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FIRST STONE ERECTED IN NEBRASKA TO MARK THE OVERLAND TRAIL AND FAMOUS U. S. ARMY HEROES

Courtesy Union Pacific Historical Museum

UNION PACIFIC EXCURSION TRAIN, 1866, AT 100TH MERIDIAN. LOCATED AT POINT 14.7 FEET EAST OF EAST FACE OF PRESENT DEPOT AT COZAD. NEBR.

Then coming up from the flats, pause midway on another viaduct and look down. Here are not switching yards but the dwellings of Mexican laborers—houses in adobé bricks with little yards and the usual assortment of children and puppy dogs and chickens. If you have ever visited a truly Mexican suburb for day labor of the unskilled sort, you know the smells are almost as variegated as the mosaic of colors but by no means so lovely. They assail you in a hot blast of anything but perfume. Look down on these Mexican workers’ dwellings—yards clean as a good kitchen floor, children in clean bright multicolored calicoes; no pulque drunks; no poverty. Kansas City does not entrust the Americanizing of her foreign unskilled labor to study-chair theory. She sends down either as public school teacher, or social settlement worker, or deaconess, or nun—according to the dwellers’ religion—someone to train these foreigners into American citizens; and of foreigners as foreigners, Kansas City today numbers less than eight per cent. The rest of her population has in a generation been so completely absorbed in American types, it cannot be distinguished from the home born and home bred type.