During the time that Harry Partch rode the rails and then transformed those trips into musical form, American perception of the hobo was shifting once more. Through the late 1930s and early 1940s nostalgia grew for pre-Depression hoboes in response to the situation brewing with migrants and transients on the West Coast. This transition can best be seen in the 1940 New York Times Magazine article “That Vanishing American, the Hobo.” The article opens with the stark observation that the hobo population had fallen from a high of a million and a half in the late 1920s to 25,000. Author Lawrence Stessin then wistfully worries over these numbers while foreseeing a future in which the hobo joins the American Indian as a vanishing people. Although Stessin views the new reliance on well-paid regular labor as a positive advance in American society, his article—printed in a prominent East Coast publication—reveals a striking change to the attitudes of even ten years earlier. Hoboes were no longer just freedom-seeking wanderers at odds with industrial society; now they were iconic figures of the Old West, new archetypes in the American psyche. No wonder Harry Partch began to highlight his time on the road as hobo: as the Dust Bowl migrant came to take the hobo's place as the most feared and despised Western figure, he naturally wished to control his persona and history and show them in the most acceptable and profitable light.