“The Floating Army”: Transient Labor in Early 20th Century California

Mark Walker
Anthropological Studies Center
Sonoma State University
Rohnert Park, CA

ABSTRACT

The landscape of much of rural California is the product of transient and migrant seasonal
workers. Rootless, undocumented, and possessing very few personal possessions, this
workforce presents problems for both historians and archaeologists. Most of our historical
information derives from periods of labor unrest, when transient labor was perceived as a social
problem that needed study and adjustment. Our archaeological information comes primarily
from the study of work camps in CRM projects. Focusing on the aftermath of the labor violence
of the 1910s, this paper discusses work camps as the outcome of changing management
ideologies and argues for the need to consider work camps as simply one point in the broader
landscapes constituted by the flows of transient labor.
 “The Floating Army”: Transient Labor in Early 20th Century California

Introduction: Transient Labor as a Historical Question

This paper is an attempt to come to grips with the issue of unskilled transient labor in the
American West, specifically California. The demographic makeup of California today is largely
the product of the need for cheap labor, drawing as it did on waves of immigration from China,
Japan, India, the Philippines, Europe, the mid-western and southwestern U.S., Mexico, and
Central America. Through their labor on road and railroad construction, irrigation and
hydroelectric projects, and in agriculture, logging, and mining, it was this class of workers that
was instrumental in building the landscape of the modern West, a class of workers that is
largely invisible in dominant memories of the American West today.

A little while back I did some work on different forms of labor organization among railroad
workers in West Oakland (Walker 2004). More recently I had the opportunity to work on two
research designs for work camps in California. One was as part of a team working on a
statewide research design for work camps for the California Department of Transportation
(HARD 2007). The other was for the El Dorado Irrigation District, doing a research design for
construction camps from the 1922 rehabilitation of the hydroelectric system by the Western
States Gas and Electric Company (Walker et al. 2007). While I focus on work camps, using the
El Dorado camps as an example, it is important to stress an underlying continuity between the
urban railroad laborers in Oakland and rural laborers in the camps. This is that they may well
have been the same people, or at least the same sort of people—the transient working class,
what one early 20th-century observer referred to as "the floating army" (Mills in Woirol 1992).

The urban Bay Area workforce was noticeably divided between a relatively powerful and
privileged class of workers, who were white and had a monopoly of skill, and the majority of
workers who were unskilled and moved for job to job, having little more to sell than their
strength. Historian Carlos Schwantes summarized this division in the West Coast working-
class as the "Home Guard" and "Bindlestiffs". In his words

The home guards put down roots, raised families, and, if unionized, after the 1880s accepted
to some degree the conservative outlook of the American Federation of Labor or the railway
brotherhoods. From their enclaves, on the other hand, the mobile, industry-rather-than-craft
oriented bindlestiffs nurtured a tradition of all-inclusive unionism and a spirit of militance
that extended from the Knights of Labor in the 1880s to the radical Industrial Workers of the
World three decades later. (Schwantes 1987:44)

A central historical question is the distinction between skilled workers and unskilled laborers—
Schwantes' "homeguard and bindlestiffs." It is difficult to understand US labor history without
understanding this distinction. In California for example, the reluctance of the AFL to organize
unskilled workers opened the way for more radical organizations that advocated industrial
organization, such as the International Workers of the World (IWW) in the 1910s and the
communist Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union in the 1930s (Mitchell 1998:61).

Walker 1 SHA 2008

It is the struggles of industrial unions organizing unskilled and transient workers that provide
the defining moments of California's labor history.

In our Oakland work there was no problem identifying the relatively privileged craft unionized
workers. They had stable households with long occupations. They showed up in the census, in
the city directories, and they left rich archaeological deposits. The problem was identifying the
so-called bindlestiffs. The few laborers we could identify, we were lucky to get. We certainly
had more than we could reliably identify, but they were buried in the mixed deposits of hotels
and boarding houses, in "the landscape of lodging." However, these were the majority of the
workers in the railroad industry and most of them would not have worked full-time in that
industry.

A feature of California's economy in the late 19th and early 20th century was that every one of
its dominant industries— agriculture, lumber, railroad construction, fishing, mining—was
highly seasonal, with peak employment in summer and autumn, and minimal opportunities in
winter and spring (Parker 1915; Walsh and Manly 1916; Street 2004:533). The predominance of
seasonal labor intensive work in regions with little infrastructure or amenities makes work
camps an important, perhaps defining, feature of the landscape of California's laboring class
(Figure 2).

Schwantes conceptualized a Western wageworkers' frontier, part of the geography of which

was "temporary communities of migratory muscle, represented by men who harvested grain
and produce or graded new railway lines and then dispersed only to recollect on other jobs or
to winter in the cheap hotels, soup kitchens, bars, socialist clubs, and hiring halls of the West's
larger cities" Schwantes 1987:42).

Difficulties in Studying Transient Labor

It is very hard to imagine the history of California without the history of unskilled, transient,
and migrant labor, but often it seems that imagination is all we have to go on. We know they
were there, but how do we study them? The central problems are practical ones. Part of the
difficulty in characterizing transient labor lies in the nature of the labor itself, another in the
nature of our studies.

The diversity and complexity of industrial enterprises demands a vertical specialization among
historians and archaeologists. We study the mining industry, the timber industry, or
agriculture. Miners were miners, loggers were loggers, and farmworkers were farmworkers.
But we need to acknowledge that there was a large class of workers that moved freely between
industries.

We tend to regard large-scale mobility in search of work as a pretty recent phenomenon. But it
was a regular feature of US working class life, particularly in the West. For example, a visitor to
the Pacific Northwest observed in 1884 that "the people of the Pacific coast are strangely
nomadic--a fact especially true of the unmarried. You can hardly enter into conversation with a

Walker 2 SHA 2008

working-man who can not give you some account of almost any settled district west of the
Rocky Mountains, often including the Sandwich Islands, Australia, and the Chinese ports"
(Schwantes 1987: 46). Records compiled during World War I (Mitchell 1996:61) show that many
white male workers migrated between the agricultural harvests of California, the lumber camps
of the Pacific Northwest, and the copper mines of Alaska. Many others moved over a seasonal
or longer-term pattern between the agricultural, mining, construction, and lumber camps of
California, or coupled crop work in California with stints in munitions factories in Iowa, grain
harvests in the Dakotas, and mining in the Rockies.

Certainly most industries did have a specialized core of skilled workers who worked steadily in
that industry. But these were usually not the only workers in that industry. But the historical
record is biased towards these workers. It is the skilled "home guard" workers who
predominate in the documentary record and in the oral histories of the industries. With oral
histories, it is the privileged workers and the supervisory personnel who will be identified as
potential narrators. In studies of any single industry, the laborers appear as shadowy
unimportant figures. They, being unskilled, contribute nothing to the industry beyond their
muscle. We cannot understand transient labor until we start looking across different industries.

This is not to say that we ignore conditions in particular industries. Quite the reverse. For
example, while the division between skilled and unskilled workers is a paramount historical
question, it is a question that has very little meaning if one does not understand the contexts
within which "skilled" and "unskilled" are defined. The distinction between skilled and
unskilled is not something that can be slapped down on any convenient set of household
features--not without considering the relations of productions within which each of those
households was enmeshed.

The sources historians use for demographic information, such as the census, are of limited use
in reconstructing the make-up of a population that was moving from place to place, job to job,
and industry to industry, often within the space of a few days and often on a national or even
international scale. There has been little detailed study of transient workers simply because
tracking their lives and their movements is enormously difficult (Peck 2000:2; Higbie 2003).
Obviously the ongoing digitization of census and other historical records, with the capacity to
search databases on a national scale is going to be a huge step forward in forming a picture of
the trajectory of these workers' lives. But even then transient workers leave a very faint
documentary and archaeological footprint. If you are not looking for them, you probably will
not see them.

When we do have solid historical documentation of these workers, it is from when they became
perceived as a social problem. For example the state and national reactions to the 1914
Wheatland Riot, Kelley's Army, and the expansion of the IWW, and a host of other labor
struggles provide us with an important series of documents and testimonies from the 1910s as
investigators sought to diagnose the reason for these social tensions. Likewise the internal
migration of tenant farmers from southern Western states during the 1930s also sparked a series

Walker 3 SHA 2008

of investigations. But otherwise, as long as they were there when needed, and gone when not,
unskilled workers were an object of little interest and thus little documented.

Work Camps

Archaeologically one place we can find these workers is in work camp sites. The kind of jobs
that entailed work camps were generally seasonal, temporary, and labor intensive, with the
industries dependent on a common pool of cheap, temporary, and highly mobile labor.

Work camps--transient workers' summer and fall residences--are part of a continuum of

temporary wageworkers settlements anchored in formal company towns at one end and
Hoovervilles and hobo jungles at the other. Depending on specific conditions a work camp in
the1920s might be a formally laid-out settlement on company land with most, if not all, the
amenities (Figure 3); in the 1930s it might be an informal auto camp on wasteland along an
irrigation ditch; or in 2007 an encampment hidden from official eyes, part of the underground
economy of undocumented immigration and labor (Figure 4).

Regardless of the importance of work camps as a source of information on transient workers, it

is important to remember that these camps represent only a snapshot of workers at a particular
point in time and under a particular set of circumstances. Generalizing from work camps to
other, broader, social relations needs to be done with caution and bearing the broader context of
transient labor in mind. For example, similar diet and living conditions among supervisors and
casual labor in temporary work camps does not translate to egalitarian social relations in the
corporation or industry as a whole. For professional and supervisory workers the work camp
was a period of roughing it; for other workers it was a period of steady work and high living.
Similar conditions means very different things for different classes.

El Dorado Example

The El Dorado Hydroelectric Project (Project 184) along the South Fork of the American River
(Figure 5), now owned and operated by the El Dorado Irrigation District, was built by Western
States Gas & Electric Company (WSGEC) between 1922 and 1924. It consisted of several high-
mountain reservoirs, an intake dam, a 22-mile-long canal terminating at a forebay reservoir,
then a wood-stave pipe and steel penstock leading to a powerhouse below Pollock Pines on the
South Fork of the American River (Figure 6). This water development covers a vast area from
high in the mountains above 8,000 ft. in elevation, spreads across four counties, down to the
powerhouse elevation 1,900 feet. To complete this massive construction project, Western States
employed some 2,000 men, the majority of whom were housed in temporary construction
camps along the 40 miles from between the powerhouse at the lower end of the system and
Caples Lake (formerly Twin Lakes) at the upper end. The El Dorado Hydroelectric system is
one example of dozens of similar high-head hydroelectric plants in the Sierra Nevada that were
built during the 1920s, a period of rapid growth in the electrical industry in California.

Walker 4 SHA 2008

Several trends should be considered for the study of the 1922 construction camps. The 1920s
were, other than a brief but very sharp recession after WWI, a period of economic expansion, at
least until 1929, and for many workers a time of steady work and rising real wages. The labor
market was relatively tight, in part due to the expanding economy, but also because of the
passage of the restrictive 1917 Immigration Act.

It was also a time of relative industrial peace compared to the previous decade. The IWW had
been suppressed, by both legal and extralegal means, and there was an overall decline in union
membership. The 1920s thus appear as a kind of lull in American labor history, a quiet spot
between the industrial violence of the 1910s and the industrial violence of the 1930s. A third
factor to consider was the impact of earlier Progressive-era investigations and reforms,
particularly those of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing (CCIH), which
was established in the aftermath of the 1914 Wheatland Hop Riot and other labor disturbances
among transient workers (Mitchell 1996).

The CCIH reformers had an explicit program. They interpreted labor violence on the part of
seasonal workers as the result of pathologies brought on by unhealthy environments.
Reforming these environments would eliminate the source of the pathologies and thus
eliminate strikes and other forms of labor agitation (Mitchell 1996:51). The CCIH produced a set
of standardized work camp plans (CCIH 1919, Figure 7), in essence commencing a program of
environmental fixes to the places that produced psychological disturbances.

An important part of the CCIH program was reforming the camps so that they conformed to an
"American standard of living." This was intended to assimilate some nationalities while driving
out others, such as the Japanese. In discussing one agricultural camp in southern California, the
investigator noted that:

It is worth the trip to Guasti to see just how some of the Mexican families can be elevated ...
the kitchens of this new camp are piped for gas. ..I assure you that it was a pleasure for me
to look into these Mexican kitchens and see the Mexican women instead of being smoked
out with an old Dutch oven, standing by gas stoves like noble Anglo-Saxons. (Mitchell
1996:105)

The material improvements described here, such as piped gas, went beyond being simple
amenities to make their workers' lives easier, but were bound up with racial ideologies and
strategies for assimilating immigrant populations into a middle class idea of the American way
of life.

This provides some of the ideological setting for the EID work camps. The camps had a
standardized array of support structures—a kitchen, mess hall, bath house, store house, and
meat house. Water was provided from tanks, as was oil and gas. Every camp had formal toilet
facilities (Figure 8).

Walker 5 SHA 2008

The tents were on raised wooden platforms and had wooden sides (Figure 9). Where the slope
was severe, flats and terraces were constructed with retaining walls. Bedding within the tents
appears to have consisted of steel cots. The cookhouses were relatively substantial frame
buildings with well-equipped kitchens (Figure 10). Unsurprisingly the associated refrigerated
meat houses also had a substantial construction, which would be necessary for insulation. All
in all, compared to conditions in many camps, especially in the previous decades, these camps
were really pretty nice.

It is very easy to take these photos and plans at their face value, but we do need to think about
why they were taken and what they were intended to represent. There is no clutter, there are
no stains on anything, and there are no people. These photos are intended to convey an orderly
and sanitary picture of the camps, which is not to say the camps weren't (they most probably
were) but these are idealized depictions. Once things really got going I doubt the camps
looked anything like this.

There is little information on the workforce itself. There is a general feeling among
archaeologists that workers on hydroelectric projects tended to be more European and
American than in other rural industries. I am not quite sure what the evidence for this is. It
may well be the case, but if so it poses an interesting problem. One certainly has to be careful as
to how the workforce was being represented in contemporary media. Casual labor was
considered a dangerous class of men. Large employers of casual labor were very conscious that
this cast their enterprises in a somewhat negative light, especially in nearby communities.
Sometimes employers dealt with this by being selective about how they described their work
forces. For example, even as itinerant hop pickers were engaging in gun battles with sheriff's
deputies, that work force was being described as primarily families having a paid holiday in the
country. The anticipated construction effort of Western States project brought forth the
announcement that

Scores of students enrolled at Stanford or the University of California are applying for jobs
during vacation with the Western States Gas & Electric Company on construction work in
this county. It is an encouraging sign when young men attending college show a
willingness to work with pick and shovel on development work in the mountains rather
than loaf about the cities or seaside resorts waiting for a kid glove job (The Mountain
Democrat, June 7, 1922.
Again, not unlikely, but the average worker on this project was probably not faced with the
choice between loafing around seaside resorts or greasing steamshovels at 8000 ft at 6 o'clock in
the morning. In fact, an oral history taken from an engineer on the project (McLean 1993) noted
that most of the hiring was done through a labor contractor in Sacramento, the notorious
Murray and Ready Employment Agents, who were featured in both Jack London's letters and
Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. The use of this firm strongly indicates that Western States was
drawing on the same pool as agricultural labor. If the laborers were any more American or
European than any other rural industry, then this is a thing that needs to be explained, rather
than just accepted.

Walker 6 SHA 2008

Labor relations also take some teasing out. One oral history gave the impression that unionism
was strong on the project, with the operating engineers, the electricians, the carpenters, and the
riggers all having unions. But another noted that the company used spies to catch organizers,
describing an incident at one camp where the workmen asked to see one such spy's “red card”
(the membership card of the IWW) and informed him that nobody worked at that camp unless
they had such a card. The company immediately fired nearly the entire camp (Shoup 1990:29).
On the surface these accounts may appear contradictory—one portraying Western States as
union, and the other as anti-union. But once we consider that there are two types of unionism
involved then the accounts are consistent. It is most probable that there was an
accommodation between Western States and the traditional craft unions, while the IWW
remained feared. Certain workers could be unionized, other workers could not.
In conclusion, work camps are not, at first glance, the most appealing sites. With little presence
in the historical record and a nondescript material culture, the inhabitants of work camps can
appear as an undifferentiated conglomerate mass. The camps themselves are often designed,
reflecting neither the culture nor ethnicity of the inhabitants (or other such much-beloved
topics much), but the cost efficiencies and paternalistic concerns of corporate engineering
departments. Understanding the lives of the workers rather than simply the interests of the
corporation means introducing ideas of power and struggle. In the case of work camps this
boils down to the dialectic between "power over" and "power to;" the power over others' lives
and the power to control one's own life. The power of work camp operators is formal,
institutional, and easily documented. The power of the workers in the camp is informal,
heterogeneous, and rarely documented, unless it should erupt into large labor actions.
Employers' interests are the most obvious element in work camp design. But even these
interests are the outcome of class relations, as employers designed the camps in response to
episodes of labor strife or in response to legislation, which is also often also the result of labor
strife. And their employees react to, adapt to, and alter those designs.
Archaeology doesn't exactly gallop to the rescue when it comes to the study of migrant and
transient labor. When it comes to the study of people who don't have a lot of things, we are sort
of at a loss. But by understanding that work camps are sites of struggle, and that these
struggles have material components, we can make an important contribution to labor history.

References Cited

California Commission of Immigration and Housing (CCIH). 1919. Advisory Pamphlet on

Sanitation and Housing (Revised, 1919). San Francisco, CA: California Commission of
Immigration and Housing.

Historic Archaeology Research Design (HARD) Work Camps Team. 2007. Work Camps: Historic
Context and Archaeological Research Design. June 2007 Draft. Prepared for Anmarie Medin,
Caltrans, Sacramento

Walker 7 SHA 2008

Higbie, F.T. 2003. Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest,
1880-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

McLean, Walter R. 1993. "From Pardee to Buckhorn: Water Resources Engineering and Water Policy
in the East Bay Municipal Utility District, 1927-1991," an oral history conducted in 1991 by
Ann Lage.. Berkeley, CA: Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University
of California.

Mitchell, D. 1996. The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.

The Mountain Democrat. 1922. No title. The Mountain Democrat, June 17.

Parker, C.H. 1915. The California Casual and His Revolt. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 30,
no. 1 (November): 110-126.

Peck, G. 2000. Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West,
1880-1830. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press.

Schwantes, C.A. 1987. The Concept of the Wageworkers' Frontier: A Framework for Future
Research. The Western Historical Quarterly 18, no. 1: 39-55.

Shoup, L. 1990.Historical Overview and Significance Evaluation of the El Dorado Canal, El Dorado
County, California, Volume 1. Prepared for Pacific Gas & Electric Company.

Street, R.S. 2004. Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913.
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Walker, Mark. 2004. Aristocracies of Labor: Craft Unionism, Immigration, and Working-Class
Households. In Putting the "There" There: Historical Archaeologies of West Oakland: I-
880 Cypress Freeway Replacement Project, ed. Mary Praetzellis and Adrian Praetzellis.
Prepared by the Anthropological Studies Center, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park,
CA, for California Department of Transportation, Oakland CA.

Walker, Mark, Heidi Koenig, and Elaine Maryse Solari. 2007. Cultural Resources Research
Design: FERC Project 184 Hydroelectric Construction Camps, El Dorado County,
California. Prepared for Trish Fernandez, El Dorado Irrigation District, Placerville,
California.

Walsh, F.P., and B.M. Manly. 1916. Industrial Relations: Final Report and Testimony: Submitted to
Congress by the Commission on Industrial Relations. Vol. V. Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office.

Walker 8 SHA 2008

Woirol, G.R. 1992. In the Floating Army: F.C. Mills on Itinerant Life in California, 1914. Urbana,
Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research on the El Dorado work camps was conducted for the El Dorado Irrigation District.
Trish Fernandez, archaeologist for the District, oversaw the project and conducted much of the
research on the camps.

Walker 9 SHA 2008

 Figure 1: Chinese worker on the Central Pacific Railroad

Figure 2: Logging camp, no date

Walker 10 SHA 2008

 Figure 3: Camp B, Western States Gas & Electric, El Dorado County 1922 (courtesy El Dorado Irrigation
District)

Figure 4: 1930s pea-picker camp, Nipomo, California

Walker 11 SHA 2008

 Figure 5: Project location

Figure 6: Project 184

Walker 12 SHA 2008

 Figure 7: CCIH plan (CCIH 1919:7)

Figure 8: Camps G and P construction camps, Western States Gas & Electric, El Dorado County 1922
(courtesy El Dorado Irrigation District)

Walker 13 SHA 2008

 Figure 9: Camp B, tents and woodstave pipe, Western States Gas & Electric, El Dorado County 1922
(courtesy El Dorado Irrigation District)

Figure 10: Camp G kitchen, Western States Gas &Electric, El Dorado County 1922 (courtesy El Dorado
Irrigation District)

Walker 14 SHA 2008