00:00:05 Speaker 1: 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 down on all fours and crawl like a bear through the brush, so it looks like it's a bear with There are a lot of grizzly bears in California at that time, forty years they live in concealment. 00:00:43 Speaker 2: I want to tell you the story of a man who stepped out of the Stone Age into the modern world in nineteen eleven. As the last surviving member of the Yahee tribe. He lived in complete secrecy in the wild lands of northern California. His entire life, amidst the extermination of his people, is interfaced 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 gonna 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 one hundred percent. My name is Clay nukemb and this is the Bear Grease 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 as designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. 00:02:40 Speaker 1: Now, this is interesting because almost all of the books you'll read and the stories that you hear say the emergence was August twenty ninth, nineteen eleven, the morning the early morning of August twenty ninth, in a stockyard outside of Orville. The dogs are barking. The young boy comes out and sees the snaked Indian cowering in the corner of the stockyard. Yells, and the other people come out and they find issue kneeling in the corner of one of the fences. 00:03:19 Speaker 2: The site 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 eighteen nineties. However, for nearly two decades there had been rumors of a small band of Indians still in the mountains north of Oraville. 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 Jeane Hopkins. 00:03:51 Speaker 1: So the emergence again. He's been by himself since nineteen o eight. He's hungry, he's lonely, he's starving, and you can imagine it living three years by yourself in the mountains. The loneliness must have been excruciating. So in nineteen eleven 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. 00:04:27 Speaker 2: 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'd 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. 00:04:56 Speaker 1: 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, fro Morrelville, comes over, recognizes this man. They think he might be insane. 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 Horrville and puts him into jail, puts him in the cell that they reserve for the insane. 00:05:31 Speaker 2: Sheriff JB. Weber came and took the man without incident. He spoke no English and made no effort to communicate. Over the course of the next twenty four hours, Yana and Spanish speakers came, but none could communicate with the man. It was a mystery who he 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 Who's tongue? No man can understand last of the wildest Indian tribe in America, and he would become known as the wild Man of Oraville. They believed him to be around fifty years old. 00:06:15 Speaker 1: 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 reading. Could he be one of the lost Yahee? Could he be one of those tribe we thought was extinct. 00:06:38 Speaker 2: 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 nineteen oh six, a hat sewn with hide and sinew had been picked up near a man's cabin where some supplies were stolen. In nineteen oh eight, survey or scouting for the building of Lake Oroville claimed that I 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 you Bigfoot. The room where Jeene Hopkins is telling us this story is probably one of the most unique in America. There are over twenty five hundred traditional bows on the walls, along with arrows, quivers, stone points, hunting artifacts, and antlers of all kinds. This is Jean's personal bowhunting museum in Columbus, Indiana. Gene is no billionaire. This museum was founded on pure passion for bowhunting, bordering on obsession. It's not open to the public, just to people that he meets that are interested. It's 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 nineteen eleven there was a spark that started a bow hunting renaissance in America, and that spark walked into the Oraville stockyard on August twenty ninth. More on this ahead, Gene owns some bows of Saxton, Pope, art Young, Will Compton, and Fred Baer. Maybe those names are familiar to you, but if they're not, these men are the Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelts 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 Oraville. Yes, he has an actual stone point made by the man who would become known to the world as Ishie. Those newspaper articles were read by two anthropologists from the University of California, Professors Thomas Waterman and Alfred Kroeber. They had big questions of where this man came from, what tribe he'd come from, and what his story was. 00:09:19 Speaker 1: Waterman was a professor of anthropology at the University of California. Waterman sees these stories. Waterman had actually come to Oroville in nineteen oh eight because he had heard the story of the surveyors. This was the first proof that the Yahie might still exist in nineteen o eight when the surveyors went into the mountains. So he goes in nineteen oh nine and goes up into Grizzly Bear's hiding place and actually tries to find those last surviving Yahid unsuccessfully. Okay, now nineteen eleven, two years later, he's seeing newspaper articles coming out of 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 Yahie 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 issue, and he's trying to communicate with Ishi is a Yahi. The Yahi language has disappeared with the Yahi people. They're part of the Yana. They're a subtribe 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 Maydu, 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 Ishu's eyes light up, and it's a word. Issue recognizes soweni soweni, yellow pine. And Waterman goes soweny yellow pine, soweni and he knocks on the bed's made of 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 yah he or extinct. You're a Yahi. And that's where now we know for the first time, Ishui is a Yahi. 00:11:46 Speaker 2: 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 other human in three years. And in that first conversation, Ishi asked Waterman, I Ni my 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 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 Yahi 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 noose of a civilization that had cars, electricity, and airplanes had flown in the air nineteen oh three Kiddiehawk. Hi 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 to 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 Yanna used the word saw to 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 yahe never speak their own name, only others can. This is really interesting and stands in start 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 community. When Waterman was finally asked by reporters what the man's name was, he just said, we're gonna call him Ishi, which means man. In Yahi. Ishi simply means man, and to our knowledge, he would never reveal his true name to anyone in white society. No one really knows. California became the thirty first state in eighteen fifty, but we need to understand what was going on there to understand Ishu's life and the Yahee story. 00:15:03 Speaker 1: Well, if we go back in history, we can look at California, Northern California and the tribes that lived in northern California, and that early eighteen hundreds timeframe, we're going to zero in on the Yanna. And the Yana were a tribe that lived up east of the Sacramento River just south of Oregon, in an area that was about sixty miles long deep and about forty miles wide. And in that twenty four hundred square mile that the Yana occupied, there were about three to five thousand Yana Indians. Now, the Yana Indians consisted of three different subgroups, the Northern Yana, the Central Yana, and then the southern Yaa, and then below those was the Yahe. All of those are going to come together to complete the story of issue Ishi came from the area of the Yahe. Now go back in the Ayahi 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. 00:16:15 Speaker 2: It's estimated that three hundred thousand Native Americans lived in pre European settlement California, constituting twenty one separate nations. With languages as different as English and French. It included one hundred and thirteen dialects in her book Issue in Two Worlds, which is an incredible book that I would suggest if you want to learn more. By a woman named Theodora Crober, 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 immemorially long. Interestingly, the yah Yahi language has a different dialect for men in 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 their territory was roughly three hundred square miles. Their entire nation could be walked across in three or four days. 00:17:33 Speaker 1: So in about that time period we start to see something really big and really important happen. They found gold in California. So in eighteen forty nine 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 one hundred thousand people a year come from the east to California to find fortune in gold. But the Yanna still were living in this area of northern California. They're still fairly remote. The yahe were living in an area on the south side of that twenty four hundred square mints that was really remote, really desert, really hard to get into. Now when the prospectors start to come, a flood of prospectors come and they more or less take their wagon trains right through the middle of the Yana country and the Yana some of the Yanna were living in the lowlands, some more 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 all that friendly because in eighteen fifty 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 a entured servitde they'd be your housemaid. That was legaland in California in the eighteen fifties. So the Yana, now we're talking about the Yanna, which are north of where issue and the Yahi were, they're seeing their numbers dwindled, 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 Yana go from three to five thousand people in that eighteen fifties timeframe to just a few hundred by the eighteen sixties early eighteen sixties. It's amazing how quickly things turned, and those people just lost their culture. That was the Yuna. Now we moved south of where the Yana were and we go down into the Ishui country Yahe country. It's a different story. Those people aren't really impacted yet because there 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 Yahee country, and their impact is starting to reach the Yahi. They're getting more and more pushed into the mountains, into the higher elevations of the mountains the Yahi, 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 rating 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 heard first started hearing the stories of issue 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 to the white man. That's not true, because his culture, his ancestors have been fighting with the white man and the Mexicans in the Spanish since the eighteen thirties and forties. I didn't know that, but it's true. What happened was Issu's tribe, Issu's 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 it's a nasty you know that probably you know, we're looking at four thousand plus Yana and Yahi killed during that ten to fifteen year period, exterminating an entire culture. There were not just the state government. Cities were paying for scalps. Cities were offering fifty cents a scalp. Other cities would bring a dollar a scalp. The government. In one year, eighteen fifty, the state of California paid a million dollars bounty on scalps. We 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 bounty 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 and the cities around the area, there are ball fields of young people playing sports, there are theaters. There's civilization at his 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 eighteen sixties. The Yahi probably were a people of about four to five hundred before all this really started. They were never a big tribe. But when all that started, in a period of just ten years, they had been taken down to maybe there were forty to fifty Yah left. That was all that was left. And we start to see some really big events, and you can think of civilization a culture that's down to its last forty or fifty 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 Ahi, and they're sending raiding parties up into the mountains. They're sending vigilanes 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 eighteen sixties timeframe, we've now seen the tribe being decimated. Around probably eighteen sixty one to eighteen sixty two is when Issue was born. We don't know for sure. The only thing we know is after he was captured, doctor Pope Saxton Pope in the medical exam said his age appears to be around fifty, so he extrapolated that back to Issue must have been born in the early eighteen sixties. And then we take the stories from the tribe and from the settlers, from the ranchers, from the vigilans about the raids and about the eyewitness accounts of seeing three Indians, a woman with a you know, 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 a birth around eighteen sixty one eighteen sixty two. I think that's interesting. You know that issue was living through all of this. Vigilani 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 Issian 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 bingeful, 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. 00:26:52 Speaker 2: All humans are capable of putting on a happy face in the midst of grief, But by all accounts is she 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 words civilized when referring to Native Americans. It's partly ease of semantics and 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, as you know, really not accurate. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Vigilantes were sent to literally hunt Indians, and in eighteen sixty eight, the massacre at Kingsley's Cave was believed to completely wipe out the Yahe when the remaining twelve to fifteen 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. Ischi would have been a young boy at this time, so it couldn't have been all of them. 00:28:29 Speaker 1: So in that battle of Kingsley's Cave in eighteen sixty eight. For a period of several years, there were no incidents, There was no evidence that there were any Yahi left. But then we start to see in the early on in the mid eighteen eighties, we start to see stories. We started to hear stories of evidence of maybe there are some Yahi left. We start to see cabins being raided again. We start to see evidence of Indians's leaving sign We start to hear about people being in the mountains and seeing Indians. So the maybe they I hear not extinct after all. 00:29:11 Speaker 2: According to Krober in her book Those twelve Years from eighteen seventy two to eighteen eighty four, quote, the concealment of those twelve 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 chapparral. Even deers 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 this story of how Ishi ended up at that stockyard alone in Araville on August twenty ninth, nineteen eleven. 00:30:13 Speaker 1: 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 Issi is either sister or cousin Ishi's mother, an older man, and a middle aged man aged man dies somewhere along the line during this concealment period. Now after Kingsley's Cave, the Yahi 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 or in concealment for a period between eighteen seventy eighteen seventy two until nineteen eleven, about nineteen o eight, I'll go back to nineteen o eight. 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. With 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 that he die. Was he killed? Did he 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 thirty years of Issue's life. 00:32:28 Speaker 2: 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 Yahee were targets of genocide, and it's hard to imagine what they went through hiding out for thirty years right under the nose of civilization. Theodora Kroeber 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 a L. Krober, Alfred Kroeber, who interacted with is she 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 twenty five years longer than Geronimo's famous band of Apaches. 00:33:39 Speaker 1: So in the concealment, you know they were so effective issue 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 eighteen eighty five. They start to be desperate and more and more desperate, and they start to read the cabins again and they start to leave a little bit of evidence and they 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 AHI come out and issue is probably one of those that comes out of the cabin. He would have probably been at that time, twenty years old. They come out of the cabin and they're caught red handed, and here's the guy standing with the rifle. They don't have rifles, 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 says, 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 the 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. 00:35:27 Speaker 2: 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. 00:35:51 Speaker 1: They've been in concealment since eighteen seventy two. In nineteen oh eight, a party of surveyors are going up into the mountains, remember the Yahi. These last four now Yahee, are living in an area maybe a half mile wide, maybe three miles long. That's their entire world. These surveyors happened 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 iss. She and the sister and the old man ran into the bushes as they saw the surveyors 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 b and they think it's an infant because she's so small, she's so starved. She looks so small that she 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 he or 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 Bear's 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 he doesn't feel good about 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 did 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. And if she 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 if she had come back and got her, because the sister cousin and the old man went out the camp, one direction is she went out to camp. The other direction, I 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 is she comes back after those people left, the souvenir hunters stole everything and left. Is she 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 nineteen oh eight when they were Grizzly Bear's hiding place was raided. In nineteen eleven, when Issue was found in the stockyard, he was by himself. So she died somewhere soon after that. 00:39:51 Speaker 2: After is She's mother died in nineteen oh eight, he remained alone until August twenty ninth, nineteen eleven, when he walked into the stockyard and Orville, assuming he was walking into his own death. But let's fast forward just six days later to September fourth, nineteen eleven. Is She has been staying in the Oraville jail, and remember Professor Waterman has come down from the University of California at Berkeley, which is near San Francisco. 00:40:20 Speaker 1: So Waterman then starts to communicate because again Ishi could understand a few Yana words. But interestingly enough, because historically the Jahi and Yana had enough Spanish and Mexican interaction in the decades and the generations before, there are actually a few Spanish Mexican words that were in the Yana Jahi 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 Anthropologist, School of Anthropology. 00:41:21 Speaker 2: On September fourth, nineteen eleven, just six days after Ishi came out of his wilderness homeland. And remember this man was believed to be fifty years old, so fifty 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 here, and 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 yahee 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 Grease Channel. Thanks for listening to Brent's This Country Life podcast. Into the Lakes Backwoods University. Thank you all so much. Keep the wild places wild, because that's where the bears live.