December 26 Thursday – In Morristown, New Jersey, Bret Harte wrote to Sam, complaining about William A. Kendall,  the past “sick & needy poet” who Sam had taken up a collection for to gain passage from New York to California. Kendall had accused Harte of swindling contributors to the Overland.

I have been lately pretty well abused from unexpected sources but I think the enclosed caps the climax. Do you remember the man to whom you gave $50; for whom I raised $60 and procured by begging a first class passage to San Francisco and to whom I sent anonymously $25, when I was rather poor myself? Well—this is the reptile! And worse than all, this is the second or third time that he has thus requited me.

Now what in the name of all that is diabolically mean, am I to do? I don’t mind his slander: that I can refute—but how am I to make this dog know that he is a dog and not a man? [Duckett 84].