Arago: Personal Identification Tokens

Owney received this identification tag from William H. Waldron who was a distributing clerk in the Council Bluffs, Iowa post office. The reverse side of the tag has the initials “JR.O.U.A.M.,” indicating that Waldron was a junior member of the United American Mechanics, originally a nativist organization that grew out of the anti-Catholic and anti-foreign labor sentiments of the mid nineteenth century. Council Bluffs, on the Iowa/Nebraska border, had several railway lines running through it. Among those lines were the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; the Chicago, Rock Island, & Pacific; the Omaha & St. Louis; and the Chicago, Milwaukee, & St. Paul.