George Beahan Daly

George never forgot the thrill of hearing the steamboat coming and in later life he often mentioned his life on the Mississippi when he heard the steamboat whistle that the trains used.

During the election campaign of 1860 when George was eight years old, he heard people say that if Lincoln were elected it would mean there would be war; later when he heard that Lincoln was elected he went out behind the woodpile and cried.

In the first legislature of South Dakota in 1891, and again in 1897, George was a representative. A friend of his, Herbert Cronin, said of him: “He was a politician in the best sense of the word, not merely to secure office but to advance the ideas and reforms which he believed to the advantage of all.”

About the year 1905 George bought the Pioneer Sentinel, a weekly newspaper in Aberdeen, changed the name to the Aberdeen Democrat and edited it for several years, staying in town through the week and going home weekends. His son Francis worked with him for a year or two. Searle Brothers finally bought the paper and George went back to the farm. Shortly after that he began teaching the home school. A great reader, he saw to it that his family were always well supplied with worthwhile reading material and while he ran the paper, he would bring home books from the library. He read many books aloud to the family in the evenings. He liked poetry and wrote poems. Some were published in Pasque Petals and in Braithwaite’s Anthology of American Poetry. The last years of his life he was telling, in poetry, the story of the pioneering of his great-grandparents, George and Polly Faussett. His eyesight failed him and he never finished it.