“My mouth fairly watered, for a piece of an indian to broil! And I continued to look out sharper for one, than for any other game,” wrote J. Goldsborough Bruff in his journal on April 8, 1850. Lured west by the California gold rush, Bruff had gotten sick and been forced to spend the winter in the northern California mountains. He was near a Yahi Indian settlement but had no contact with them. Nearly starving, he emerged from his camp in early spring and resumed his trek.
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This was the earliest account of the Yahi written by a white. As settlers pressed into the region over the next couple of decades, raiding parties of whites, led by celebrated “Indian fighters,” hunted down the Yahi. The number of Yahi plummeted, and they were deemed extinct–until August 29, 1911, when a solitary, starving Yahi walked out of the woods near Oroville.
Much of Ishi’s saga is recounted in two books by Kroeber’s wife, which are also the basis for Ishi: The Last Yahi, a 1992 documentary by Jed Riffe and Pam Roberts. This earnest feature, narrated by Linda Hunt, is playing this week at the Film Center as part of a series called “Native Americans on Film.”
Ishi was given a job as a janitor at the museum. Pope found him “indifferent to the beauty of labor as an abstract concept,” but noted, “he had the most exacting conscience concerning the ownership of property.” Pope also stated that he was “free from perversions,” though “he had a fondness for ice-cream soda, which, with the moving pictures, constituted his entire accomplishments in debauchery.”
Kroeber’s second wife, Theodora, interviewed him about Ishi, whom she never knew firsthand. She wrote a popular book about Ishi that was published in 1961, a year after Kroeber died.
