Everyone who passed over the Mariposa trail carried away a pleasant memory of Galen Clark’s quaint wayside inn and long remembered its proprietor. The generous hospitality that he extended never failed to win the admiration of his guests. Even celebrities from abroad paid him tribute whenever they chanced to speak of him in later years, and always remarked that he had made them feel at home beneath his roof. The poor as well as the rich held him in esteem. No weary wanderer, no matter how low his fortune or how humble his pack, was ever turned away hungry or unrested. All were equally welcome, for he shared his loaf with Indian and white alike. Indeed, the natives in the country around loved him for his kind and gracious ways, sought his advice in council, and called him “Father Clark.” The early guide books that tell of these incipient days of pilgrimages to the Yosemite rarely neglect to remark about the evenings spent about the open campfire of this simple, upright, kindly man. They tell how he presided over the social converse of the evening, how he narrated many a mirth-provoking anecdote, freely exchanging wit and wisdom, and all the while never indulging in boisterous laughter. They allude to those trifles which memory often cherishes—“the slight intonations of his voice indicating that something mildly sarcastic or funny was coming.” Lastly, they usually conclude with a picture of the great sugar pines, one hundred and fifty and two hundred feet high, solemnly standing guard, the files of their fellows extending back into the mystic blackness of the forest, the foremost calmly looking on the happy scene, their shadowy clusters of needles brightening and glowing in the flickering firelight. Yet these noble qualities which Nature had planted in his being with such munificence unfitted Galen Clark as an inn-keeper. Business was too foreign to his temperament, and he was too utterly self-forgetful to win success. His friends multiplied fearfully and wonderfully, but fortune was unkind to him and led him into debt. So low had his estate fallen by 1869, when the Mariposa County survey was made, that he deeded half his Wawona property to one Edwin Moore. A few years later he borrowed money with which to make extensive improvements. These proved so unfortunately planned that foreclosure resulted. Again Galen Clark faced the most discouraging ordeal that can come to man—the making of a new start in life.