Lost Tribe’s Spirit Lives in Wilderness Area

This remote cliff country, crisscrossed by roaring canyon streams swollen by melting mountain snow and choked with dense brush and tall timber, has a name so new it has yet to appear on California maps.

It is the state’s newest wilderness area, set aside by Congress in October, 1984, to protect the natural and archeological resources from as much human intrusion as possible.

The wilderness, a seldom visited, difficult-to-penetrate section inside Lassen National Forest in Northern California, is called Ishi in honor of America’s last Indian living in the wild.

For 45 years this was the home and hide-out for the lost tribe of Yahi Indians, a tiny band that avoided contact with civilization and numbered 16 members at most at the beginning of their long concealment in 1866.

Anthropologists and archeologists had voiced concern about setting the area aside as a protected wilderness because it calls attention to an area with more than 100 ancient Indian village sites, many yet to be scientifically excavated.

Until now, no more than 200 people a year have visited the area. One anthropologist said he was here for five weeks recently and saw only two people.

Black Rock, a spectacular pyramidal hill looming 250 feet above Mill Creek, is the gateway to the wilderness. It is reached by a 20-mile, single-lane, twisting, pot-holed dirt road perched on the shoulders of a perpendicular cliff.

From Black Rock, the historic center of the world for the Yahi, the way into the wilderness is by foot. Vehicles are prohibited.

Ishi became the last of his people, living alone in the wild for three years without a single encounter with another human being.

Feared He’d Be Shot

He emerged on Aug. 29, 1911, on the outskirts of Oroville, emaciated and starving, a bewildered and frightened man of about 50, convinced that he would be shot and killed by the white man, as had happened to many of his people.

A Stone Age survivor confronting the 20th Century, he spoke a language no one could understand.

There had been an estimated 300 to 400 Yahis living in what is now Ishi Wilderness in the early 1850s, at the time of the first settlement of Tehama County in the Sacramento Valley.

Within 15 years, the Yahi were virtually annihilated in a series of massacres described by anthropologists as the “fiercest and most uncompromising resistance met by Indians on the West Coast.”

During their long concealment, said anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, the Yahi made up “the smallest free nation in the world, a nation that succeeded in holding out against the tide of civilization.”

The wilderness covers 40,670 acres (13 miles long, eight miles wide) of the forest, which is about 50 miles southeast of Redding. As a wilderness area, it is protected from development. There can be no roads, no structures, not even an outhouse. Visitors need a permit to enter and are required to leave no trace of having been there.

For Lassen National Forest archeologist Jim Johnston, 35, the creation of the wilderness area and naming it after Ishi makes him both happy and sad. Johnston has spent 14 years on and off doing archeological research here.

“There could not be a better name for the wilderness,” Johnston said. “However, I fear the name may be counterproductive. It will attract more pot hunters.”

Despite the fact that the wilderness is a difficult place to get to, vandalism and theft at many of the more than 100 village sites have already been serious problems.

At the village site on Mill Creek where Ishi is believed to have spent his early years, there is fresh evidence of digging in house pits. The Indians dug holes in the ground and around them erected homes with conical-shaped roofs constructed of branches and hides.

Scattered on the ground are metates (grinding stones), scrapers, cutting tools and obsidian flakes, not prime objects of value to pot hunters.

“People come in here and dig for baskets, beads, arrowheads and other Indian artifacts. It is a crime to remove anything from a national forest, punishable by fines up to $20,000 and two years in jail,” Johnston explained. He said that rangers have increased patrols since the area was given the special designation.

“I would love to place interpretive signs in here pointing out caves and the bear den where Ishi, his mother, his sister and an old man lived for several years in hiding, and note other historically significant Yahi sites,” he said.

“But we cannot risk the chance of people coming in and destroying these important areas.”

Johnston followed Mill Creek until he came to a cave he had explored in the mid-1970s. A dozen years ago he had discovered the skeleton of an adult female, which he reburied and left intact.

“Look at this,” he said dejectedly on entering the cave. “Someone has come in here and removed the remains of the Indian woman.” All that was left was a single human rib.

When Ishi stumbled out of the wilds in 1911, he was taken into custody and held by Sheriff J. B. Webber in the Butte County Jail at Oroville.

Kroeber, head of the University of California’s Anthropology Museum, then in San Francisco, read an account of Ishi in a newspaper. He immediately sent a telegram to Sheriff Webber:

“Hold Indian till arrival. Will take charge.”

For the next four years and seven months, until Ishi succumbed to tuberculosis on March 25, 1916, he lived at the museum in San Francisco.

Meaning of Name

No one ever knew his name, as it was a Yahi tradition never to say one’s own name. So Kroeber called him Ishi, Yahi for man.

While living at the museum, Ishi mastered a vocabulary of about 600 English words, and Kroeber compiled a dictionary of the Yahi language.

The museum was jammed each weekend by people who came to watch Ishi chip arrowheads, shape bows and answer questions with Kroeber’s help.

Ishi developed a close friendship with physician Saxton Pope, his doctor, who became fascinated with the Indian’s skill with the bow and arrow. That friendship triggered a renaissance in archery in America and throughout the world.

Pope, who became known as the father of modern archery, wrote articles and books about archery and about Ishi and his knowledge of the bow and arrow.

In 1914, Pope, Kroeber and anthropologist Thomas T. Waterman spent the summer with Ishi in Yahi country. Ishi took them on a tour of his Stone Age world. He stalked and hunted deer with bow and arrow. He speared salmon. He gathered and ate acorns, brodiaea bulbs and green clover.

Ishi was interested in everything about modern man. He adapted rapidly, proving, according to Kroeber’s wife, Theodora, that “Stone Age man and modern man are essentially alike.” She chronicled the last years of the Yahi and Ishi in her book, “Ishi--A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America,” published in 1961 by the University of California Press.

When Ishi died, his body was cremated, as was the Yahi custom, with one of his bows, five arrows, acorn meal, beads, tobacco and obsidian flakes. His remains were placed in a small, black Pueblo jar in the Mount Olivet Cemetery south of San Francisco.

Each summer, June 1 through Aug. 31, the University of California’s Lowie Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley has a small exhibit of its Ishi material and photographs of America’s last wild Indian.

“Ishi’s spirit is still here,” mused Frank Norick, assistant director of the museum and curator of the Ishi collection.