that meant they couldn't
come back to regular life. Life on the rails was naked,
not covered by platitudes and promises. To step inside the
train yard is to realign your sense of power and
(34:36):
your sense of honor. I kept thinking about least sleeping
under his truck in the desert. That's how far he
went to stay away from the false promises of life
on our side of the tracks, until the day my
book got canceled I'd been an insider. Now I was
becoming an outsider just like Ruby. But I still wanted
her back. How do you bring an outsider back in
(34:59):
and how do you at them to stay? I had
a chance to find out when Christmas rolled around. Ruby's
father was trying to figure out how to get her
to come home for the holidays. But it was a
logistical crisis. She lost her I D so she couldn't
take a plane or a train. He finabled her an
Amtrak ticket from Houston, but she had already left and
gone to Austin. On top of that, I knew there
(35:22):
was more trouble in Ruby's life on the rails than
she was letting on. Right around Thanksgiving, I found hospital
bills in the mail addressed to Ruby. I ripped one open,
not a bill, but a receipt for medication. I called
a nurse friend to ask about the drugs, strong antibiotics.
Ruby must have had a pretty serious infection, my friend said,
(35:43):
emergency injun carrot A County hospital. This is my first
evidence of Ruby slipping into the cracks. What was going
on with her? My heart sank thinking about just how
hard it was to get someone off the rails. But
if father was able to get her a bus ticket,
and Ruby was taking the Greyhound from Austin to Oakland.
(36:06):
She was coming home for Christmas. This guy knew her,
he was one of the elders in that eighteen Street gig.
And then she's gone. And during that time she became
someone that I didn't know anything. I slept in the
backyard with the dogs, just like being inside. I felt claustrophobic.
Come back here, be here tomorrow night, and I'll have
(36:27):
her here. That's what he said. I'm looking for my daughter.
I walked through the fires at hell. That's next episode
on City of the Rails, said Mocka, just drinking gastle.
(37:07):
Look what you've done. City of the Rails is written
and hosted by me than el Morton and developed in
partnership between Flip Turn Studios and I Heart Podcasts. Have
a Colton story. I think we got it all wrong.
Call in and tell us you might just end up
on the show. The number is seven oh seven six five,
(37:29):
three oh three three nine. And thank you to everyone
who's been calling us. We listened to every message and
they really give us a boost. I want to help
us out. You can do it. Very quickly by leaving
us a rating or review wherever you're listening to. This
will help more people find the show and it means
a lot to us. I want to follow along. Find
us on Instagram at flip turn Pods. Our team is
(37:52):
executive producer and showrunner Julian Weller and executive producer Mark Keeley.
Julian will Always have Colton and the World's Largest Pancake,
Senior producer and editing master abooz Afar and producers Emily
maronof Sina Ozaki and Zoey Denkla, who do not like
the fact that I keep calling them my lady squad. Well,
I've got the microphone, so you're outvoted. The lady squad
(38:14):
knows how tough some of this was to write, and
they were with me every step of the way, battling
it out and keeping the gin in the freezer for
when things got glum. So grateful to you three and
I will never forget you and the production support from
Marcy di Pina. Original music every episode by Aaron Kaufman.
Our theme music is Wayfaring Stranger, performed by Profane Sass.
(38:36):
Thanks to Scott Mischot at Flail Records. Our logo is
by Lucy Quinia and uses a photograph by Mike Brody,
the roving now phoneless photographer and at I Heart thanks
to Nikki Etre and Bethan Macaluso. We'll be back next
week in the days of Christmas past and also the
fires of Hell on City of the Rails.
Host
Danelle Morton
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.