
Hello and welcome to Civil War Stories. I'm your host, Steve Matthews. Today we're going to explore a fascinating and often overlooked consequence of the American Civil War - how the conflict's end gave birth to one of America's most enduring cultural phenomena: the hobo. So settle in as we journey from the battlefields of 1865 to the railroad tracks of the Gilded Age, where hundreds of thousands of Civil War veterans found themselves riding the rails in search of work, home, and meaning in a rapidly changing America.