A series of first-person narratives recounts an eighteen-month experiment of living and earning as an unskilled day laborer while traveling from the Northeast to the Pacific. Episodes portray encounters with fellow itinerants, railway and farm hands, and boarding-house life, detailing routines, hardships, and local characters met along the way. Vignettes alternate descriptions of specific occupations such as section-hands and burro-punchers with impressions of poverty, hospitality, and the practicalities of transient work. The work combines observational detail and personal reflection to sketch labor conditions and popular habits of the late nineteenth-century working class.