The Stone Age in America Comes to an End

by Bill Peak

The small town of Oroville, California, drifted into the twentieth century as a shadow of its former self. Back in 1848, when gold was discovered in the area, prospectors had poured into the place. But by 1900 the vein had long since petered out and the town become little more than an agricultural backwater.

Meanwhile, the modern world marched on. In Los Angeles, California’s first movie theater opened for business in 1902. The next year, the Wright brothers made the first heavier-than air flight at Kitty Hawk. And in 1908, Henry Ford brought the automobile within reach of everyday Americans when he introduced the reliable, relatively inexpensive Model T. Still, news of these wonders would have arrived in Oroville as little more than rumors of a wider, more sophisticated world.

Then, on August 29, in the year 1911, a teenaged layabout named Floyd Hefner strode into the corral of the local slaughterhouse, intending to hitch up a team of horses, and found a nearly naked man leaning unsteadily against a fence-post. The last uncontacted Native American in North America had come in from the cold.

Perhaps not surprisingly for the time and place, guns were drawn, dogs were held at bay, and someone used the telephone in the slaughterhouse to call the law. By the time the sheriff arrived, a butcher’s cloak had been thrown over the shoulders of the hapless Indian, who spoke no language anyone understood. The sheriff handcuffed the man, drove him into town in a wagon (the first time in his life he’d ever ridden in a wheeled vehicle), and locked him up in the county jail.

It wasn’t long before newspapers throughout the state were reporting the discovery of America’s “last wild Indian.” Learning of the news, Alfred Kroeber, a renowned professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, sent a colleague, Thomas Waterman, up to Oroville.

Meeting with the prisoner in his cell, Waterman thought he might be speaking a language related to the Yana tongue. Waterman knew a little Yana, and when he tried it out on the prisoner, the man’s face lit up. For the first time since the only other members of his Yahi tribe had died, he had heard another human being speak a word or two he understood.

Waterman was able to ask the man his name. Using a combination of gestures and simple Yahi, the Indian explained that in his culture it was taboo to speak his name aloud to someone else until another member of his tribe had formally introduced him. As this was now impossible, Waterman ended up simply calling him “Man” in the Yahi tongue. And so it is that the last Native American who still crafted his arrowheads from stone comes down to us in history under the false name of “Ishi.” We will never know what his real name was.

Waterman’s fellow professor at Berkeley, Alfred Kroeber, was a remarkable man. He had earned his Ph.D. in 1901 from Columbia University, studying under Franz Boaz, the father of modern anthropology. Kroeber took Ishi in and gave him a place to live in the university’s museum, where Ishi worked as a janitor. This allowed Kroeber and the other anthropologists in his department to study Ishi closely over the remaining five years of his life.

You might expect that much of what Kroeber and Waterman learned from Ishi would have been horrifying. This was a man who, from boyhood, watched his tribe and immediate family whittled down by ceaseless slaughter. Norman Kingsley, an eager participant in one of the last massacres, later recounted that, in the middle of his attack, he exchanged his .56 caliber Spencer rifle for a .38 caliber pistol, because the rifle “tore them up so bad,” especially the babies.

But after his introduction into the modern world, Ishi didn’t speak of the horrors he’d witnessed, nor did he give in to melancholy or despair. While he always maintained his Yahi dignity, Ishi smiled readily. He was fascinated by tools that made work easier, shiny coins that could be exchanged for food, and the speed with which scenery flew by when riding in a train. He probably found it alarming that white people shared their names so willingly, but the pronunciation of those names never failed to entertain him.

I learned of Ishi from Alfred Kroeber’s wife and fellow anthropologist Theodora Kracaw Kroeber, who, in 1961, wrote Ishi in Two Worlds, now considered a classic of modern anthropology. I first read the book forty years ago, and rereading it recently, I found myself placing Theodora Kroeber in the same league as Claude Lévi-Strauss. Without ever leaving any of her anthropological principles behind, she consistently writes clear, compelling prose.

It isn’t easy reading the first part of Kroeber’s book, watching as Ishi and the remaining members of his band are forced to withdraw further and further from the whites encroaching upon their world; until, finally, they retreat into that world’s last untouched cañon, and, ultimately, its last bushy slopes. But watching the way Ishi handles the modern world he is then brought into, the way he maintains his Yahi dignity in the face of that world’s awesome power (while never losing his ability to see through its sometimes absurd idiosyncrasies) is somehow reassuring. It gave me hope for humanity at large.

I reread Ishi in Two Worlds thanks to an Inter-Library Loan, but a copy of the book has now been placed in our collection at the Talbot County Free Library. You’ll find it in the Easton library on the Biography shelves under the call letters ISHI. If you’re in St. Michaels, you can place a reserve on the book and it will be sent down there for you.

Ishi died in 1916 from tuberculosis, almost certainly contracted from one of the few whites who ever set out to help a Yahi Indian. In the Yahi way, I think Ishi would have found that ironic. He might have even smiled.