Ishi: The Last Yahi

  Ishi (c1861 – March 25, 1916) was the last known member of the Native American Yahi people from the present-day state of California in the United States. The rest of the Yahi (as well as many members of their parent tribe, the Yana) were killed in the California genocide in the 19th century. Ishi, who was widely acclaimed as the "last wild Indian" in the United States, lived most of his life isolated from modern North American culture. In 1911, aged 50, he emerged at a barn and corral, 2 mi (3.2 km) from downtown Oroville, California.

Ishi, which means "man" in the Yana language, is an adopted name. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber gave him this name because, in the Yahi culture, tradition demanded that he not speak his own name until formally introduced by another Yahi. When asked his name, he said: "I have none, because there were no people to name me," meaning that there was no other Yahi to speak his name on his behalf.

Ishi was taken in by anthropologists at the University of California, Berkeley, who both studied him and hired him as a janitor. He lived most of his remaining five years in a university building in San Francisco. His life was depicted and discussed in multiple films and books, notably the biographical account Ishi in Two Worlds published by Theodora Kroeber in 1961.

𝐄𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞

In 1865, Ishi and his family were attacked in the Three Knolls Massacre, in which 40 of their tribesmen were killed. Although 33 Yahi survived to escape, cattlemen killed about half of the survivors. The last survivors, including Ishi and his family, went into hiding for the next 44 years. Their tribe was popularly believed to be extinct. Prior to the California Gold Rush of 1848–1855, the Yahi population numbered 404 in California, but the total Yana in the larger region numbered 2,997.

The gold rush brought tens of thousands of miners and settlers to northern California, putting pressure on native populations. Gold mining damaged water supplies and killed fish; the deer left the area. The settlers brought new infectious diseases such as smallpox and measles. The northern Yana group became extinct while the central and southern groups (who later became part of Redding Rancheria) and Yahi populations dropped dramatically. Searching for food, they came into conflict with settlers, who set bounties of 50 cents per scalp and 5 dollars per head on the natives. In 1865, the settlers attacked the Yahi while they were still asleep.

𝐑𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐁𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐰𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞, 𝐢𝐧 𝐈𝐬𝐡𝐢 𝐑𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝:

"In 1865, near the Yahi's special place, Black Rock, the waters of Mill Creek turned red at the Three Knolls Massacre. 'Sixteen' or 'seventeen' Indian fighters killed about forty Yahi, as part of a retaliatory attack for two white women and a man killed at the Workman's household on Lower Concow Creek near Oroville. Eleven of the Indian fighters that day were Robert A. Anderson, Harmon (Hi) Good, Sim Moak, Hardy Thomasson, Jack Houser, Henry Curtis, his brother Frank Curtis, as well as Tom Gore, Bill Matthews, and William Merithew. W. J. Seagraves visited the site, too, but some time after the battle had been fought.

Robert Anderson wrote, "Into the stream they leapt, but few got out alive. Instead many dead bodies floated down the rapid current." One captive Indian woman named Mariah from Big Meadows (Lake Almanor today), was one of those who did escape. The Three Knolls massacre is also described in Theodora Kroeber's Ishi in Two Worlds.

Since then more has been learned. It is estimated that with this massacre, Ishi's entire cultural group, the Yana/Yahi, may have been reduced to about sixty individuals. From 1859 to 1911, Ishi's remote band became more and more infiltrated by non-Yahi Indian representatives, such as Wintun, Nomlaki, and Pit River individuals.

In 1879, the federal government started Indian boarding schools in California. Some men from the reservations became renegades in the hills. Volunteers among the settlers and military troops carried out additional campaigns against the northern California Indian tribes during that period.

In late 1908, a group of surveyors came across the camp inhabited by two men, a middle-aged woman, and an elderly woman. These were Ishi, his uncle, his younger sister, and his mother, respectively. The former three fled while the latter hid in blankets to avoid detection, as she was sick and unable to flee. The surveyors ransacked the camp, and Ishi's mother died soon after his return. His sister and uncle never returned, possibly drowning in a nearby river.

𝐀𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐄𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐒𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐲

After the 1908 encounter, Ishi spent three more years alone in the wilderness. Starving and with nowhere to go, Ishi, at around the age of 50, emerged on August 29, 1911, at the Charles Ward slaughterhouse back corral near Oroville, California, after forest fires in the area. He was found pre-sunset by Floyd Hefner, son of the next-door dairy owner (who was in town), who was "hanging out", and who went to harness the horses to the wagon for the ride back to Oroville, for the workers and meat deliveries. Witnessing slaughterhouse workers included Lewis "Diamond Dick" Cassings, a "drugstore cowboy". Later, after Sheriff J.B. Webber arrived, the Sheriff directed Adolph Kessler, a nineteen-year-old slaughterhouse worker, to handcuff Ishi, who smiled and complied.

The "wild man" caught the imagination and attention of thousands of onlookers and curiosity seekers. University of California, Berkeley anthropology professors read about him and "brought him" to the Affiliated Colleges Museum (1903—1931), in an old law school building on the University of California's Affiliated Colleges campus on Parnassus Heights, San Francisco. Studied at the university, Ishi also worked as a janitor and lived at the museum for most of the remaining five years of his life.

In October 1911, Ishi, Sam Batwi, T. T. Waterman, and A. L. Kroeber, went to the Orpheum Opera House in San Francisco to see Lily Lena (Alice Mary Ann Mathilda Archer, born 1877) the "London Songbird," known for "kaleidoscopic" costume changes. Lena gave Ishi a piece of gum as a token.

On May 13, 1914, Ishi, T. T. Waterman, A.L. Kroeber, Dr Saxton Pope, and Saxton Pope Jr. (11 years old), took Southern Pacific's Cascade Limited overnight train, from the Oakland Mole and Pier to Vina, California, on a trek in the homelands of the Deer Creek area of Tehama county, researching and mapping for the University of California, fleeing on May 30, 1914, during the Lassen Peak volcano eruption.. Waterman and A.L. Kroeber, director of the museum, studied Ishi closely over the years and interviewed him at length in an effort to reconstruct Yahi culture. He described family units, naming patterns, and the ceremonies that he knew. Many traditions had already been lost when he was growing up, as there were few older survivors in his group. He identified material items and showed the techniques by which they were made.
In February 1915, during Panama–Pacific International Exposition, Ishi was filmed in the Sutro Forest with the actress Grace Darling for Hearst-Selig News Pictorial, No. 30.

𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡

Lacking acquired immunity to common diseases, Ishi was often ill. He was treated by Saxton T. Pope, a professor of medicine at UCSF. Pope became a close friend of Ishi and learned from him how to make bows and arrows in the Yahi way. He and Ishi often hunted together. Ishi died of tuberculosis on March 25, 1916. It is said that his last words were, "You stay. I go." His friends at the university tried to prevent an autopsy on Ishi's body since Yahi tradition called for the body to remain intact. However, the doctors at the University of California medical school performed an autopsy before Waterman could prevent it.

Ishi's brain was preserved and his body was cremated. His friends placed grave goods with his remains before cremation: "one of his bows, five arrows, a basket of acorn meal, a box full of shell bead money, a purse full of tobacco, three rings, and some obsidian flakes." Ishi's remains were interred at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Colma, California, near San Francisco. Kroeber put Ishi's preserved brain in a deerskin-wrapped Pueblo Indian pottery jar and sent it to the Smithsonian Institution in 1917. It was held there until August 10, 2000, when the Smithsonian repatriated it to the descendants of the Redding Rancheria and Pit River tribes. This was in accordance with the National Museum of the American Indian Act of 1989 (NMAI). According to Robert Fri, director of the National Museum of Natural History, "Contrary to commonly-held belief, Ishi was not the last of his kind. In carrying out the repatriation process, we learned that as a Yahi–Yana Indian his closest living descendants are the Yana people of northern California." His remains were also returned from Colma, and the tribal members intended to bury them in a secret place.

(𝐈𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞: 𝐈𝐬𝐡𝐢, 𝐃𝐞𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐤 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐝 𝐌𝐚𝐧)

(𝐒𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞: 𝐈𝐬𝐡𝐢 𝐢𝐧 𝐓𝐰𝐨 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝𝐬: 𝐀 𝐁𝐢𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐝 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐍𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚 & 𝐖𝐢𝐤𝐢)