20 Hattie Plum Williams 
abandoned them to their own interests. For years the city dumped 
its garbage into the front yards of the south settlement, and 
when a protest finally arose it philanthropically transferred its 
refuse to the back yards of the north settlement. The word 
“dump” is a common one in the vocabulary of every Russian 
German child in the settlements. ‘To those on the south side, it 
signifies a long high ridge partially overgrown with grass, form- 
ing a vantage ground on which to play, and sometimes yielding 
up rich treasures in the form of marbles, broken bits of pottery 
or brass, and discarded articles of small furniture.* To the 
child in the north settlement it means richer discoveries, for the 
dump has not yet been picked over; but it also means sickening 
odors when the breeze drives the smell of decaying garbage into 
his home, particularly if the wind changes while the dump is 
being “burned.” <A little kindergartner, when asked by his 
teacher to draw a picture of his front yard, covered an otherwise 
fairly clean sheet of paper with a great black spot and called it 
the “dump.” This conception represents the growing conviction 
of a large part of the community that our system of garbage dis- 
posal is a great blot on a moderately clean and well-ordered city. 
For many years a sewer discharged its contents into a natural 
depression on the edge of the south settlement, although at present 
it is the policy of the city to extend all such pipes to the creek. 
These “sinks” now furnish skating ponds for the children in 
winter, and in summer breeding places for amoebae and other 
zoological specimens over which dignified professors stoop gin- 
gerly, hurriedly gather their prey, and hasten back to their 
laboratories. For many years, also, the city discharged its human 
sewage in the same vicinity, and until 1909 the red-light district 
cut off the south settlement from the business portion of the 
Citys 
18 Just recently several new “dumps” for rubbish alone have been 
started on the edges of the south settlement. For a number of years an 
effort has been made to get the city to adopt scientific measures to handle 
the garbage problem, and in May, 1915, a bond issue of fifty thousand 
dollars was voted for the establishment of a garbage disposal plant, but a 
year has passed without anything definite being accomplished. 
14Tn 1909 the county attorney enforced the law against these “ houses,” 
146 
