1860?-1916
Last survivor of the Yahi tribe
In August 1911 a Yahi man about fifty years old came down out of the dense chaparral and rocky terrain of northeastern California's Lassen foothills. He had been living in those hills, in hiding with the last Yahi people, for some forty years. In the twenty-five-year period following the beginning of the California Gold Rush in 1849, most of the native people of northern California had been killed by Euro-Americans or their diseases, and those who remained were having a hard time surviving the miners' and settlers' impact on the land. The small Yahi tribe, known even before the arrival of whites for their fierce courage, was among the more effective groups in resisting the takeover, and they had suffered greatly.
In 1908 a group of men surveying for the Oro Light and Power Company inadvertently walked right into the hidden camp of the Yahis, whose population had by then been reduced to four. Three fled, leaving behind an old woman who couldn't walk. The surveyors left the woman unharmed, but took all the Yahis' possessions with them—blankets, acorns, salmon, traps, arrows, even a fire-making tool. Soon only one Yahi was still alive. Three years later he decided to join other humans, even though, given the facts of history, he probably expected to be killed.
The people who found the silent and acquiescent "wild man" called Sheriff J. B. Webber, who took him to the Oroville jail for his own protection. No one could communicate with him. Sam Batwi, one of the few remaining Yana people, was brought to try to talk with him because they were both Indians from the same general area. But although the Yahis were a part of the same linguistic group as the Yanas, their languages were not very similar, and the two men did not understand each other well. Reporters and newspaper publishers took full advantage of this mystery, and sensational stories soon reached San Francisco.
Alfred Kroeber and Thomas Waterman, anthropologists at the University of California, had heard about the surveying party's encounter with the Yahi people and had tried, without success, to find them. Hearing the news, they correctly guessed that the man was a Yahi. Kroeber, who had dedicated his considerable energy to "salvage anthropology"—that is, finding and recording what remained of native cultures before they disappeared completely—arranged to bring the man to stay at the university's anthropology museum in San Francisco. The man never told anyone his true name, and it was at the museum that people began to call him "Ishi," the Yahi word for "man."
As anthropologists, Kroeber and Waterman were thrilled with this opportunity to study a culture and language on the brink of disappearance. Over the next four years and seven months, as they learned to communicate with each other, Ishi gave them a vast and detailed body of information about Yahi life, even accompanying them in 1914 on a trip to his old home at Deer Creek. Meanwhile, visiting Ishi at the museum became a popular Sunday outing for families in the San Francisco Bay area. For his part, Ishi took up his new life with curiosity, grace, and great generosity of spirit.
In 1914 Ishi developed a cough that soon proved to be a symptom of active tuberculosis. In 1916, while staying with the Watermans in Berkeley and working with the linguist Edward Sapir to record Yahi words and phrases, he died. After his death Saxton Pope, a doctor at the hospital next to the museum who had become a particular friend of Ishi's, wrote: "His were the qualities that last forever. He was kind; he had courage and self-restraint, and though all had been taken from him, there was no bitterness in his heart."
Nobody with any imagination can help but feel the immensity of this tragedy, so dense with irony, so loaded with universal symbols. And the symbolism has indeed become loaded for Native American people. Many non-Indians, cherishing the sterling qualities of Ishi's personality that Saxton Pope and others noted, see him as a romantic and nostalgic figure. Somehow, far too many people have come to believe that the "last wild Indian in North America," as he is called in the subtitle of Theodora Kroeber's Ishi in Two Worlds, was the last of the California Indians; plenty of California children from families that act Indian, feel Indian, are Indian, and are treated by their communities as Indian have had the puzzling experience of hearing in school that there are no more California Indians. How can this be? Maybe it's easier to think the excesses of history are all in the past and their victims extinct than it is to deal with the events of the past and their impact on the present. Despite this brutal history and subsequent efforts to downplay their traditions and sovereignty, California Indians are very much present, distinguished from the mainstream by the bits and pieces of their heritage they have been able to hold on to or salvage. In another twist of fate, the bits and pieces have often come from scholars who worked with people like Ishi, scholars who believed they were recording the last vestiges of cultures that would not survive.
Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967); Jed Riffe and Pamela Roberts, Ishi, the Last Yahi (Berkeley, Calif.: Rattlesnake Productions, 1992), videocassette.
Jeannine Gendar
News from Native California
