When Beard was three years old, his family moved to Missouri where he worked in a saw mill at age 12. At age 17, he moved to Wildwood, Florida and worked on laying the tracks for the Seaboard extension of the Florida Central and Peninsular Railroad, but he did not settle there until later. In 1898, he claimed to be fighting in Cuba in the Spanish–American War and after the war he worked as a farmer in Wildwood.