mrs. bradley writes about the early days

"George and I were married in 1878 and George immediately went west to Minnesota, as he had an aunt there who had always urged him to come west. He worked in a drug store there and Gene was born there. In the apartment next to ours lived John Carroll, who was a professor in the schools. He came in evenings urging George to go to Dakota with him. He was appointed postmaster and land agent in De Smet and we decided to go. So they formed a partnership and George was to be assistant postmaster and Deputy Land Agent and have a drug store combined with it all, with the understanding that at the end of a year if George thought he could manage his part alone they would dissolve the partnership. They opened up in a little room joining the Sturgeon Hotel on the south and in two months I joined them, with Gene in my arms.

"At the end of the year George bought the building the Fuller boys had built, the one on the corner where the Mallery Drug Store is, and found it wasn't large enough so George bought it and moved it on the next lot, and moved into it.

"The first Fourth of July we celebrated, the program was in the unfinished store of Fullers and we had a speaker and a quartet, and Mr. Couse and I sang in it.

"Gene would have been the first baby in De Smet, but the railroad camp was at De Smet when we came, and a baby was born in it, and it was a Masters baby. The rails were laid to De Smet and they had turned a box car around and it was the depot, and a big box was the platform. The morning I came Mr. Tinkham was down to the train to meet us, George having gone to Volga to meet me. Mr. Woodsworth was the agent. We came in a box car and sat on a plank across two kegs."
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:42 PM