Messrs. Walworth and Hite were the first to venture in serving the Yosemite public. Hite was a member of that family whose fortune was made from the golden treasure of a mine at Hite’s Cove. Walworth seems to have left no record of his affairs or connections. The partners selected a site opposite Yosemite Falls, very near the area that had been occupied by Captain Boling’s camp in 1851, and set up their hotel of planks split from pine logs. The building, started in 1856, was not completed until the next year, and in the meantime a second establishment was started near the present Sentinel Bridge, so the first became, quite naturally, the “Lower Hotel.” Cunningham and Beardsley, the same Beardsley who packed Weed’s camera in 1859, elected to finish construction of the Lower Hotel, and they employed Mr. and Mrs. John H. Neal to run it for them. J. C. Holbrook, the first to preach a sermon in Yosemite, writes of his stop with Mrs. Neal in 1859: “I secured a bed, such as it was, for my wife, in a rough board shanty occupied by a family that had arrived a few days before to keep a sort of tavern, the woman being the only one within fifty or sixty miles of the place. For myself, a bed of shavings and a blanket under the branches of some trees formed my resting place.” A London parson in his _To San Francisco and Back_, of the late ’sixties, offers the following description of his visit to this earliest of Yosemite hotels: There are in it [the valley] two hotels, as they call themselves, but the accommodation is very rough. When G—— and I were shown to our bedroom the first night we found that it consisted of a quarter of a shed screened off by split planks, which rose about eight or ten feet from the ground, and enabled us to hear everything that went on in the other “rooms,” which were simply stalls in the same shed. Ours had no window, but we could see the stars through the roof. The door, opening out into the forest, was fastened with cow-hinges of skin with the hair on, and a little leather strap which hooked on to a nail. We boasted a rough, gaping floor, but several of the other bedrooms were only strewed with branches of arbor vitae. As a grizzly bear had lately been seen wandering about a few hundred yards from our “hotel,” we took the precaution of putting our revolvers under our pillows. I dare say this was needless as the bears have mostly retired to the upper part of the valley, a few miles off, but it gave a finish to our toilet which had the charm of novelty. Next morning, however, seeing the keeper of the ranch with his six-shooter in his hand, and noticing that it was heavily loaded, I asked him why he used so much powder. “Oh,” said he, “I’ve loaded it for bears.” At first G—— and I were the only visitors at this house, but several were at the other one about half a mile off, and more were soon expected.