After Queen Lili`uokalani was overthrown[1] in a coup by the Committee Of Safety, he ran afoul of the government of the Republic of Hawaii and was accused of treason.

[3] By 1881, the Grotto came to be patronized by such notables as William Randolph Hearst and the sons of the sugar cane baron, Claus Spreckels.

He became friends with the sons of Claus Spreckels, whose family owned the Oceanic Steamship Company and a sugar cane business in Hawaii.

In 1889 he was supervising shipment being loaded at the docks, when some of the Spreckels family invited him on board for a poker game.

Their competition was the Hawaiian Fruit and Packing Company, owned by established descendants of American missionaries such as Lorrin A. Thurston, who was also a powerful politician.

[6] Celebrities such as Robert Louis Stevenson stayed there on his second trip later that year, and it became a popular destination for tourists from the mainland.

[7] In 1894 Lycurgus made his first trip to the Kīlauea volcano with Admiral Royal R. Ingersoll, sailing to Hilo aboard the USS Philadelphia.

Lycurgus hired a band of Hawaiians who played music honoring Queen Liliʻuokalani instead of "The Star-Spangled Banner".

[9] Hawaii was annexed as a territory of the United States that year and the practical Lycurgus applied for American citizenship.

He opened a restaurant called the Union Grill in Honolulu in 1901 and would hold "Jailbirds of 1895" nights which were not popular with the new government.

In 1903, when he returned to Greece to visit his mother, he met and married Athina Gerassimos from Sparta, the second of nine children.

However, the Lycurgus family kept a shrine to deposed Queen Liliʻuokalani at the Volcano House and related the legends of Ancient Hawaii to the visitors.

In 1919, Demosthenes Lycurgus traveled to Athens to marry Maria Yatrakos, but died of influenza within a week of his wedding in the 1918 flu pandemic.

[8] In 1932 during the Great Depression the Inter-Island Steam Navigation Company was going bankrupt after expanding the Volcano House to 115 rooms.

[12] At the age of 81, he traveled to Washington, D.C., and convinced influential friends, many of whom (including Franklin D. Roosevelt) had stayed in the Volcano House, to assign the Civilian Conservation Corps to construct a park headquarters building farther back from the cliff.