One stove and a box of stationery were reserved.

Briggs had in the meantime moved into a dugout built by Oscar Bass, a trapper, which stood near the creek on the west side of the land, about where Jim Overholt's house now stands.  Briggs afterward contested this quarter of land from the town company, an account of which will be given later on.

June 29, 1873, Reed and Briggs got an attorney by the name of J. R. Linville, of Beloit, to come up and dissolve the school bond, but Reed and Briggs always thought he sold them out.  Briggs remained in the mercantile business but a short time.  He contested a part of the townsite that he claimed he bought of the Newells that they refused to relinquish to him.

Mrs. Briggs commenced practicing medicine at once.  Her first patient was W. E. Case, who was sick at Mott Wood's dugout in May, 1873.  In January and February, 1874, Briggs again sold supplies to the Otoe Indians near Dodge City, coming back to Norton about March 1.  In July of that year Briggs contracted with Cook and Simpson to carry the United States mail from Norton to Hays City, and from Norton to Oberlin and return, once a week for $50 a month and "find himself."  Early in the winter he discovered that $50 a month would not buy his horse feed.  At Stockton they took a good mule from his hired man for a $14 board bill.  Briggs froze his feet and was laid up for some time.  No amount of persuasion on the part of Mrs. Briggs would cause him to budge in the direction of saving something out of his "Star Route" contract; he did not even inquire after the mule, but abandoned the whole business.  While he was confined with frozen feet he feed (sic) everybody that came along, until those who fed for a fee called Briggs' dugout "a county poor house."

Mrs. Briggs and Dick Felton were the only guests at the first wedding in this county, Jim Kinyon's.  Their "menu"