Founded in 1857, Olathe occupied a strategic position on the Santa Fe Trail and, in the era of horsepower, stood a day's journey from Independence, Missouri. As the town's population and commerce grew, a faster connection with Kansas City became necessary. By 1925, automobiles had shortened travel time, but muddy roads still caused trouble, so the paving of Kansas City Road, which followed the Westport route of the old Santa Fe Trail, drew great public excitement. Much of that excitement focused on a bricklaying contest between James Garfield "Indian Jim" Brown and Frank Hoffman of El Dorado. On the morning of September 12, 1925, Brown laid 218 tons of brick, 46,664 bricks in seven hours and forty-eight minutes, in a drizzling rain and won the contest. He received a $200 prize in addition to his regular wages of $2 per hour. Many prominent Olathe citizens laid ceremonial bricks that day alongside Senator Charles Curtis and Governor Ben Paulen. In the afternoon, more than 10,000 people watched a parade of sixty floats celebrating the progress of transportation, and J. C. Nichols, an Olathe native and developer of the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri, spoke about the importance of paved roads to the region's economic development; the trip to Kansas City could now be made in forty minutes. Brown, who was born in upstate New York in 1880 and was a member of the Oneida Indian Nation, had attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where Native American children were uprooted from their families and forced to assimilate and abandon their cultural traditions. An avid football player, he brought strength to laying the eight-pound bricks then in use, and he later laid brick roads in Baldwin, Liberal, and Goodland, Kansas, as well as Pampa, Texas.