Bear Grease - Ep. 374: Ishi - Brothers of the Bow

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

In this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, host Clay Newcomb continues the story of Ishi, known as “The Last Stone Age Man,” following his relocation from the small town of Oroville, California, where he emerged in 1911 to the museum in Berkeley, California. During this period, Ishi forms a remarkable friendship with Saxton Pope — the namesake of the Pope and Young Club. Archery historian Gene Hopkins joins Clay to explore Ishi’s transition and adaptation to modern society, as well as the circumstances surrounding his tragic death. 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.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. The story of Ishi, the last Yahi Indians showing up in Oroville, California, 1911, has got to be one of America's most fascinating stories. This episode is more redemptive in some ways than the first, but ultimately the scales tipped toward it being even more tragic.

These events took place between September 4th, 1911 and March 25th, 1916, when Ishi died. But it wouldn't be into the 1990s when Ishi's remains were put back into the dirt of his homeland that this story really ends. But if you're a bowhunter, the ripples of Ishii's life reverberate into our modern bow hunting culture more than you might know. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. And as a note, we interrupted this series for our Ted Cople interview, but we're back on track. And I hope that everyone is having a great start to the fall. And the medical doctor that they assigned Ishi to was Dr. Saxton Pope, Saxon Pope of the Pope and Young Club that we have today. Saxon Pope, father of bowhunting,

Saxon Pope was assigned to be the medical doctor for Ishi. Pope became Ishi's closest friend. and by all accounts, more so than Krober, more so than Waterman, more so than Sambawa. Pope was Ishi's best friend. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Greece podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in 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, Perletyl. purpose-built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. The singing we've just heard was the voice of a man who on August 29, 1911, wandered into a stockyard in Oroville, California.

His hair was singed near to the scalp in mourning. He was emaciated. The only clothing he wore was a shredded piece of canvas wagon cover. He spoke no English and appeared destitute. The local sheriff took him into the jail, where he stayed for several days and tell anthropologists from the University of California, who had read in the newspaper about a Stone Age man who could understand no man's language, had wandered into town, and these men came and got him.

Rumors had circulated for the last two decades that a small band of Yana Indians remained in a remote region of northern California in the deer and Mill Creek region, but few believed it was true. How could it be true? At one time, there had been bounties for the scalps of these Indians in the state of California, and they were the targets of a decades-long genocide.

But living the entirety of his 50 years of life and hiding, completely isolated from the technology of the Western world, one man remained. He never revealed his name, but was simply referred to as Ishi, which in his native language simply meant man. The story that this man would tell and the lessons he'd teach would alter the knowledge of Stone Age civilizations and dramatically alter the trajectory of archery. This is the story of Ishi's life from 1911 until 1916 before a tragic ending. In the last episode, we left off with Ishi, less than a week after his arrival in Oroville, heading to San Francisco, California with Dr. Waterman at the permission of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They would soon learn of the complexity of the culture of the Yahi, a sub-trib of the Yana.

This is archery historian Gene Hopkins of Columbus, Indiana. So he's, you know, they keep him in the Oroville jail just for a couple. couple three days until Waterman can get there. And Waterman gets there and he recognizes how important this find is, you know, this person is, and the contributions to our understanding of culture is going to be this guy is a gold mine for us. And he gets permission to take him back to the university anthropology department. And he takes this sheet and puts him on the train. And now Iishi, all the time he was living in the mountain.

When he was up on Mount Lassen, which was in the northeast part of their range, when he was on Mount Lassen, he could look down in the valleys and he could see the train. As a young man in the 1860s and 70s and 80s, when he was up on the mountain, he could watch that train go through the valleys. And his mother would tell him, that's the white man's, there was a word he used, monster, but you don't need to fear it because it never leaves. its tracks. It will not hurt you. It will never leave its tracks. Now here he is in 1911, only having been captured just a couple of days earlier, Waterman's taking him to the train station and putting him

on that train. And can you imagine coming out of a culture that was truly Stone Age, and within two days you're on a train, and you're going to the big city, and you're seeing buildings and the vehicles and the trains and everything that goes on inside a big city in 1911, modern society. So when issue gets on the train and they're taking, Waterman's taking

him back to the University, the University of California and Berkeley, and they're going into, you know, they're leaving a civilization, a culture that's truly Stone Age. And he's lived with nothing but a bow and arrow. He's lived with nothing but fire and fire starters. He's lived having to

kill or catch or harvest anything and everything that he would eat except what he would raid from the cabins. But he would never take, you know, he'd never take any canned goods. He would only take the stores that were not canned because they didn't understand what canned goods were. He didn't understand there were food inside those cans. But here he is, just two days after being captured. He's on a train going back to the big city. He'd never seen more than 40 people. And now he's in a city where there's hundreds of thousands of people. It must have been mind-blowing for him. Can you imagine what was going through his head?

It must have been intimidating. It must have been scary. But he didn't show it. He didn't show it. He was very inquisitive. He was fascinated. His demeanor and his actions. He didn't try to escape.

He didn't try to run. It was pure fascination. So Waterman gets Ishi back, and they introduce Ishi to Alfred Krober, who was Waterman's partner in the Anthropology Department. And Crobert takes Ishi basically under his wing, and they give him a place to live in the museum there at the Department of Anthropology. They don't want Ishi to feel like he's a captured inmate. They want Ishi to feel comfortable. They want the issue to feel welcome. They want him to feel like this could be your home.

And Ishii is, again, fascinated, everything going on around him, so inquisitive about everything he's seeing. And inside the anthropology department, you know, there's a lot of items. And included in those items, there are a lot of cadavers and a lot of skeletons and things that, you know, issue in his way of... thinking in his culture was pretty intimidating. So that's something he had to get used to, you know, that they would try to keep Ishi apart from the skeletons and all the remains

that they would have in a typical anthropology department. It's interesting and not surprising that Ishi had issues with the Native American remains stored at the University of California. All he'd ever known was the way his culture dealt with the dead, likely cremating them, but the details of all this remain a mystery. But here, these people were storing human remains in boxes. 79 years later, a U.S. federal law called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 would require institutions to return human remains and funeral objects to the tribes if requested.

Later, that very law would affect Ishi's remains. So Ishi was big news now, big news across the country. Last Wild Man, captured in California. I use the analogy, if we would today capture a big foot, and we would bring him down and we would put him on display, right? And it would make newspaper headlines across the world. That's the way it was with Ishi. Newspapers across the country were telling the story of Ishi on the front page.

So people were coming from all over the country. to see this last wild man. So now, Krober and Waterman are trying to figure out why. What am I going to do? How are we going to do this? We can't just open it up. You know, we can't just let everybody come in, which they did for a couple of weeks. It got kind of out of hand.

And then they decided, no, we're going to have to schedule time. We're only going to have a couple of hours in the afternoon. People can come by and see Ishi. So they give Ishi new clothes, pants, shirt, a jacket, tried to give him shoes. He wouldn't take the shoes. And then they would set up greeting a meet-and-greetz, more or less, for people to come in. And people, local school kids were coming, dignitaries were coming from across the country to meet Ishi.

Krober would introduce Ishi I would like you to meet Mr. Smith. And Ishi would try to, as best, to pronounce the name because he was very respectful. That's another thing about Ishi. And the Yahi culture must have been a very respectful culture. So it was very important to him when he would be introduced to somebody that he would be able to repeat your name. And he would try his best to pronounce. And his articulation was very good. So, you know, if she was a smart man, he was a very smart man.

He just hadn't been taught the things of our culture. He was taught the things of his culture. But he picked up the things of our culture very quickly. And at that time, anthropology was a fairly new science. So we have T.T. Waterman and we have Alfred Krober, the two anthropology professors there at the University of California. Waterman takes him back there and then Krober, they start to study more and more of Ishi. And they're actually starting to build now. They teach Ishi a few words of English. Ishi teaches them a few words of Yahi. And over a period of time, Ishi gets to the point where he has a vocabulary of about 500 English words.

but he would take a lot of those words in Yahi eyes. Because in the Yahi language, it was actually a dual language. Women spoke one way, men spoke another way. So a good example. Let's use the word hat. In English, it's hat. Yahi would have a word for hat, Yahi word for hat. Well, let's pretend it's English.

So the women would say hat. The men would say hatna. So they would put a suffix on the back of their words. So when a man was speaking to a man, this was a hat. Now, when a woman was speaking to a woman or a man was speaking to a woman, it was a hat. So as he learned English, a lot of his words, he would do that. He would put the male suffix on the end of a lot of his words. So when you listen, you can actually go out and Google, go to YouTube.

There's some stories out there where they actually read. recorded ishi talking. There are wax recordings. There are 147 or 148 different wax recordings of Ishi talking and singing and telling Yahi stories. So you can hear his voice today. There are five hours and 41 minutes of recordings of Ishi talking and singing in Yahi, recorded by Waterman and Krober. Here's a clip of Ishi describing the history of the Yahi language. Ishizu Kornwa'i'a-a-law-a-lawed-e Ishizhi's life barely overlapped with the technology making it possible to record his voice. Can you imagine the life that the man lived who you've just heard?

On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a full of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence.

Indications were he should be right there. But he was. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwards. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something.

I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Gene is now going to tell us about another relationship that Ishi had. And for many of us, this relationship might be the one that impacts us the most today. Now, interestingly, again, one of the books which I give credibility to, Dr. Saxton Pope. So when Ishi was brought to the university, the first people that he was introduced to Waterman, who came to Oroville to get him. Krober was the other anthropologist when they took him back to the university.

Krober became a big part of his life, actually became closer to him than Waterman. But then there was also a medical doctor. And a medical doctor that they assigned Ishi to was Dr. Saxton Pope. Saxon Pope of the Pope and Young Club that we have today. Saxon Pope, father of bowhunting, Saxon Pope was assigned to be the medical doctor for Ishi. Pope became Ishi's closest friend, by all accounts. More so than Krober, more so than Waterman, more so than Sambala.

Pope was Ishi's best friend. Ishi would call him Pope. He wouldn't say Pope, he would say popi. Remember, again, the Ahi had. the suffix they would put on the end of the words. So Pope became Popey. Popey was his best friend. One account says that Ishi actually shared his real name with Pope.

And I believe the story, the book is very credible. But Pope, out of respect for Ishi, never told anybody what his name was. So did he? We don't know. Could. Likely, I think. Pope did know his real name, but he never shared it. So now we're into late 1911.

I think this is really critical. We talk about Saxton Pope and how important Saxton Pope was to us as bow hunters. Saxon Pope wrote the book 1923, Hunting with the Bow and Arrow. That book was a combination, a culmination of a lot of stories and a lot of things he learned from Ishi, how to hunt with Yahi style, how to call, how to decoy, how to make equipment. A lot of that book, Hunting with the Bow and Arrow in 1923, was a lot of, what he learned from Ishi. That book is what really launched our sport. That book got Doug Easton into bo-hunting. That was a big deal. Now, Pope, so I'm going to back up now from that 1923 book,

which was the end, the result. The beginning of that was him being assigned to Ishy as his medical doctor. In 1912, in early 1912, Pope had been seeing Ishi since he was captured. A doctor, a doctor, doctor-patient relationship. In 1912, spring of 1912, Pope is looking out his office window, and he sees Ishi on the lawn shooting a bow. He's out there by himself shooting a bow. Pope gets up and walks out, and Ishi shows him how to shoot a bow. Ishi introduces Pope to the bow. Now, Pope had an interest in archery, but here is Ishi now taking Pope and teaching him out of shoot a bow, how to hunt with a bow. In 1912, that's when Pope became, more than his doctor.

That's when their friendship started. That's when they started to realize that they were brothers of the bow. And from that point forward, there weren't days go by that they weren't going out and shooting. That Ishi wasn't teaching Pope something about archery and hunting with the bow and arrow. Ishi's impact on Saxton Pope, who the Pope and Young Club would later be named after is immeasurable. That impact is. If you're not familiar, the Pope and Young Club is America's premier bow hunting conservation organization still in existence today.

Archery was on its way to being completely lost in a world enamored with the technology of the firearm. But some people still had interest in this archaic form of hunting. So by 1914, Ishi has been, he's gotten very comfortable with his life there at the university. They have made him an assistant janitor. They gave him a job. They figured Ishii was costing them about $25 a week for food and board. So they gave him a job as assistant janitor, and they gave him a salary of $25 a week. So Ishi, not just because they wanted him to earn his own living,

but more because they wanted him to have the pride that he was. living off of them, he was taking care of himself. He was making his own living. And he would take his $25 a week's salary. And they would, they taught him how to sign his name. He was paid via a check. And he would go down and cash the check. And then he would take his change back, or his cash back in half dollars. And he would take his 50 cent pieces and he would stack them into stacks of 20. And so he could count. And then he was in his cult. He never had to worry about thieves.

He never had to worry about somebody taking something that didn't belong to him. So he would keep all his money on his table. Pope and Krober both, that's not a good idea. So Krober took him back to the office and showed him the safe. And, issue, we can pick your money and we can put it in the safe here. And we'll have a little box and it'll have your name on it. This is yours and you can get it out anytime you want. but it's not wise to keep your money on the table like you've been doing.

So from that point on, Hishie kept his money in that safe. And he would spend about half of his weekly salary on ice cream and on food and things like that. He loved ice cream. But the other half he would take every week and put it into the bank. Can you imagine describing the value of currency to a 50-year-old man who walked out of the Stone Age? This coin represents value that you can go and trade for food and clothes and the stuff you need. Can you imagine describing to him the banking system? These people will keep your money safe. It must have been a wild concept, but he understood it

immediately. Here's more from Gene, giving us a picture of Ishi's new life in San Francisco. So, okay, in 1914, again, Ishi is very comfortable now. He's been making his own living. He's the assistant janitor. He's now picked up about four to five. hundred words of English. He's able to walk the city by himself. He's able to go shopping by himself. He's interacting. He's mingling. He's become part of the community. And he goes to, again, Pope is the doctor. Pope is one of the most noteworthy, successful, looked up to surgeons in the country. He's the head of the department, the surgery department at the University of California by the time he's in his mid-30s.

Pope would let Ishi come into the hospital with him and meet the patients. And Ishi would even wear a lab coat and walk into the room and sometimes by himself. He'd walk into the patient's room and look at the patient, not say anything, just look at the patient. And then he'd walk out. And the patients knew who he was. It wasn't like who was that guy. You know, they knew the story of Ishi. They knew who he was.

You know, he was a very respected, looked up to, again, cheerful. he was never in a bad mood, so he was good for people. So Ishii would come into the hospital. Pope would actually take him into the operating room, and Ishii would be able to observe Pope doing operations. And here's a man again. Three years ago was coming out of a Stone Age civilization, and now he's watching Pope perform surgeries, removing kidneys.

And Ishi was fascinated, obviously, by that. And so there were several stories about Ishi would debate Pope. on some of the treatments. Why do you do that? You don't need to do that. You just do this. You know, medicines and herbs and things like this. You don't need to cut him.

You can do this. And at other times, something really radical like removing the kidney, it was like, how will that man live? You know? Can you imagine three years ago you were in Stone Age and now you're watching surgeries,

removing a kidney, you're watching them recover and living? It was unbelievable. Oh, there is one story I want to tell. So remember when Ishi came down, for the last 40 years of his life, his world was four and five people. That was it. That was all the civilization he knew. Overnight, he's put into a civilization where there are thousands of people, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, riding trains, seeing cars, going to shows.

Well, they take Ishi to basically a Bodville show where there's a... singing and dancing and there's a beautiful lady singing and Ishi and Krober and Waterman and I think Pope are all at the show and Ishi they think Ishi would be really interested in the show but in reality Ishii is not even watching the show what is he fascinated by he's fascinated because this is the first time he's been in a room with so many people and they they just said it was like the show didn't exist The show to him was being in a room with hundreds of people at the same time. Think about Ishi.

Since he was 10 years old, his world is four and five people. A sister-cousin, a mother, an old man who might have been an uncle, and himself. He never had an experience of dating, of having a woman in his life. That was something that he never had the chance to experience. So when he went to the show, the newspaper guy was there, and he wrote a story. And his story was, he had a story he wanted to tell, regardless of what happened. He already had a story. And it was how issue was infatuated with the dancer.

And obviously he had, you know, thoughts of the lady. But in reality, all the people around him said he didn't even look at her. And I've got a picture of him and her and Waterman and Krober and Pope. after the show is over with. He doesn't care about her. He carried about the room full of people. That's what he cared about. They would take him,

and they thought he would be wowed by the buildings there at Berkeley and at San Francisco. He wasn't excited at all about the big buildings. They think that's because when he spent his years growing up in the mountains, it was nothing for him to be up on the side of the mountains. He was always up high.

He would jump from the side of the cliff onto a tree, never thought anything about it. He would get out on the ledges of the buildings and just walk the ledges. Didn't bother him at all. Heights didn't bother him at all. He wasn't fascinated by the big buildings. He was fascinated by the people. Now Gene's going to tell us about a trip that was proposed to Ishi. So 1914, Pope Waterman and Krober have the idea.

Ishi is at the peak of his health. He's no longer the emaciated, starved Indian that they found in 1911. He's a very healthy man now. You can see pictures of Ishi in 1914. He's a pretty muscled guy. They decide that wouldn't it be fantastic if we could take Ishi back up into the country where he came from? We could take him back up to the Ahi country. We can let him tell us and show us.

where all of these things happened, Kingsley's Cave Massacre, Grizzly Bears' hiding place. Let's go. Let's go up in the spring in 1914 and let's go back with Ishi. So they approached Ishi with this idea. And Ishi was not so good about that. He was not so comfortable with that. So was it because it brought back bad memories? I don't want to go back there.

That's where all my people were killed. Or was it because they thought, he thought, they might be taking him back. back there and they were going to leave him. We don't know what issue was thinking, but he wasn't comfortable with the idea going back. Finally, he relented. Finally, he said, okay, I'll go back. And they took one room of the museum, and that was their staging room and all the equipment they were going to take on the trip with them. They'd stage in that room. But there were also skeletons and things in that room. So, issue says, this is not good. I mean, you know, everything is just going to be polluted with bad spirits.

So they had to take all their equipment and wrap it up and show Ishi that it's wrapped up. It can't be exposed to the bad spirits and it's good and Ishi was fine. And then they went on a long pack trip, horse pack trip up into the area where the Ahee lived. And they spent a few weeks up there and Ishi loved it. He, by the time they started the trip, he was excited. So they go up into the mountains and he shows them where, you know, this is where I killed a bear. And he walks and he says here. And he starts digging in the ground and he actually finds the skull and the claws of the bear that he killed.

He found the spot where he buried the bear. Ishi buried a bear. This story confirms something that I've recently been learning about for my book project on the American Black Bear. Ceremonial disposal of bear remains was common across North America. Many animals they would dispose of without ceremony, but bear was different and required more effort. Some tribes threw bear bones into rivers and others buried them like humans.

This confused archaeologists for a long time leading them to believe that many tribes didn't eat bears because they didn't find bear bones in refuse piles. Only later would they learn about the ceremonial disposal practices. And going back to Ishi being concerned with their geesey, being stored in a room with human remains, I'd like to read a quote from Theodora Krober's book Ishi in Two Worlds, where she writes about his spiritual doctrine. This is what she said. He was an introvert, reserved, contemplative, and philosophical. He lived at ease with the supernatural

and the mystical which were pervasive in all aspects of life. He felt no need to differentiate mystical truth from directly evidential or material truth or the supernatural from the natural. One was as manifest as the other within his systems of values and perceptions and beliefs. The promoter, the boaster,

the aggressor, the egotist, the innovator would have been looked at askance. The ideal was the man of restraint, dignity, rectitude, he of the middle way. life proceeded within the limits of known and proper pattern from birth through death and beyond. End of quote.

I find fascinating the intersection of the spirit world and the natural world. I think these things are still relevant today. But let's get back to the trip to Ishi's homeland. He took them to the cave. He took them to the grizzly bears hiding place. In the grizzly bears hiding place, there were still. some things when they left, they left behind. There were some residues and remnants that the settlers hadn't stolen that were left behind.

They would swim in the creek. They would hunt. They would kill deer. Pope wanted to kill a deer. Ishi was teaching him out of hunt. Pope smoked, and Ischis said they went two days that they didn't kill a deer. Ishi said, you're not killing a deer because you're smoking. You have to quit smoking.

So Pope quit smoking. The next day he killed a deer. Ishi said, see, I told you, you know. So Ishi was imparting on them all of his wisdom about living in the country and making a living off the country. And so they spent a couple of months up there on the springtime adventure. It was Pope, it was Krober, it was Waterman. It was Pope's oldest son, Saxon Jr. And it was Ishi.

The ripples of this historic trip with Ishi teaching Saxton, Pope how to effectively kill game with a primitive bow are still being felt today. Many of the skills that modern bow hunters have and even take for granted, like how to wait before you track a bow shot animal and then blood trail it was likely learned from Ishi on this trip. But I've got to warn you, things are about to existentially change for Ishi. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road.

I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a full of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there. but he wasn't.

This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwards. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something.

I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And they come back and they make plans to go back in the fall. Well, in the fall, and then especially by the spring, issue started showing signs of sickness. So by the fall of 1914, he had a fever, he had a cough. They tested him for different things like tuberculosis.

negative tests. It's just a cold. It's just something going on. And then they planned to go in 1915. Well, in 1915, Ishi became more ill to the point where he wasn't able to make the trip. So they never made it back. They only made the one trip in 1914. Now, Ishi's health deteriorated from that point, although his TB tests were still showing negative. But at that time, in medicine, and TB tests were often negative. Even if he had been positive, it was not unusual to get a negative test. And by the fall of 1915 and early 1916, full-blown tuberculosis had come, and Ishi's health was getting poor.

And by March of 1916, Ishi died of tuberculosis. Now, if you know tuberculosis, it's a terrible, terrible, terrible death. and tuberculosis in the early part of the 1900s was a very common disease across the U.S. Waterman, and Krober's own wife, his first wife, had tuberculosis. Interesting because Ishi would go to Krober's house for dinner often. She would spend several nights staying at Krober's house. Krober's wife had tuberculosis. Could he have got the tuberculosis from his wife?

Krober's wife. Krober's wife passed away of tuberculosis in 1913. Or all the time that issue spent in the hospital with Dr. Pope, many patients in the hospital were there because of tuberculosis. Why weren't they shielding him from that? They knew that he was a compromised immunity because of his culture, because of his background. So some of the criticism, probably rightfully so. Why didn't they shelter him more?

Why didn't they protect him more from, you know, white man's disease? But he got tuberculosis. So he died. Pope was grief-stricken. This was his best friend. They were truly best friends. Waterman had left for Europe several months before that. Krober had gone to Europe.

Krober had gotten word that the tuberculosis test were positive now. He knew issues days were not. numbered, but he couldn't get back. He got all the way back to New York, but his business schedule kept him in New York. He was communicating via telegram back with the people at the hospital, keeping track of Ishi, knowing that he was progressively getting work or worse, eventually getting to the point where death is imminent, and he left word. There will be no autopsy. We will respect issue's culture. There is no need to do an autopsy. We know he died of tuberculosis. Science be damned. Science can go to hell, or the words that he wrote. There will be no autopsy.

And he sent the letter. He sent it via letter. The letter didn't arrive in time. Ishi died. Pope conducted an autopsy. Now he did it respectfully. Pope being a medical doctor, he didn't think like Krober is an anthropologist, but he did the autopsy. What wasn't talked about at the time was that he also took Ishi's brain, and they were studying the brain. Now, by 1917, Krober is back at the university again. Krober is over the emotional impact of Ishi dying. He knows that the brain is there. What are we going to do?

They'd taken the body and cremated what they thought was the Ahee desired for cremation. They took the body and cremated it, put it in a ceramic urn. The Ahi would have said put it in a basket and bury it. And they took it to the local cemetery and put it in more or less a mausoleum. But the brain stayed in the museum. In 1917, Krober sent a letter to the Smithsonian. There was a gentleman at the Smithsonian who was collecting brains from different civilizations, studying what, I don't know, why, I don't know.

But he had brains from all different cultures, all different civilizations. Krober made a deal to send Ischie's brain to the Smithsonian to this guy for his collection, his brain collection. And he did. He sent the brain to the Smithsonian in 1917. It didn't get cremated with the body. but this was all done kind of on the sly. And it wasn't talked about it.

It wasn't even people at the hospital didn't even know it. So the stories start to come out. Somehow people start to hear that issues brain had been removed. And they start to do some investigation. Where's the brain? What happened to it? We don't know. It's not here.

Being in the Smithsonian, people didn't know. So there were a couple of people that actually started on the trail, starting researching what happened to the brain. And in 1989, they found the letters where Krober had sent the communication to the guy at the Smithsonian about the brain. The guy had said, yes, I would love to have it. And they find evidence that it did get sent to the Smithsonian. But remember back, if you were alive in the 80s, there was this big native repatriation movement.

all, you know, you can no longer dig for artifacts, bones which people collected, private people collected bones, universities collected bones of natives. George Bush signed a law that those had to be repatriated if they were requested. So some local natives requested issues brain, they found out about the brain. They requested the brain and they requested the cremated remains so they could take it to the mountains and bury it as the Ahi would have wanted. So they found the cremated remains right away. It was common knowledge. People, it was there in the local cemetery, but the brain was a dead end. And it started, actually got a response from somebody who should have, and probably

did know better, that the brain had been incinerated because the Smithsonian didn't want it to get out. that they had the brain. They didn't want the bad publicity. So they disposed of it. The story was they disposed of it to prevent that from happening. We don't have it. In reality, they didn't. In reality, it was still there.

But it took several years of just two people digging before they got to somebody that knew where it was. And they found somebody who knew where it was and they got the brain and they took it back with the ashes, the cremated ashes, and they took it to the base of Mount Lassen there in the Yahi country

and they buried it. Now interesting, remember the cremated ashes were in an urn, ceramic urn. The urn, when they got it out of, basically the mausoleum, had a cement plug in it. So they couldn't open it to get the ashes out. They wanted to put the ashes in the ground.

So they had to break the urn open. When they broke it open, there were the ashes, there was some bone, there was some obsidian flakes in there, which Pope had put in before they cremated issue. And there was a letter that somebody had put in the urn, a yellowed piece of paper. After the cremation, the people doing the repatriation found the, that letter, it was folded up. And you know what? They never opened it. They never read it. They respected that whoever wrote it, put it in there as person to person. This is from them to issue. It's none of our business. So they buried it with the ashes and they buried the brain. They didn't incinerate the brain. They carried the brain from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.,

as carry-on baggage on a plane back to California, took it up into the mountains with the ashes, and buried the ashes along with the whole brain and the letter, and never opened the letter. We don't know who the letter was from. Speculation, it was probably Pope. That was his best friend. What did it say?

No idea. Fascinating. Ishi's contribution to linguistics, anthropology, and our understanding of indigenous Americans is hard to quantify. But what we can quantify is Ishi's contribution to archery. I want to hear about this from Gene, a man who's dedicated his life to archery. So Ishi's contribution to us, you know, as we said here today, in a room full of archery and bull hunting. And, you know, my life, I've, you know, I've been hunting with the bow and arrow for 60 years.

It's all I've ever done. I told you my first big game animal were grasshoppers. the cow pasture when I was five and six, seven years old. I thought that was a big deal, you know, to me a grasshopper was a big game hunt. I was out there with my bow and arrow, shooting grasshoppers and putting them in my pocket and then take them to the farm pond and catching bluegills and bass. What Ishi did for us in that day, on that day in 1912, when Pope looked out that window and saw Ishi shooting the bow, and Pope left his office and went down there and started shooting with him. And from that point, they go up into the mountains in 1914, and they go hunting.

and Ishii's teaching Pope how to hunt white-tailed deer and how to call and how to decoy and how to get close. And then Ishi dies and Pope continues. And something that I think not many people know or understand too is how it all fits together. In 1915, Ishi was asked to be part of the Pan Pacific exhibition there in California. It's kind of like the World's Fair. Ishi was on the show card for the Pan Pacific, 1915. Remember again, all across the country, Ishi was front page news.

One of the people who read one of those stories was Will Compton, Chief Compton. Chief Compton comes to the Pan Pacific in 1915 to see Ishi. He also goes to the Japanese archery exhibit, which is there that year too. And while he's there at the Japanese archery exhibit, this tall athletic man comes up and stands next to him, looking at the same exhibit, and Compton introduces himself to the man.

The man says, hello, I'm Art Young. Art, glad to meet you. Do you hunt with a bow and arrow? Do you shoot a bow and arrow? No, I think I would like to. Well, why don't you come back and let's go meet this guy named Ishi and then they get friends with Pope because Pope is part of Ishi's circle.

So now we have Pope, Compton, and Young coming together because of Ishi. Ishi dies in 1916. Pope and Young continue to hunt across the world. They go to Alaska. They go to Africa. They hunt with their bow and arrow. They document their hunts. They write stories for the magazine.

They publish books about hunting with a bow and arrow. Art goes on a hunt to Alaska. makes a movie, a silent black and white movie of hunting Alaska called Alaskan Adventures. You can Google it and look at it on YouTube. He comes back with that movie and he goes around the country, showing that silent black and white movie at movie theaters across the country. Well, because it's silent, he goes to and he sits on stage and he narrates the movie for the audience. And then after the show, he does shooting exhibitions. Well, he's doing this show in 1928 in Detroit

in the audience as a young man by the name of Fred Bear. Fred introduces himself to art, finds out art's going to be at a, I think it was either a Lions Club or Certoma Club meeting a couple weeks later, and he goes to that. And he becomes friends with art, and Art and Fred end up in Fred's basement, art teaching Fred how to make archery equipment.

That's how Fred Bear got into archery. That's how Fred Bear and why Fred Bear started Bear Archery Company a few years later in 1933. Art died in 1935. Compton died in 1938. Fred Bear starts Bear Archery in 1933. Fred Bear, genius at marketing, probably in my mind without doubt, the most important man for marketing our sport. He understood it's not good enough just to make equipment.

It's not good enough just to sell bows and arrows. We've got to build a sport. We've got to market this to people so that they want to do this. Otherwise, they're not even going to know it exists. So Fred Bear goes out and brings archery to the world. Fred Bear, Glenn St. Charles, Glenn St. Charles, they make movies, they make TV shows, the American sportsman. one of my earliest memories of bull hunting was getting up on Saturday morning and watching the American sportsman on ABC.

And here is Glenn St. Charles and Fred Bear hunting Alaska. That fired me up. That just lit my flame. It never went out. Then I become friends with Glenn St. Charles. I get to meet Fred Bear because I'm a bear dealer in the 70s and 80s, and I get to meet these guys. I get to become friends. And that goes all the way back to Ishy.

If Ishy hadn't been the glue that brought together, Art Young, Saxon Pope, and Chief Compton, Fred Bear wouldn't have gone to that movie. Fred Bear might not have started Bear Archery. We're here today because Ishi brought those people together. In 1961, Glenn St. Charles and Fred Bear and several others founded the Pope and Young Club, which influenced, North American hunting culture significantly and specifically through bow hunting. Their mission is to preserve wildlife, promote bow hunting, and protect hunting. I think clubs like the Pope and Young Club and the Boone and Crockett Club are extremely important and relevant even today.

These clubs are typically just known as record-keeping organizations for animals. That's kind of what they've been to become known for. You know, their scoring systems for gauging the size. size of antlers and skulls. But they really do so much more to protect our heritage as American hunters. And I think these organizations deserve our support. And I think it's super interesting how they can be tracked back to this man, Ishi, that I consider a hero of our culture, a hero of this continent.

I think it's super interesting how it all goes back to him. I can't thank you enough for listening. to Bear Grease, for listening to Brintz This Country Life, for listening to Lakes Backwoods University. We're putting our heart and soul into telling these stories. We can't thank you guys enough for just following along. Please share this feed with your buddies this week, and I just hope everyone has a great fall. I hope you get to hunt. I hope you're successful.

I hope you get to spend some incredible time with your friends. and family in the woods. And I just, every day, I'm just more and more thankful for the life that we get to lead amidst the chaos of the earth that surrounds us. We've got a great treasure in wild places and our ability to go and hunt them and acquire wild game for our family

and to let these activities of our culture be a conduit to our children for a value system of respect, responsibility, honesty, integrity, the things that I think wild places produce inside of us. For that reason, keep the wild places wild because that's where the bears leave. 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 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 Felps. Game Calls.com. I think you'll be glad you 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.

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