To his cousin and business partner - and the California State Senator from Calaveras County - Dr. John Y. Lind: “I regret exceedingly that your suspicions are always so easily and so readily aroused in regard to me…I thought my troubles during the last eight months were about as great as human nature could endure but pile it up. I will try to stand it....I am perfectly willing that my conduct and actions towards you during the last four years should be weighed in the balance with your own and be judged accordingly...See how readily the mind the mind perverts things when it has so pre-determined....My coolness, want of cordiality and sociality when we last met in San Francisco is another cause of censure. Admit them all, then please examine your own conduct, your own actions at the time of my marriage and see and judge if there were no sufficient reasons, no just cause, no earthly consideration, nothing could have induced me to have treated you in a similar manner..Again in regard to my financial affairs...I have only to regret that my affairs are so embarrassed, so badly involved that I shall not be able to save a single dollar or have a dime to divide with you. That Weber House affair and...bad management have swallowed up everything I have made and saved and will entail debts and liabilities upon me which will require years of labor and hard work to liquidate. In regard to salary, I have received this year nothing but state scrip, nor is there any possibility of my obtaining any thing else. I am troubled and worried enough to make someone almost crazy. I have been dunned and garnasheed and attached till I am sick and tired to death and as if to pile up the agony as much as possible, you must pitch in with your censure and complaints...There is neither reason, sense or justice in your fault-finding...and I am not in a condition nor much disposed to stand them much longer. We have quite enough to contend with in pushing our way through the selfishness and rascality of the world without quarreling among our selves..." Robert K. Reid and his cousin, John Y. Lind came to California together via Panama in 1849. They first practiced medicine at Mokelumne Hill and other gold mining towns near Stockton. Then Lind went into politics, elected the first State Assemblyman and State Senator from Calaveras County, while Reid was appointed the first Superintendent of a new state hospital at Stockton, soon converted into the state's first Insane Asylum, badly needed at a time when so many Gold Rush immigrants who flocked to California suffered from mental illness. When Reid wrote this plaintive letter to his estranged cousin, he was 34 years old, had just married the matron of the female section of the Asylum, had lost tens of thousands of dollars financing the Weber House, the most lavish hotel in Stockton, and, together with his wife and 3 "keepers", had charge of 113 men and 11 women from every state of the Union and 14 foreign countries who were diagnosed as insane.