Science: Ancient American

Improbable though his story seems, a Stone Age man, practically untouched by modern civilization, was alive in the U.S. only 50 years ago. When he stumbled out of the brush near Oroville in northern California one August morning in 1911, he was naked except for a scrap of canvas thrown over his shoulders. Weak and emaciated, he spoke not a word of English or any other known language. It was days before anyone could communicate with him and learn who he was. Now, half a century later, a new book, Ishi in Two Worlds, by Historian Theodora Kroeber (University of California Press; $5.95), recalls that human relic of a long-forgotten age.

Ishi belonged to a small tribe, the Yahi, who lived in the scrub-tangled foothills of volcanic Lassen Peak, high in the Cascade Range. Early Spanish and Mexican settlers had little contact with the Yahi, but the gold seekers who flooded California in the 1850s hunted them down like wild animals. The Yahi had no guns; they fought their pathetic best with stone-tipped spears and arrows, but by 1872 they were believed extinct. A dozen years later, ranchers in the foothills began to miss occasional calves and sheep, and sometimes caches of food were pilfered from mountain cabins. Rumors spread that Yahi were still hiding in the hills, but when the pilfering stopped, the Yahi faded into legend.

In 1908, surveyors working for a California power company stumbled on a carefully hidden village. In one of the three huts they found an old, paralyzed woman covered with rags and skins. She was Ishi’s mother. Somewhat gentler than the Forty-Niners, the surveyors did not kill the old lady directly; they merely looted everything in the huts, including tools, clothes and stored food. When they returned the next day, the old woman was gone. Ishi had carried his mother to a new hiding place for a few more days of life. He never again saw any other members of the Yahi remnant, and after three years of miserable loneliness he wandered into the valley where his enemies lived.

Museum Celebrity. The rest of Ishi’s life partly atoned for his early hardships. Treated kindly by the people of Oroville, he became a brief celebrity, and soon Anthropologist Thomas T. Waterman of the University of California took him to San Francisco in the “white man’s demon,” a railroad train, and gave him comfortable quarters in a museum endowed by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, mother of William Randolph Hearst.

Professor Waterman and the museum’s chief, Professor Alfred Louis Kroeber, recognized Ishi as the unspoiled survivor of a vanished race. They soon became his devoted friends and admirers. When Ishi arrived in San Francisco, he had no words, even in Yahi, for most of the things he saw. English came slowly to him. Like many conservative, middle-aged men, he was a stickler for the proprieties. His native language had special forms to be spoken by men and women; for a man to use a female word when talking to other men was extremely bad manners. So Ishi masculinized all English words that sounded female to him. “Hat” became “hatna” and “sheep” became “sheepna,” both of them proper enough words for any well-bred male Yahi.

Obsidian Craftsman. Ishi was clean and neat; he had no trouble learning table manners and the use of the white man’s tools, vehicles and money. With his own Stone Age tools he was a master craftsman. Biographer Kroeber, the widow of Ishi’s friend, Professor Kroeber, tells how he deftly chipped glass-sharp arrowheads out of obsidian. Using only stone tools, he made powerful bows out of wood and sinew. He shot his beautifully feathered arrows from a crouching position, so as not to scare the game by standing up. As a huntsman he was superb, hiding in thickets and attracting animals by displaying a stuffed deer head or making strange little noises with his lips.

For more than five years, until he died in 1916, Ishi lived with his late-found white friends. He taught them hauntingly touching stories from Yahi folklore and took them hunting in his people’s ancient home under Lassen Peak, where he knew every ledge and thicket. Willingly he explained how the last survivors of the Yahi had hidden skillfully for more than 40 years close to the white man’s towns. But when Ishi was questioned about the fate of his family and the friends of his youth, he turned silent and sad, as if he were once again among his people’s enemies.