About a year or more before we left Keosauqua I had traded off the house I had first purchased in the village for a very beautiful home that had been built by L. J. Rose. It had about a full block of ground well planted with young fruit trees and vines and shrubbery and rose bushes. The house was well located on the hill in the northwest part of the village, and my wife as well as myself had become fondly attached to the place. During our five years of residence we had many friends in the town, and we found it hard to leave them. My wife shed many tears at the thought of leaving the place, but the largest amount that my practice had yielded in any one year whilst in Keosauqua was $800, and I was satisfied that our best interests would be promoted by our new location. The location of the permanent capital of the state at Des Moines, and the fact that our supreme and United States courts would be located there, and that it would necessarily become a railroad center and build up and become one of the chief cities of the state, had attracted many other young men of the profession. Within twelve months before the time I settled in Des Moines probably a dozen well educated, enterprising young lawyers had preceded me. The result was a fierce competition and struggle for business, every young man realizing that it was a question of the survival of the fittest, and that his success depended upon himself. Before arriving in the city I had secured a small house of two rooms and a shed kitchen on Sixth street, at a rental of twenty dollars per month. We moved our goods into this house on Saturday, and on Sunday morning after a light breakfast both my wife and myself went to bed with the ague. The chill was succeeded, of course, by the usual high fever, and in the middle of the afternoon we were delighted by a call from an old acquaintance, a girl that had been raised at Keosauqua and who had married Mr. R. L. Tidrick, of Des Moines. She made us a cup of tea, and we came out of the fever encouraged and contented.
The first two years of my practice in Des Moines were not remunerative. In addition to our earnings we spent $1500 in our living, having saved that amount from the proceeds of the property that we disposed of at Keosauqua.