Yes, where IS Ishi?

Column: RiverWatcher

By Rex Burress

Article Launched: 11/08/2007 07:37:41 PM PST

Where is Ishi?

We are told that the remains of Ishi, last of the Yahi Indians, has reverted back to Mother Earth. The story is that when Ishi died in San Francisco in 1916, the body was cremated and placed in a ceramic urn, stored in Colma, Ca., but secretly, the brain had been preserved and later showed up in the Smithsonian collections, and finally was returned to California.

Appropriate Indian tribes took those bits of dust and droplets, and privately returned them to his home in Mill Creek country for proper interment. But really, where is Ishi? Where is his spirit? Does he float in the winds that stroke the earth, rise in the springtime flowers, drift with the waters down the rivers, mingling with the spirits of a hundred thousand ancestors???

Newspaper Headline: August 29, 1911

"OROVILLE GREETS THE INDIAN"

"This was no wild man. He was a thoroughly frightened, starved Indian.

There was no place to take him but to the county jail."

— Florence Danforth Boyle

Through history, we know the story of Ishi's exodus from the Mill Creek mountainous homeland after his family died, and know of mysterious wanderings...to finally emerge at Oroville, Ca. in a butchering corral...hunched in a corner...disheveled...and crudely covered with a shred of canvas. That was 1911. We have much detail from that time on, relentlessly pieced together by University Professors Waterman and Pope, and historian and researcher Richard Burrill, who has written three booksabout Ishi's journey from obscurity to San Francisco.

We don't know it all. What was the route Ishi took from his homeland? Where did he cross the Feather River? What evidence did he leave along the way? What was his personal life after "capture" really like? What treasures did he hide away that will never be found? Just as in the lives of everyone, no one ever knows everything.

Even when his Professor benefactors took Ishi on a trip back to Mill Creek Canyon where he demonstrated his life style and hunting techniques, what parts did Ishi hold sacred and keep secret? We remember how he showed his "spear-punching" technique in impaling salmon, and his method of using the short flat bow and arrow. But no one knows or tells it all.

Now I have a tale of another an Ishi that is visible today. This Ishi is in a process of decay, too, and yellow flakes of skin are peeling from his arms. His face is blemished with time, and the fresh cheeks are becoming wrinkled and parched. His eyes still stare out at the world as if memorizing every leaf on the nearby sycamore, but soon they, too, will break away from the body and mingle with the dust of earth.

This Ishi has stood tall for years, wrapped in his crude robe, holding a walking stick as if preparing for a long journey. His dark hair is chopped short as if still mourning for his mother, but he moves not, stranded on the wall of the old prison in the "city square" at Robinson and Lincoln Streets in Oroville. He hasn't moved an inch for several years, either toward Mill Creek or San Francisco. It is the great mural that artist Lee Franks painted a few years ago. It is in need of repair ere this Ishi also crumbles into dust.

Go see this pictorial tribute to Ishi before it is blasted away by the relentless weather. The blazing summer sun does its erosion on all exposed things...and Oroville's Ishi stands in great need. Go find Mr. Franks, someone, before it is tooooo late!

"No man is an island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee."

—John Donne (1571-1631)