Douglas Cazaux Sackman is a Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound. His newest book, Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of
Modern America, looks at Ishi, “the last wild Indian” and one of the fathers of anthropology, Alfred Kroeber. When Kroeber and Ishi came face to face, it was a momentous event, not only for each man but also for the cultures they represented. In the excerpt below we learn about some of the media hoopla that surrounded their meeting in 1911.
Headline, San Francisco Bulletin, 5 September 1911, evening edition: “BIG CITY AMAZES CAVE MAN. PRIMORDIAL MAN BLINKS AT CIVILIZATION’S GLARE.” Ishi had just arrived late the night before; when we woke up he saw San Francisco, and San Francisco, through the eyes of several reporters, saw him. The Bulletin’s lede was typical: “The lusty civilization of the twentieth century that is typified by San Francisco upon this shore of the Pacific was viewed today by a primordial man, brought to town from out of the furthermost savagery.”
Reporters had gathered that morning at the Affiliated Colleges of the University of California on Parnassus Heights to get their first glimpse of the city’s newcomer. They used as much ink describing the man’s perceptions of “civilization” as they did describing the man himself. That made a certain kind of topsy-turvy sense: their descriptions of the other were really descriptions of themselves, using the man they beheld as a kind of measuring stick for the “lusty civilization of the twentieth century.” Five years after the earthquake and four years before it was to host the grand celebration of progress called the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco was at once proud of itself and anxious. That anxiety was reflected in the Ishi reporting that was, by turns, serious and silly.
The reporting recapitulated the exchanges of material items that had characterized Ishi’s stay in Oroville. Reporters wanted to see, or stage, his initial encounters with civilization all over again. First, they wanted to get a picture of the man in his native attire. The anthropologists obliged by bringing a fur cape from their collection (though not one of Yahi manufacture, as they would be collected by the museum only later.) When asked to undress for the photograph, Ishi, keenly observing his cultural surroundings, objected. He liked his overalls and his necktie, he said through Batwi. Besides, he didn’t see anyone else wearing these kinds of clothes. He’d keep his on, thank you very much. He did agree, however, to put the fur cape pm over his other clothes, and the photographers rolled up his pant legs to hide them. By nipping and tucking away the Western clothes, they finally succeeded in getting the staged shot they wanted. Six photographers began shooting away, while Waterman told Batwi to tell Ishi, “White man just play.” But being shot by a camera is still being shot. As Mary Ashe Miller described the scene from the Call, Ishi “stood with his head back and a half smile on his face, but his compressed lips and dilated nostrils showed that he was far from happy.
Ishi’s refusal to return to a pure state of nativity became part of the story. Bemused and incredulous, reporters wrote that in his natural state he had gone about naked, “as God made him.” Nev