If you’ve found this site, welcome. I’m Steve Schoonover, and completing this book has been part of my life for more than 30 years.

It began when my efforts to educate my son to what happened to the Yahi, were derailed by my discovery that the written history of that Northern California tribe had been warped to support the myths of Ishi.

I’m an old newsman, so to find out what really happened I turned to microfilms of newspapers of the era to find timely accounts of what happened. 

And, I learned first hand about the geography of Yahi country by backpacking through much of it, and studying the maps of the places I couldn’t reach. This is a step other writers about the tribe had curiously ignored

I read everything I could find about the tribe and the area in archaeological, anthropological and historic writings, published and otherwise. I got my hands dirty and broadened my mind by volunteering on archaeological digs.

I studied the ecology of the area, and Native American friends showed me how the First People used what the Earth provided. And I discovered how the activities of the newcomers to California fatally disrupted the Yahi life cycle.

My book is the summation of all those explorations. I may be wrong about all of this, but I think I’m more correct than what you have read about the Yahi before

The book is available in Downtown Chico at The Bookstore at 118 Main St.; Bird in Hand at 320 Broadway, Made in Chico at 127 W. Third St., and the Chico History Museum at 141 Salem St. In Oroville, the Butte County Historical Society Museum has it in stock. It’s in the Tehama County Museum in Tehama, and the Plumas County Museum in Quincy.

And now, you can also pick it up in the Lassen Volcanic National Park Kohm Yah-Mah-Nee Visitor Center.

You can buy the book from me by sending a $30 check to Steve Schoonover, P.O. Box 2181, Chico, CA, 95927. That’s the $24.95 price of the book, sales tax, plus part of the cost of putting it in the mail.

You can buy it on Amazon on Kindle for $9.99. You can also get it through Amazon in print, and I thought Jeff Bezos could get it to you cheaper than I can because he has planes and trucks and stuff like that. But the Amazon website has the cost listed from $31.89 to $51.27. Not sure what’s going on there.

You can also order it through Barnes & Noble, Books a Million and a few other places like that.

On this site you will find the introduction to the book, a sample chapter, and an outline of the entire book. It’s 192 pages, with 46 photographs and seven maps. It’s pretty granular if you aren’t into the Ishi myth.

You can reach me at beforeishi@gmail.com.

To listen to an interview I had with Nancy Wiegman on North State Public Radio, go to https://www.mynspr.org/show/nancys-bookshelf.

To read Dan Barnett’s review of the book in the Enterprise-Record, go to https://dielbee.blogspot.com/2024/05/before-ishi-life-and-death-of-yahi.html.

Nancy and Dan also treated me very kindly in a wrap-up of new books from 2024, which you can hear at https://www.mynspr.org/show/nancys-bookshelf/2024-12-26/nancys-bookshelf-2024-retrospective.

The first of two talks I gave about the book May 25 at the Chico History Museum is on its website — chicohistorymuseum.org.