This is not a book about Ishi. This is a book about the Yahi. They were the tribe that spawned him, or kidnapped his mother from a neighboring tribe, or this, or that. 

The details haven’t mattered because it’s all been about Ishi. The tribe has been relegated to a mere frame around whatever myth about Ishi is being promoted, or whatever fable is being created from thin air to profit from his name.

The Yahi’s history happened before a lonely Indian came down out of the hills into Oroville. The Yahi’s history happened before the anthropologists dubbed him Ishi. And once they had a celebrity Indian in their hands, everything that had happened before became of secondary importance.

The anthropologists and others cobbled together a history of the Yahi to further the myths of Ishi, with easily disproved assumptions and legends about the tribe accepted as fact, without challenge. 

The Yahi were said to have terrorized a stretch of Northern California about 100 miles long for years. Except, they didn’t. 

They remained unseen for decades by the people that displaced them. Except that wasn’t the case. 

They were a Stone Age tribe when the final camp was discovered in 1908. Except they weren’t. 

And Ishi himself, when he staggered into Oroville in 1911 to give himself up, was starving. Except he wasn’t.

This isn’t a book I intended to write. I had read the books on Ishi by Theodora Kroeber and Robert Heizer back in the ’60s when they first came out. For some reason I picked them up again in the ’90s after my son was born.

That’s when it occurred to me that I could show my son historical sites in Yahi Country, like my parents had done as we moved around the country every two years due to my dad’s Navy career. 

The plan began unraveling with our first sighting of Black Rock in Mill Creek Canyon, although I didn’t realize it at the time. 

In Ishi, Last of His Tribe, Theodora Kroeber described Black Rock as “three times the height of a man, smooth and shiny.” 

In fact, where it rises from Mill Creek it soars 500 feet or so, and it’s not smooth at all, but rather a twisted and ragged mass of basalt.

Kroeber goes on to have Ishi climbing to the top of the rock and looking down to the  Sacramento Valley to watch and listen to a train go by. Well, Black Rock’s in the bottom of Mill Creek Canyon, and you can’t see the Sacramento Valley from there. As the nearest rail line is more than 25 miles from Black Rock, he wasn’t likely to  hear a train from there either.

“She never saw it,” I thought of Kroeber and Black Rock at the time, but my thought process ended there. 

As I returned to the books, I began finding obvious errors. Kroeber’s narratives didn’t match the firsthand accounts of the participants printed in Ishi the Last Yahi, which she and Heizer compiled. Being a newsman, I turned to old microfilms of newspapers from Tehama, Butte and Shasta counties, from the 1850s through the 1870s, to seek other sources of information. And that process further unwound the story as it had been written. 

I noted many of the mistakes came from an unfamiliarity with the country. Not seeing Black Rock was a fatal flaw. My wife and I began returning to Yahi Country again and again, backpacking the ridge tops and canyon bottoms and the high meadows at every opportunity. We learned how the land changed with the seasons, and how those changes varied from one end of Yahi Country to the other. We even backpacked eight days from the Sacramento Valley floor to Childs Meadow to get an understanding of the Yahi’s annual migration.

That country tried to kill us more than once. I began to wonder how the Yahi could have lived in such a harsh land for eons. But the written accounts only sketched in a generic Native Californian tribal lifestyle and assumed it applied to the Yahi before contact with European civilization. The books instead focused on the Yahi’s destruction and the time after Ishi came down out of the hills.

Reconstructing the tribe’s history prior to contact is difficult because there are no Yahi left to ask. The anthropologists’ questioning of the one informant we had — Ishi — appears to me to have been haphazard. Undoubtedly that is because of translation difficulties, but there are so many questions that just didn’t seem to get asked, which would have cleared up so many mysteries.

Applying the generic Indian lifestyle to the narrative just doesn’t work for the Yahi. Their country is a place of two extremes, different from the homelands of most of the other tribes. The artifacts they left behind are also different. They don’t include a clear shift that happened elsewhere in Northern California a few thousand years ago, when new technologies came in from tribes to the north. The Yahi seem to have followed a different path — or rather, stayed on the path they had been following forever.

The only way we can imagine how they lived starts with learning their land.We have to do some speculation about how things might have changed since they were here, but that isn’t daunting. No one since the Yahi has been able to set down roots deep enough to substantially alter what is there. There has been some clear-cut logging on the ridgetops, but it’s hard to get logs out of the canyons.

Our science can then fill in some of the gaps. We know a lot about fish migration and deer migration. The First Peoples have shared information on how native plants were used. There is research on how fire affects the landscape when it’s done with purpose, as the Native Californians did.

Even then, the Yahi lifestyle is somewhat of a guess. And for the folks who make their living on history — the professional anthropologists, archaeologists and historians — guessing isn’t how you build a reputation and a career. You build on what’s been accepted, rather than tearing down the research of your predecessors and starting over. That’s one reason the mistakes about the Yahi just keep being regurgitated over and over.

But I’m an old retired newsman without a future career to worry about. ​​I can speculate. I can let myself logically tie together the things we do know to come up with a broader picture. And I’m pretty sure what I’ve come up with here about the Yahi is more accurate than anything you might have read before. 

If nothing else, perhaps this will start a conversation.