The Great Hike: San Francisco to San Diego, September 26 - December 12, 1914, was compiled from notes typed from a small notebook carried by Mary Rantz Schwab on a "Great Hike."

Mary and her husband of two years, Rudolf Schwab, were hoping to do some union work and to discover what working conditions were like. They were active members of the Socialist-Labor Party in San Francisco.

Mary was thirty years old and Rudolf was twenty-nine at the time.