Ishi

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Ishi : biography

– March 25, 1916

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’ (Moak 1923:20) or ‘seventeen’ (T. Kroeber 1961: 80) [so-called] 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 (Moak 1923:18). Eleven of the Indian fighters that day were Robert A. Anderson, Hiram Good, Sim Moak, Hardy Thomasson, Jack Houser (also spelled Howser by Anderson), Henry Curtis (leader of the Concow men), 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 (Waterman 1918: 53)."

Burrill continued, "Robert Anderson (1909:79) wrote, ‘Into the stream they leaped, 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 (Burrill, 2003:39). The Three Knolls battle is also described in Theodora Kroeber’s Ishi in Two Worlds (1961: 81-82), but more information has come to light. 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 infamous Indian boarding schools started in California. The ranks of embittered reservation renegades who became the new ‘boys in the hills’, to quote Robert Anderson, became a direct function of what new attacks or removal campaigns that the volunteers and military troops elected to carry out against the northern California Indian tribes during that time."

In late 1908, a group of surveyors came across the camp inhabited by a man, a young girl, and an elderly native woman — Ishi, his younger sister, and his elderly mother, respectively. The former two fled while the latter hid herself in blankets to avoid detection, as she was sick and unable to flee. The surveyors ransacked the camp and took everything. Ishi’s mother and other relatives died soon after Ishi’s return.

Walking into occidental world

Ishi lived three years beyond the raid alone, the last of his tribe. Finally, starving and with nowhere to go, at the age of about 49 on August 29, 1911, Ishi walked out into the occidental world., Mohican Press He was captured attempting to steal meat near Oroville, California after forest fires in the area.

After the native was noticed by townspeople, the local sheriff took the man into custody for his own protection. The "wild man" caught the imagination and attention of thousands of onlookers and curiosity seekers. Professors at the University of California, Berkeley, Museum of Anthropology — now the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (PAHMA) — read about him and brought him to their facility, then housed on the University of California, San Francisco campus in an old law school building. Studied by the university, Ishi also worked with them as a research assistant and lived in an apartment at the museum for most of the remaining five years of his life. In the summer of 1915, he lived temporarily in Berkeley with the anthropologist Thomas Talbot Waterman and his family.

Ishi revealing Yahi culture

Waterman and Alfred L. Kroeber, director of the museum, studied Ishi closely over the years and interviewed him at length to help them reconstruct Yahi culture. He described family units, naming patterns, and the ceremonies that he knew, but much tradition had been lost because there were few older survivors in the group in which he was raised. He identified material items and showed the techniques by which they were made. Ishi provided valuable information on his native Yana language, which was recorded and studied by the linguist Edward Sapir, who had previously done work on the northern dialects.