American flophouses date at least to the 19th century, but the term flophouse itself is only attested from around the early 1900s, originating in hobo slang. In the past, flophouses were sometimes called lodging houses or workingmen's hotels and catered to hobos and transient workers such as seasonal railroad and agriculture workers, or migrant lumberjacks who would travel west during the summer to work and then return to an eastern or midwestern cities which ran along the rail lines, such as Chicago to stay in a flophouse during the winter. This is described in the 1930 novel The Rambling Kid by Charles Ashleigh and the 1976 book The Human Cougar by Lloyd Morain.