When Sam returned from Honolulu, George Barnes remembered, “he was no better off than when he left, except in prestige, and quite in the dark as to his future course.” Or as Sam recalled in Roughing It, “I was home again in San Francisco, without means and without employment.” He accepted occasional reporting assignments for the Sacramento Union, such as covering the California State Fair and reviewing a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore at Maguire's Opera House in San Francisco....

“I tortured my brain for a saving scheme of some kind, and at last a public lecture occurred to me! I sat down and wrote one, in a fever of hopeful anticipation.” As he reflected in 1896, “It seemed an easier way of making a living than by journalism; it paid better, and there was less work connected with it.”