He also acted as a real estate, loan and collection agent, and was later elected to one term as mayor of Omaha, Nebraska, USA.

He spent seventeen years as his cousin George Francis Train's private secretary and traveled around the world with him.

[3] On returning to Omaha, Bemis worked as a real estate agent throughout the city, selling lots in the Credit Foncier Addition and focusing on his own subdivision.

Bemis' wife, Julia Browne, was a lifelong suffragist who had worked on Susan B. Anthony's paper, The Revolution.

[4] In the early twentieth century, Bemis offered to send $100,000 to the federal government in order to keep the activist Emmeline Pankhurst from being deported in 1913.