A few individuals have made their livelihoods as entrepreneurs in the Yosemite Valley through the early years. One of the first was the married pair of James and Elvira Hutchings.

Galen Clark, Yosemite's most famous guardian, arrived in the 1850s and operated a number of facilities but was a much member naturalist than he was a businessman. James Hutchings, on the other hand, succeeded in business there, for a time.

Hutchings first visited the area in 1855. Hutchings was a gold miner and a carpenter but also a journalist, and he wrote about what he saw. He published Hutchings' California Magazine, the premier edition of which contained the first published illustrations of Yosemite Valley. Hutchings published 60 editions of the magazine, which was read around the country.

Hutchings returned in 1859 and stayed in the Upper Hotel. He returned several more times, including with his wife, Elvira. They bought the Upper Hotel in 1864 and renamed it Hutchings House. Among the upgrades to the two-storey accommodation were glass panes for the windows, which up to that point ahd been open frames. Perhaps the most famous upgrade was the Big Tree Room, in the middle of which was a 175-foot-tall cedar tree.

In the same year that the Hutchingses bought the hotel, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, an Act of Congress that assigned ownership of the Yosemite Valley to the State of California and made the area off-limits for settlement. The state administrators appointed as a result of the Grant insisted that the Hutchingses sign a lease for Hutchings House because they did not have a valid claim to the property. James and Elvira refused and embarked on a legal campaign that lasted the part of a decade, finally winning a settlement from the California Legislature in 1874. Embittered by the experience, the Hutchingses moved to San Francisco.

While they were still operating the hotel, they made the acquaintance of famous environmentalist John Muir, whom James Hutchings hired to run his sawmill in 1869. That association lasted two years.

A constitutional convention in 1878 resulted in the ousting of the administrators who had insisted that the Hutchingses were in violation of the Yosemite Grant, and the newly appointed administrators offered James Hutchings a new position, as guardian of Yosemite. The holder of the position, Galen Clark, was removed.

Hutchings, who by this time had divorced his wife, proved none too popular as a guardian and left after four years, having been ousted by the administrators who had appointed him.

Hutchings died in a wagon accident in 1902 and is buried in the Yosemite Valley Cemetery, next to his daughter Flo, also the victim of an accident. Flo was a very famous person in her own right.

James Hutchings is remembered as someone who helped popularize Yosemite and surrounds, not only as the owner of a hotel but also as the author of magazine articles and of two books, Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity in California, published in 1870, and In the Heart of the Sierra, published in 1886.

Elvira Hutchings painted many watercolors of the Yosemite Valley. Most of those were lost in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; however, six now hang in the Yosemite Museum.

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