Forged by "autochthonous" migrant workers, anchored by the railroad and by the possibility of traveling hidden in freight wagons, a whole counterculture developed in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a genuine counter-society equipped with its institutions, their legal knowledge -and above all illegal-, their jargon and their taxonomies: the Hobo culture, the «Hobohemia». With capital in Chicago and extending its range of influence between the Midwest and the West of the United States, an entire army of poor people, who were not lacking in the desire to live and acquire knowledge, organized themselves in a parallel society of the one that scarcely remains some folkloric vestiges and whose autonomy was "annihilated" by the social welfare in the thirties. Although it is not uncommon to see a hobo that sneaks in as a secondary character in cultural products imported from North America, and that Martin Scorsese himself made a more than free adaptation of Boxcar Bertha in his second film (Bertha, the sister of la carretera, 1973), "Hobohemia" is a very little known phenomenon: there are few that to date, in our language, have echoed its strength, its wealth, its roots, its alliances and its subsequent projections. In this text, original 1937, Ben Reitman narrates the life of Bertha Thompson, a woman who was a prostitute, thief, reformer, social worker, revolutionary ... And with the threads of this biography, Reitman draws the ins and outs of the hobo movement, offering us this way both an overview of the whole and an intimate vision, and not without reflection, of the maremgnum of vagabonds, criminals, radicals and revolutionaries who populated the margins of North American society at the beginning of the 20th century.