“A good mayor is useful; a man should not recoil before the good he may be able to do.”—Hugo.

In the Antelope State, on the Big Muddy River, on a plateau rising from the west bank of the river is built the city of Omaha, the metropolis of the State, with a population of 150,000 people. Omaha was called the “Gate City” on account of its important commercial position when it was founded in 1854. It was one of the first to breathe of the mighty progress of civilization in our great West; and, like all of our growing Western cities, is eminently an industrial center—meat packing, breweries, smelters, machine shops, brick yards,—and it is an important railway center. Because of all of this, it continually beckons through its portals a vast number of the army of the seekers after work. Omaha, too, boasts of its culture and humanity, and of a social distinction around which cluster names which in the years to come will be intimately connected with the history of the country.

I reached Omaha on a Sunday morning in September. What a gloomy day for the penniless toiler this God’s day is, in the great city, when unwashed, unfed, and homeless, he walks the streets! All places for obtaining work are closed and he can simply drift until Monday morning, when industrial activity is resumed.

I found the city of Omaha spending thousands of dollars for the entertainment and amusement of visitors to the annual convention of a great fraternal organization. While its stores and blocks and public buildings had been placed on dress parade with gaudy decorations, and while the glad hand of hospitality was stretched out to these guests from thousands of its citizens, there was no welcome for the honest laborer who might happen to be homeless and penniless within its gates, and no provision for him but the filthy concrete floor of the huge steel cages, beneath the crumbling plastered walls of the city jail.

I walked down the darker streets in the lower part of the city where the out-of-work are forced to gather. In Boston I thought I had never seen such a gathering of human misery as I found on Boston Common, but nowhere have I found that condition so evident in a smaller way than in Omaha.

Approaching a policeman, I asked for the public baths. It was my first test to find out what our Western cities were doing to provide that great sanitary necessity. I was told there was “nothing doing,” and the policeman glanced significantly towards the “Big Muddy.” I do not know of a single public bath west of Chicago except in Denver.

I then decided to try for the first time the Young Men’s Christian Association, which poses as an institution assisting those needing help, and which is supported by benevolently inclined contributors and its income enhanced in the same way. When I applied at the Omaha Y. M. C. A. for a free bed and bath, a most affable, well-dressed, neat-looking clerk behind the desk assured me nothing would give him greater pleasure than to accommodate me, but their beds and rooms were fixed up “pretty nicely,” in fact, too nicely to be given away. Then I asked for a bath, and he assured me that was a member’s privilege only.

I then sought the Salvation Army. My answer there was to the effect that if they gave fellows like me free beds they would be overrun every night.

Next I went to the Union Gospel Mission on Douglas Street. The door to the lodging house upstairs was locked. Downstairs a gospel meeting was being held. I waited until the meeting was concluded. The dormitory was not open, there were bright lights there, and people were going to their beds. I approached the attendant, who was closing the door, and asked him if he would give me a bed. He kept right on closing the door in my face, meanwhile saying that he wished that he had a free bed himself, that he slept in the street when he hadn’t “the price.”

I then applied to members of the Volunteers of America. They could do nothing for me as they had no lodging house, but thought I might find shelter at the City Mission. I went there and found the place locked and dark. It was a reception about as cordial as that which I received once at Genoa where I went to visit the birthplace of Columbus. After standing on tiptoe reaching up and ringing the bell of that curious house for about five minutes a barber stepped out of the house next door and said in a mixture of Italian and broken English: “Eh, Miestro Colombo, eh not-a-to-home. No ring-a-de bell so damn-a loud. Miestro Colombo eh dead, all a-right dead,—yes-a-four hundred years!”

Later with two or three other “down and outs,” I lay down on the grass in Jefferson Park. Very soon a policeman came along and drove us out. “How many times have I got to tell you fellows to get out of here? Now, get out of here!”

A short time afterward I met another policeman and asked him where I could get a free bed, telling him I was broke. He looked at me rather savagely and said, “You can’t get nothing like that in this town.” Then he added, “You might go to the city jail, but it is chock full now that the car strike is on.”

By this time it was midnight. From down in the lower part of the city I saw a man standing listlessly on the curbing. In a moment he sat down. I strolled along and sat down beside him. He was penniless, starving, had eaten nothing since morning, and had no place to rest, but he was not hopeless. In fact, he was in a rather happy mood, for he had a place to work ten miles out in the country, on a farm for one dollar and a half a day and board, and if he made good it would be an all winter job. Soon after daybreak he was going to start out. When I told him I, too, was without a place to sleep, he told me I was welcome to his blankets which he had down in an old shed under the tracks where the owner had let him spread them down the night before. He doubted, however, whether I could stand it.

“I tried it last night, but if there was one I believe there were ten thousand rats infesting the place. I was fearful of losing myself for one minute for fear they might attack me, and so I spent the night just as I am spending this one. The farmer did not want me to come out until Monday morning, although I wanted to go out Saturday with him when he hired me.”

Thoroughly tired out, I bade my hopeful midnight acquaintance good-night, and sought my hotel. As I lay in my comfortable bed I thought of the homeless, moneyless ones who belonged to Omaha that night and who were shelterless and hungry. The next day I visited the City Jail. There I found eight ten-by-ten cells, the bull-pens. Crowded into a single one of these, I counted fourteen men. The shocking closeness of the place was stifling, and I hurried out.

I saw, far up the street, a great mob pressing down, and as soon as I got within hearing and seeing distance, I made out two men driving a team of horses hitched to an old wagon partly filled with potatoes. The men were driving directly down the car track, hindering the traffic of the cars. Two policemen stood back of these men trying to get hold of the lines, and they were beating them or trying to beat them into insensibility. The men’s shirts were torn into shreds and the blood ran down over their faces and over their clothes to the bottom of the wagon. I did not find what the trouble was about, but it was as though I had caught a leaf from those other days of social unrest, when the poor of France cried for bread, and the thoughtless paid so dearly for their folly.

There was no place for a homeless man in Omaha that night—not even in the city jail. A strike was on.