6 May 1881 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NPV, UCCL 01948)
All right—am mailing that letter to Slote. For our lawyer’s information, I will state that in it I “have I propose to “arrest Sneider on a charge of obtainingⒶemendation money under false pretenses,” & ask Slote if he is willing to bear one half the expenses of the suit.—addingⒶemendation, that if he ought really to bear a larger proportion than that, because if he had stood to his part of the agreement & run the business himself, instead of taking Sneider’s word for everything, the transparent swindle would have been detected long ago & the outlay stopped. I ask him if he will pledge himself to advance some money now & put up dollar for dollar with me till the suit is ended. I also say to him, “You need have no fears as to the result; the case is perfectly plain, & the penitentiary as perfectly sure.” I tell him to go to my lawyers ( when they send for him, ) & give thi em every assistance he can in preparing the case.
I approve your action in the matter.
P. S. That contract of ours with Sneider was based upon a lie & a fraud—viz., that Sneider had already invented the process. He brought the (apparent) proofs of this, & exhibited them. Therefore, i If the process could be protected by patent, there would be no question of its value. Therefore, the $5,000 & $150 a month were to be paid for simply the two things—the delivery to us of patents, & the development & perfecting of a process already shown to have been accomplished. But it was all a lie, for Sneider had invented nothing new; he was working by old methods—& at the same time not succeeding with them. He pretended that the specimens he brought were made by the process described in the patents afterward issued to him, but such was not the case. It was exactly as if he had contracted to furnish me a process of making silver out of sawdust for a specific sum, & then colaimed the sum on specimens of silver produced in the regular old time-honored way.
P. P. S. I enclose the letter which I am proposing to send to Slote—it is best that the lawyers see it & approve or disprove it. If the former, return it to me, & I will mail it,—or, if preferable, you can send it to Slote yourself.
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Special Collections, NPV.
MTBus, 153–54.
See McKinney Family Papers in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.