Bear Grease - Ep. 364: Ishi - The Last Stone Age Man

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

On August 29, 1911, the last survivor of the Yahi people wandered into Oroville, California, naked, starving, and carrying with him a history and language unknown to the outside world. This is the story of Ishi, a man who endured the extermination of his tribe and went on to leave a lasting mark on modern bow hunting and linguistics. Host Clay Newcomb guides the narrative, joined by traditional archery historian Gene Hopkins, to explore Ishi’s extraordinary life and legacy. If you have comments on the show, send us a note to [e-mail] Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days in real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. They're in concealment, doing everything they can to hide. They go so far as to only walk on rock. They don't walk on dirt where they could leave a track. They go from rock to rock.

They travel the waterways, so they don't leave a track. They never, when they're going through brush, break a branch. They always bend the branches as they're going through. They get out on all fours and crawl like a bear through the brush. so it looks like it's a bear where there are a lot of grizzly bears in California at that time. Forty years, they live in concealment. I want to tell you the story of a man who stepped out of the Stone Age

into the modern world in 1911 as the last surviving member of the Yahi tribe. He lived in complete secrecy in the wild lands of Northern California his entire life amidst the extermination, of his people. His interface with modern anthropologists at the University of California gave incredible insight into the lives of North America's last surviving most primitive people and his arrival to Berkeley, California made national news. We don't know his real name,

but they called him Ishi. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. Just a note before we begin. This is a bit confusing to me, but I hear rumblings of it being inappropriate to refer to Native Americans as Indians. However, all the Native people that I have personally met have conveyed to me their comfort with the naming convention, so we'll be using it here. My intent is to bring respect and dignity to the Native community, and I hope that translates 100%. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Greece podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight and unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.

Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. Now, this is interesting because almost all of the books you'll read and the stories that you hear say the emergence was August 29, 1911. The morning, the early morning of August 29th, in a stockyard outside of Oroville, the dogs are barking. The young boy comes out and sees this naked Indian cowering in the corner of the stockyard, yells, and the other people come out and they find Hishy kneeling in the corner of one of the fences. The sight must have been unnerving to the men in the stockyard. The Yana Indians were believed to have been completely gone from the rugged region of northern California since the early 1890s. However, for nearly two decades, there had been rumors of a small band of Indians still in the mountains north of Oroville.

Indigenous people were still viewed as dangerous enemies of American progress. This was still a real vibe. You're hearing the voice of a man named Gene Hopkins. So the emergence, again, he's been by himself since 1908. He's hungry, he's lonely, he's starving, and you can imagine living three years by yourself in the mountains. The loneliness must have been excruciating. So in 1911, he decides that he's going to, I'm going to go down. I know I go down, I may not come back.

I probably won't come back. They'll either kill me or they'll hang me. But I'm going to go down there and see what happens. The man was in dire straits, physically and psychologically. His hair was burned off close to his scalp. He was naked except for an old scrap of a covered wagon canvas that he had wrapped around his shoulders. He was stoic and bewildered like a man walking into certain death.

These people he was now engaging with had killed off every single one of his family and his tribe. He'd watched it happen in his lifetime. So one way or the other is she is found in the stockyard, starving, can't communicate with anybody. The people of the stockyard are sympathetic. They call the local sheriff. The local sheriff from Orville comes over, recognizes this man, they think he might be insane. This man. This man, needs help. He's starving. He can't communicate. We've got to find out what the story is here. So the sheriff takes him back to Horvill and puts him in the jail, puts him in the cell that they reserve for the insane. Sheriff J.B. Weber came and took the man without incident. He spoke no

English and made no effort to communicate. Over the course of the next 24 hours, Yana and Spanish speakers came, but none could communicate with the man. It was a mystery who he was. He said, was where he came from, what tribe he was from. The next day, the San Francisco call newspaper ran an article in a photo with the headline, Aborigine whose tongue no man can understand, last of the wildest Indian tribe in America. And he would become known as the wild man of Oroville. They believed him to be around 50 years old. Now, at this time, the local newspapers are starting to write stories about a wild man found captured in Oroville.

Could he be the Indians that we've been hearing about over the last several years that have been raiding? Could he be one of the lost Yahi? Could he be one of those tribe we thought was extinct? Rumors that circulated that there were Indians still in the Deer and Mill Creek area of Butte County, California, but they were just rumors. In 1906, a hat sewn with hide and sinew had been picked up near a man's cabin where some supplies were stolen. In 1908, surveyor scouting for the building of Lake Oroville claimed they saw a naked Indian fishing with a harpoon on deer creek. This would be treated with the same skepticism today as someone claiming to see a big foot. The room where Gene Hopkins is

telling us this story is probably one of the most unique in America. There are over 2,500 traditional bows on the walls along with arrows, quivers, stone points, hunting artifacts, and antlers of all kinds. This is Gene's personal bow hunting museum in Columbus, Indiana. Gene is no billionaire. This museum was founded on pure passion for bow hunting, bordering on obsession. It's not open to the public, just to people that he meets, that are interested. To comprehend its significance, you'd have to be belly button deep

in the weeds of bow hunting history. You see, Native Americans archery hunted, then archery died way down with the advent of rifles and the breakup of the traditional lifestyles of the tribes. But in 1911, it was a spark that started a bow hunting renaissance in America. And that spark walked into the Oroville Stockyard on August 29th.

More on this ahead. Gene owns some bows of Saxon Pope, Art Young, Will Compton, and Fred Bear. Maybe those names are familiar to you, but if they're not, these men are the Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt's of modern bow hunting. But perhaps the most prized artifact will fit in the palm of your hand. It's an original stone point made by a yahee Indian first called the Wild Man of Oroville. Yes, he has an actual stone point made by the man who would become known to the world as Ishi. Those newspaper articles were read by two anthropologists from the University of California,

professors Thomas Waterman and Alfred Krober. They had big questions of where this man came from, what tribe he'd come from, and what his story was. Waterman was a professor of anthropology at the University of California. Waterman sees these stories. Waterman had actually come to Oroville in 1908 because he had heard the story of the surveyors. This was the first proof that the yahee might still exist in 2008 when the surveyors went into the mountains. So he goes in 1909 and goes up into Grizzly Bear's hiding place and actually tries to find those last surviving Yahi. unsuccessfully. Okay, now 1911, two years later, he's seeing newspaper articles coming out to

Oroville about the Yahi wild man being captured in Oroville. He's in the jail down there. He wires the sheriff and says, hold this man. Because I think this may be one of those Yahi, the surveyors saw three years ago. So the sheriff holds him. Waterman gets on the train, comes to Oroville, And he's interviewing basically Ishi, sitting on the bench, sitting on this bed next to Ishi. And he's trying to communicate with Ishi. The Yahi language has disappeared with the Yahi people. They're part of the Yana. They're a sub-trib of the Yana.

So there is some similarity between the languages, but not a lot. He had a book of Yana language. So he was going through the Yana words. and he was trying to see if he could get any recognition. He was going through Medu. He was going through all the different dialects of all the tribes in that area. And he's almost exhausted every avenue he had.

And he gets down almost to the end of the list. And he says one word, and his eyes light up. And it's a word issue recognizes. Sawini. Sawini. Yellow pine. And Waterman goes, Sawini, yellow pine, soini. And he knocks on the bed, is made a pine.

And Ishi laughs, and that was the point of recognition. And Waterman looks at him and says, yeah, you're a yahi. You are a yahi. It can't be. Yahi are extinct. You're a yahi. And that's where now we know for the first time, Ishi is a yahi. The communication was powerful for both men.

knowing he was Yahi, Waterman was able to have a level of primitive communication with him, but what Waterman didn't know yet was that Ishi hadn't talked to another human in three years. And in that first conversation, Ishi asked Waterman, I Nima Yahi, are you Indian? To which Waterman simply answered yes. The comfort of hearing his own language coming from the mouth of another human was visor. visible on his face and it's likely hard for us to even grasp what that would feel like. This is the part of the story though where we've got to go back to understand the last century

to understand how Ishi got here. Ishi had lived his entire life in the wilderness evading modern American civilization. Many tribes had been killed out completely, some assimilated and others were forcefully moved to reservations, but the Yahy managed to retreat deeper and deeper into the wilderness, never using any modern tools, guns, or steel. It was as if they lived in the Stone Age, right under the nose of a civilization that had cars, electricity, and airplanes had flown in the air. 1903, Kitty Hawk.

Ishi had no concept of modern civilization except what he saw in distant valleys from the tops of ridges and when he made raids to get food under the cover of darkness. It was said that they never took canned food, just fresh food. They may not have understood what the glass canned food was. Later, Waterman would learn that Ishi's mother taught him that the trains they heard whistling in the valleys were demons that followed white men. The Yonah used the word salto for whites,

which meant being from another order or a non-human. When Waterman asked Ishi his name, he told him that he had been alone so long that he had no one to give him a name. The Yahi never speak their own name, only others can. This is really interesting and stands in stark contrast to the individualistic Western world, where a child is often taught that their own name is the most special in all the world. It's interesting that individualism was found inside of, of community. When Waterman was finally asked by reporters what the man's name was, he just said, we're

going to call him Ishi, which means man in Yahi. Ishii simply means man. And to our knowledge, he would never reveal his true name to anyone in white society. No one really knows. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest.

It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com.

I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. California became the 31st state in 1850, but we need to understand what was going on there to understand Ishi's life and the Yahis story. Well, if we go back in history, we can look at California, Northern California, and the tribes that lived in Northern California in that early 1800s time frame, we're going to zero in on the YANA. And the Yonah were a tribe that lived up east of the Sacramento River,

just south of Oregon, in an area that was about 60 miles long, deep, and about 40 miles wide. And in that 4,400 square mile that the Yana occupied, there were about 3 to 5,000 Yana Indians. Now, the Yana Indians consisted of three different subgroups, the northern Yana, the central Yana, and then the southern Yana. And then below those was the Yahi.

All of those are going to come together to complete the story of Ishi. Ishi came from the area. area of the Yahi. Now, if you go back in the yahi culture, they were living in some of the remote, most desolate, hard-to-reach areas of Northern California. So they were pretty well undisturbed as the country was filling up going west. It's estimated that 300,000 Native Americans lived in pre-European settlement, California, constituting 21 separate nations with languages as different as English and French. It included 113 dialects. In her book, Ishi in Two Worlds,

which is an incredible book that I would suggest if you want to learn more by a woman named Theodora Krober. She said that only parts of the Sudan and the island of New Guinea offer so much language variety within comparable areas. She said that extreme language differences take a long time and they believe California to be inhabited immemorial long. Interestingly, the Yahi language has a different dialect for men and women, which is extremely rare. Men spoke to men in a certain way and they spoke to women in a completely different dialect. That is wild.

At its peak, Ishi's Yahi tribe likely only had four or five hundred people and they spoke. And their territory was roughly 300 square miles. Their entire nation could be walked across in three or four days. So in about that time period, we start to see something really big and really important happen. They found gold in California. So in 1849, we see the gold rush. And from just a few thousand people living in California during the Spanish and the Mexican time, Now we're having 100,000 people a year come from the east to California to find fortune and gold.

But the Yana still were living in this area of northern California that's still fairly remote. The Yahi were living in an area on the south side of that 2400 square miles that was really remote, really does it, really hard to get into. Now when the prospector start to come, a flood of prospector. come. And they've more or less take their wagon trains right through the middle of YANA country. And the Yana, some of the Yana were living in the lowlands, some were easily inhabited, more friendly living spaces. Those people were almost immediately impacted by the prospectors coming over. So that three to five thousand people are seeing this rush of prospectors, miners, and surveyors coming across the mountains, invading their territory. It wasn't a lot of,

all that friendly because in 1850 it was actually legal in California for these white prospectors and these settlers to actually indenture captured natives. And they would capture young natives and put them in indentured servitude. They'd be your housemaid. That was legal in California in the 1850s. So the anna, now we're talking about the anna, which are north of where Ishi and the yahi were, they're seeing their numbers dwindle, and they're also seeing white man's disease. It's not just them coming in and killing all the deer and starving the Indians out, or all that's happening, but they're also bringing disease. All kinds of diseases the Indians have never had before. And the aniana go from three to five thousand people in that 1850s time

frame to just a few hundred by the 1860s, early 1860s. It's a lot of the 1860s. It's a lot of amazing how quickly things turned and those people just lost their culture. That was the Yana. Now we move south of where the Yana were and we go down into the Ishi country, the Yahi country. It's a different story. Those people aren't really impacted yet because they're, again, this is pretty inaccessible country. But then they start giving land grants out and the land grants are starting to grant the settlers' areas they're going into the Yahi country. And their impact, they're impact is starting to reach the Ahi. They're getting more and more pushed into the mountains, into the higher elevations of the mountains, the Ahi. And there starts to be conflict, because just as

anybody would, you and I would probably be the same way. If our families are threatened, our families are starving, our livelihoods have been taking away from us. What are we going to do? We're going to find a way to feed our family. So they started raiding some of the ranches. They started raiding some of the ranches in the springs, after their sources have dried up, all the salmon and deer that they have put away, have exhausted during the winter, they start to raid the ranches in the springs because there's nothing to eat and we don't have anything else. So they start raiding the ranches for food. That triggers a lot of animosity from the ranchers. And the ranchers start singling out the ahi for extermination.

Now, one of the things I've learned reading through the books over the years is, you know, when I first started hearing the stories of Ishi, the last Stone Age wild Indian, my mind thought that Ishi had never knew white man existed. Ishi was on this island or this planet where he didn't even know there was such a thing as a white man. That's not true because his culture, his ancestors have been fighting with the, white man and the Mexicans and the Spanish since the 1830s and 40s. I didn't know that, but it's true. What happened was Isish's tribe, Isis people are getting pushed further and further and further up into the mountains, into the more desolate areas,

to escape the persecution that they were getting from the settlers. It was a nasty, you know, that probably, you know, we're looking at 4,000-plus Yana and Yahi killed. during that 10 to 15-year period, exterminating an entire culture. There were not just the state government. Cities were paying for scalps. Cities were offering 50 cents a scalp. Other cities would bring a dollar a scalp.

The government, in one year, 1850, the state of California, paid a million dollars downy-eown scalps. You know, there were, just to put it in perspective, when you think about what's going on. At the time this is happening, the state of California is paying a million dollars a year and pounding for scalps. Whole tribes, cultures of people are being wiped out,

mercilessly, men, women, and children. And at the same time, in the cities, in Chico, in the cities around the area, there are ball fields of young people playing sports. There are theaters, there's civilization at it, finest, and we're killing indiscriminately men, women, and children in the mountains just outside of the towns.

So, okay, now we go, we're in the 1860s. The Yahi probably were a people of about four to 500 before all this really started. They were never a big tribe. But when all this started, in a period of just 10 years, they had been taken down to maybe there were 40 to 50 Yahi left. That was all that was left. and we start to see some really big events. And you can think a civilization, a culture that's down to its last 40 or 50 people,

that civilization is going to die. One person removed from that chain of reproduction is going to impact that tribe. But we start to see the landowners now have taken a vengeance on the AHA, and they're sending raiding parties up into the mountains. they're sending vigilantes up into the mountains. They're sending the army up into the mountains to get these guys who are raiding their cabins. Well, they're raiding their cabins because they're starving to death.

They're raiding your cabins because you have killed all their deer. You have taken everything they've got, and this is the only way they have left to survive. In that early 1860s time frame, we've now seen the tribe being decimated. Around probably 1861 to 1862 is when, issue was born. We don't know for sure. The only thing we know is after he was captured, Dr. Pope, Saxton Pope, in the medical exam, said his age appears to be around 50. So he extrapolated

that back to issue must have been born in the early 1860s. And then we take the stories from the tribe and from the settlers, from the ranchers, from the vigilantes about the raids and about the eyewitness accounts of seeing three Indians, a woman with a small child, then a woman with a middle-aged child, and then a woman with a teenage boy, that was all issue. So everything together puts his time of birth around 1861, 1862.

I think that's interesting, you know, that issue was living through all of this vigilante. He was seeing all this. And when you think about, now keep this in mind when we get, to Ishi after his capture. He's an eyewitness to his whole tribe being murdered. He's an eyewitness to the extinction of a people, the last of his tribe.

But when we get to Ishi in captivity, Ishi being transformed from the last Stone Age Indian to civilized man, I'll quote, air quote, civilized. He was the most joyful, the most cheerful. He never, ever. came across as vengeful, never, very happy, very cheerful, didn't talk about a lot of things, but how could you do that? How could you witness everything that he went through and be so cheerful? All humans are capable of putting on a happy face in the midst of grief, but by all accounts, Ishi would become known as friendly, kind, and generous to those that he got close to.

I want to mention something about the use of the word civilized when referring to Native Americans. It's partly ease of semantics in describing two ways of life with living in towns using modern technology described as civilized and the hunter-gatherer lifestyle as primitive. And there's kind of a derogatory sense of civilized is a higher way of life. In describing a primitive lifestyle, you kind of get this idea that there were just wild, unintentional people just living the best they could, but that is not true. It's completely worth noting that indigenous people had built an intentional, robust civilization for thousands of years, likely more complex than those living in the California

cities. So to say they were uncivilized is really not accurate. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps's Game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts now i'm going to tell you i love mine because it's easy to use i'm not going to go i'm not going to win a turkey calling contest it's just not going to happen but when i run this call i get the sounds that gobblers are looking for i have a great turkey hunting track record if you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods

they're not going to win calling contests right that's who i listen to i can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did and you'll find out that the Steve

Rinella cut is an easy to use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Vigilantes were sent to literally hunt Indians. In an 1868 the massacre at Kingsley's

cave was believed to completely wipe out the Yahi when the remaining 12 to 15 were killed in a single event by people from the town who gathered up to kill the Indians when they trapped them in a cave. Ishi would have been a young boy at this time, so it couldn't have been all of them. So in that Battle of Kingsley's Cave in 1868, for a period of several years, there were no incidents. There was no no evidence that there were any yahee left. But then we start to see in the early, well, the mid-1880s, we start to see stories, we start to hear stories of evidence of maybe there are some yahee left.

We start to see cabins being raided again. We start to see evidence of Indians leaving sign. We start to hear about people being in the mountains and seeing Indians. So maybe the a year not extinct after all. According to Krober in her book, those 12 years from 1872 to 1884, quote, the concealment of those 12 years was complete. Not a footprint, not a telltale bit of ash or a wisp of smoke from fire was seen. Not a single broken arrow shaft or a lost spear point or a remnant of a milkweed rope.

They traveled sometimes long distances by leaping from boulder to boulder, their bare feet never leaving a print. And if they did, each footprint on the ground was covered with dead leaves. Their trails went under heavy chaparral. Even deer sought more open spaces. They never chopped. The sound of chopping being the unmistakable announcement of human presence. They kept their fires small. End of quote.

Remember, we're piecing together. story of how Ishi ended up at that stockyard alone in Oroville on August 29th, 1911. So you go further down into the story of Ishi, now we're after Kingsley's Cave, and now we're down to the last five of the Yahi. There were Ishi, is either sister or cousin, Ishi's mother, an older man, and a middle-aged man. The middle-aged man dies somewhere along the line during this concealment period. Now, after Kingsley's Cave, the Yahweh more or less are in concealment. They just now have done, they know they can't fight anymore. They know the only way to survive is to be concealed.

So they go up into the highest part of the mountains, the most difficult part of the mountains, the most thick part of the mountains. and the last five Yahi now are in concealment for a period between 1870, 1872, until 1911. About 1908, I'll go back to 1908. They're in concealment, doing everything they can to hide. They go so far as to only walk on rock. They don't walk on dirt where they could leave a track. They go from rock to rock.

They travel the waterways, so they don't. leave a track. They never, when they're going through brush, break a branch. They always bend the branches as they're going through. They get out on all fours and crawl like a bear through the brush. So it looks like it's a bear. There are a lot of grizzly bears in California at that time. Forty years, they live in concealment. The middle-aged man dies mysteriously. I can't find any evidence of what happened to him. Did he die? Was he killed? Did he see? starve, I don't know. Now we're down to the last four. They find an area in the thickest part of the last concealment area. That's maybe an area of about three miles long and maybe a half

mile wide. And this is where they spend the last 30 years of Isch's life. Some of the most compelling human stories of all time are of people hiding under the threat of persecution. I immediately think of Anne Frank, whose family hid from the Nazis, but make no bones about it. The Yahi were targets of genocide. And it's hard to imagine what they went through hiding out for 30 years right under the nose of civilization. Theodora Krober says that ethnologists are agreed that they pursued a way of life most totally Aboriginal and primitive of any on the continent, at least after the coming of white man to America. Can you imagine the psychology?

Can you imagine their prayers? Theodora's husband was Al Krober, Alfred Krober, who interacted with Ishi. We'll see. He called Ishi's band, quote, the smallest free nation in the world, which by an unexampled fortitude and stubbornness of character, succeeded in holding out against the tide of civilization, 25 years longer than Geronimo's famous band of Apaches?

So in the concealment, you know, they were so effective, Ishi and his family, and, you know, the last four survivors were so effective during the concealment that they were thought to be extinct. Until around 1885, they start to be desperate and more and more desperate, and they start to raid the cabins again, and they start to leave a little bit of evidence. actually get caught a couple of times, breaking into cabins. And one guy came and caught them red-handed, leaving the cabin, leaving his cabin with their hands full of food and clothing and things like that.

But this is a guy who understands, and the yahi come out, and issue is probably one of those that comes out of the cabin. He would have probably been at that time 20 years old. They come out of the cabin, and they're caught red-handed, and here's the guy standing with a rifle. They don't have rivals, and they expect the worst. But he just looks at him, and one of the four that came out of the cabin was a lady, an Indian lady. And she speaks in broken English slash Spanish that she's, this is for our children, you know, that we're starving. And he said, okay, okay, you can have it. You just go.

You can have it. No problem. That was in the spring. that fall, his cabin was broken into again, and nothing was taken. They came and they left him some baskets. Probably, thank you for this spring. Here's a little bit of something in return, a token of gratitude. So there's the good and the bad.

You know, not every rancher in the area was bad. When I hear this story, it validates to me that it's okay to stand against the trends as an outlier. That rancher's culture and even the law would have been okay with him killing those people who were stealing from him, but he chose mercy. Here's another story of contact with the outside world that wasn't so good. They've been in concealment since 1872. In 1908, a party of surveyors are going up into the mountains. Remember the Yahi, these last four now, Yahi, are living in an area maybe a half mile wide, maybe three miles long. That's their entire world.

These surveyors happen into their camp, and these last four survivors were so careful of building their camp so it couldn't be seen. They built it in the thickest undergrowth. They built it so it couldn't be seen from above. They disguised all their trails. They never walked the same path to the river more than once so that they didn't make a trail. Well, these surveyors just happened into their camp. and probably Ishi and the sister and the old man ran into the bushes as they saw the

surveyor's coming. The old woman is she's mother. She's too frail. She can't. So they hide her under some blankets. The surveyors come into camp and they start looking around and they find the bed where the mother is and they raise the blanket and they think it's an infant. because she's so small, she's so starved,

she looks so small that they think at first she's a young person, and then they look at her face, they uncover her face, and they realize she's an old lady. And she's scared that they're going to kill her, and they try to reassure her, we're not going to hurt you, we're not going to hurt you, and they don't.

But what do they do? Here are these last four survivors. Everything they own is in this camp. They call it Grizzly Bears hiding place. And as they leave, they don't hurt the old lady, but they raid everything in the camp. They steal the blankets. They steal the bows and arrows. They steal the things that they cook with, and they take it as souvenirs.

Now, one of those people in the white people that were in that, I'll call it a raid, was this gentleman named Apperson. He doesn't feel good about it. what's happening here. And he tries to leave her something. He goes through his pocket. He goes through his pack, and he's trying to find something to leave her as a gift. And he can't find anything. So he doesn't. He just, you know, they pack up everything and they leave. Now, what do they do? They just took everything that these people needed to survive. And they took it as souvenirs. And they left this old lady laying there. Yishi and the sister cousin and the old man were probably

off in the bushes watching all this happen. They knew they couldn't do anything. They didn't have any way to defend themselves. They knew these people doing the rating had rifles. There was nothing they could do. So those people left. They come back the next day. Apperson comes back the next day with a couple other people to check on the old lady, and the old lady's gone. So Ishii had come back and got her because the sister-cous and the old man went out the camp one direction. Ishi went out to camp the other direction. He never saw the sister-cousin again. He never saw the old man again.

He thinks in later years that they probably drowned as they were trying to escape. They got down in the water in the creek and probably drowned. So issue comes back after those people left, souvenir hunters stole everything and left. Ishi comes back and gets the old woman, his mother. And he takes her away. We don't know what happened to her. He never told us.

what happened to her. How long did she live? We don't know. But in between that time of 1908, when Grizzly Bear's hiding place was raided in 1911, when Ishi was found in the stockyard, he was by himself. So she died somewhere soon after that.

After Ishi's mother died in 1908, he remained alone until August 29th, 1911, when he walked into the stockyard in Oroville, assuming he was walking into his own death. But let's fast forward just six days later to September 4th, 1911. Ishii has been staying in the Oroville jail. And remember, Professor Waterman has come down from the University of California at Berkeley, which is near San Francisco.

So Waterman then starts to communicate because, again, Ishi could understand a few Yonah words, But interestingly enough, because historically, the Yahi and the AHA had enough Spanish and Mexican interaction in the decades and the generations before. There were actually a few Spanish-Mexican words that were in the Yaha-Yahi language. So they start to build up very slowly a communication. They can start to communicate with each other. Waterman understands now what a treasure this man is. So within a week, within just a couple of days, he wires back to the university and he says,

I'm bringing this man back. And he gets permission to take Ishi into their care, takes him back to the University of California, where they have the University of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, School of Anthropology. On September 4th, 1911, just six days after Ishi came out of his wilderness homeland, And remember, this man was believed to be 50 years old. So 50 years in the wilderness. And on that day, he left with Professor Waterman. It headed to San Francisco, California.

This chanting, this singing that you've been hearing throughout this episode. I wanted to wait to the end to tell you that that is the actual voice of Ishi. That is him singing a Yahi song. Ishi would become the most important link to understanding the Stone Age world perhaps of all time In the next episode we'll follow Ishi into San Francisco

and his unthinkable transition into the modern world His massive contribution to modern archery And his untimely death Truly an incredible story We can't thank you enough For listening to this Bear Greece channel Thanks for listening to Brent's This Country Life podcast into Lakes, Backwoods University. Thank you all so much.

Keep the wild places wild because that's where the bears live. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. but when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for.

I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com.

I think you'll be glad you do. did and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy to use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.