A saddle tramp is a person who wanders from place to place on horseback, often doing odd jobs, then moving on.
The earliest known use of the term was in the 1922 Fort Wayne (Indiana) Journal-Gazette, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. [1] It was distinct from nomadic cowboy, an itinerant who worked with cattle.
One of the most famous saddle tramps was a woman: Mesannie Wilkins, a 63-year-old farmer who made national headlines in the mid-1950s by traveling thousands of miles from Maine to California by horseback.
In 1936, students at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, founded the spirit and sports-boosting club Saddle Tramps. Tech student Arch Lamb said he chose the name from stories of traveling men who would come to a farm for a brief time, fix up some things, and move on. [2]
In modern times, "saddle tramp" can refer to a biker. In 2016, Corey Baum from the band Croy and the Boys said, "I doesn’t matter if he’s on a horse or a Honda." [3]
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