Hello, and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service. In the late summer of 1911, a mysterious man walked out of the forest in California, unable to communicate in English. He was eventually identified as Ishii, one of the last surviving members of the Yahi tribe, who'd been living in hiding for 30 years. Louisi Dauggo reports.
The year is 1911, California, and one late summer's day, a man walks out of the forest. His name was Ishii, and he was a member of the Northern California tribe, which was methodically attacked and massacred and exterminated until there were about four or five of them left, who went into hiding in the rugged hills up there and managed to hide out while California was settled and grew up. This is early 20th century. Author Ursula Legin, Ishii's story would catch the imagination of artists down the generations, including filmmaker Jed Riff, who's made a documentary about Ishii's life.
He first came into a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Orville, California. Ishii was very thin, but he wasn't starving. He had some small food items with him in a little pouch. But he only had a shirt on top of his covering top of his body, and we don't know why he came out at that time.
But he let himself be captured after almost 50 years in hiding. So whether it was intentional or not, we don't know. Ursula Legin, whose father would become a friend of Ishii's, believed that she knows why Ishii emerged from the wilderness that day. He came down out of hiding, I think, in despair to seek death, and all he knew from why people was dead.
And I think he came down to get killed. Before the white man, there'd been 10 million Native Americans. By 1911, there were less than 300,000. The Californian Gold Rush had brought a wave of newssetless West.
Ishii's tribe, the Yahi, resisted, but by the 1870s, all but a handful had been wiped out. When you read the accounts of the Indian hunters at the time and the brutality, the $5 a head, 50 cents a scalp, one of the Indian hunters describes shooting into Ishii's father's village when Ishii and his mother were escaping. And they had to change his long rifle for a pistol because the long rifle blew the babies up so badly. Ishii, his mother, and a few other survivors somehow managed to escape.
And for the next 30 years, they hid in the wilderness. We excavated one of two house pits during the making of a film called Ishii the Last Yahi back in 1992. And what we saw there was this very small encampment that couldn't have held more than four or five people. Maybe there was more earlier in over the time they died through attrition or through some other way.
But we think the Last Camp held four or five people for quite a while, probably 20 years on the side of a rugged, remote volcanic mountain. It was so remote, it took us 20 years with a team of archaeologists and anthropologists to locate the site. And the only way we located it was because of fire burnt off all the poison oak and the thrush oak and the other materials that covered it. But he said he wasn't the last survivor.
Well, we think he was last surviving. In fact, there's a story told by Frank Day, who's a mighty Indian. And Frank Day is now recognized as one of the most famous American Indian artists. And him and his father were walking along some railroad tracks up and just outside of Warville.
This is about two weeks before Ishii's emergence. And they heard some noises in the bushes. They were hunting. And there was a man kneeling over another man using some kind of water and stone to reflect heat from the sun, owned to a serious, serious wound on this other man's stomach.
And when they walked into the clearing, the men were so terrified that Frank Day and his father, even though they were Indian, they looked Anglo. They immediately withdrew. They knew something was happening. They'd scare these people and they withdrew.
Two weeks later, Ishii walked into a clearing near a slaughterhouse and into the white man's world. It must have been very traumatic. The descriptions of the men at the slaughterhouse who had him cornered by dogs and pushed him over and knocked him around until he realized he wasn't a threat. It must have been a terrifying situation for Ishii at the beginning.
They locked him up in the county jail, probably because they didn't know what else to do with what they called a wild Indian. And they helped from the anthropology department at the University of California, which my father had founded. And so I think the people who went up there were actually linguists, at first, who tried to talk to Ishii, but he was the last speaker of his language. Eventually, they found some words from another tribe that Ishii could understand.
A week later, Ishii was taken from Orville to a new museum at the University of California in San Francisco that was headed by Ursula Ginn's father, the cultural anthropologist Alfred Krueber. It was he who named Ishii. It means man in Yahii. Ishii never revealed his true name.
The anthropologist had been bringing Indians from all over California to record their songs and stories with the Black cylinders and to try and get as much information as they could. The scientists, anthropologists, really believed that Indians were going to disappear. There would be nothing left to their language or their culture in a few years. The news of Ishii's arrival at the museum spread like wildfire.
On the first six Sundays he was there, 26,000 people were said to have visited to see the man build as the last wild Indian in America. One of those visitors was eight-year-old Ray Clark. Years later, in his 90s, he described it to Jed Riff as clearly as if it were yesterday. He was very much, I may use the term a wild Indian when I first saw him.
He was supposed to show the people how he shot bows and arrows. And I remember very vividly that he was a pretty lousy shot. Then I remember him walking towards the people sitting there and pointing the bow and jabbering as though there was something wrong with a bow. Now, of course, at that time it didn't mean anything to me, but since then I very much suspect the anthropologist had taken a bow from the exhibit and handed it to him.
And it could have been from another tribe, maybe an enemy tribe or something, and it was all wrong for him. They kept him at the museum in his apartment there, and he worked there. He could earn some money. This sort of janitorial.
He also would come out front and talk to people and show them how to chip obsidian or make fire. He could show them his technologies. And children apparently were particularly taken by him, and he liked to talk to children because he had no children in his life, this fugitive life that he had to leave. So, again, my father, I think, became friends by talking together a great deal, because my father was learning from Ichi all the time, you see, and they liked each other.
He was a most extraordinary man. Everyone who met him was impressed and loved him. He was a man of great strength and purity. In the five years that Ichi lived at the Berkeley Museum of Anthropology, he made 400 recordings of his language and the songs and stories of the Aussie people.
Ichi died in March 1916 of tuberculosis. At that point, my dad was off in Europe. They've wired him and said the Smithsonian wants to do an autopsy on Ichi as a specimen in the name of science. You know, my father said science can go to hell, but they did it all the same.
And they took his brain off and lost it in the Smithsonian towards the end of my father's life in the late 50s. They sort of came to him and said, you should write about Ichi. You know, you were the person to write the book about Ichi. And he said, I don't write books about my friends.
He did not want to do it. And I think he half jokingly said, ask my wife. She's a good writer. And so they did.
The Adora Kruber's book, Ichi in Two Worlds, was published a year after her husband's death. Today, it's still read by every school child in California. In August 2000, the Smithsonian did find issues brain and it was given to a Californian tribe to bury according to Yahi tradition. Witness was written and presented by Louise Hidalgo.
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