Ishi: The Last Track In The Pines

 

Below was sent to me by a friend who is a fellow bow hunter/archery enthusiast. We read the same sort of stuff and have similar interest. My friend found this on a FB archery site. I did a similar posting about Ishi back in 2018. This story was written by Vic Stickel and is a very well written synopsis of  Ishi, the "last wild Indian". The story of Ishi's ranks high as one of the most fascinating stories of humankind IMHO. I had never heard Ishi's story until I saw the 1992 film starring John Voight and Graham Greene titled The Last Of His Tribe (a very good movie I recommend if interested). There are also several books pertaining to this amazing tale of a man who was the last surviving member of his people that walked out of the stone age and into the modern world of his time. The piece below is titled The Last Track In The Pines. Enjoy. 

                                                                                   

The smell of mountain pines in Tehama County used to hang so thick a man could taste it, that clean resin weight drifting through the early years of the twentieth century like a promise of rain. But even that sharp scent could not hide the unease that crept over the ranchers working those lonely ridges. Something moved in the high country, something quiet as moonlight, slipping into wilderness line cabins without breaking a latch or lifting a tool. The intruder never touched the blankets or the gear; he only tore the place apart in a frantic scatter and carried off one thing alone, the rolled barley meant for the pack stock. It left the cattlemen standing in their own doorways, scratching their heads, wondering what kind of thief ignored everything of value and made off with feed.

Then the sheep men started finding dead animals on the high pastures. A postmortem on one of the carcasses brought the truth out like a cold hand on the shoulder. Buried deep in the flesh were obsidian broadheads, knapped clean and sharp as the day they were made. The white settlers had long believed every Native soul in that country had been wiped out decades before, but the stone points said otherwise. Someone still lived in those gorges along Deer Creek, someone who knew how to move without leaving a whisper behind.

Years passed under that quiet tension until an irrigation crew rode into the country to run surveys. They were following a bend in Deer Creek when they saw him, a naked Indian standing on the rocks, spear raised, watching the water for salmon. For a heartbeat the world held still, then panic broke loose. The man charged, spear lifted high, and the surveyors scattered like quail flushed from cover, riding hell for leather back to camp with wild stories no one believed.

Weeks went by without a track. Then, a year later, the same crew returned to the same bend. One of the newcomers laughed and asked where their Indian was now, just as a flint-tipped arrow hissed through the air and punched a neat hole through the crown of his hat. That was enough to send them thundering back to camp again, but this time their fear turned to fury. The whole construction outfit armed themselves and pushed into the brush to hunt the hidden archer.

What they found was no war party. Deep in the undergrowth lay a single wickiup made of bark and branches, camouflaged so well it seemed grown from the earth itself. Inside was only a frail, dying Native woman. The men, half afraid and half cruel, ransacked the place and fled. Later, they returned with a larger posse, but the woman was gone. Whether she had crawled away or been carried off, no one knew. The men destroyed the wickiup and took every last scrap of the family’s belongings, leaving whoever remained to face the wilderness with nothing.

Months of silence followed. Then, on August 29th, 1911, the butchers at a slaughterhouse near Oroville heard their watchdog erupt in frantic barking. When they stepped outside, they found a starving, terrified Indian pressed against the fence, naked and shaking from years of hunger and grief. Unable to speak with him, the authorities locked him in the Butte County jail for his own safety and brought in a local Native translator, but the languages did not match. The man trembled; certain he was about to die.

Someone finally sent word to the University of California. Professor Thomas Waterman arrived and tried every dialect he knew until he spoke the old Yana tongue. Recognition lit the stranger’s eyes. . Within three weeks the two men could speak freely. Arrangements were made to bring him to San Francisco, where he met Dr. Saxton Pope, bowyer Will Compton, and the woodsman Art Young. The man accepted the name Ishi, because his people forbade him from speaking his true name aloud.

Over the next five years those four men became brothers. They hunted together, traded knowledge, and walked the hills as if they had always belonged to one another. Compton later wrote that Ishi was the gentlest, most honorable man he had ever known. When calling predators like bobcats or lynx, Ishi would hold a leaf to his lips and make the thin, heartbreaking cry of a dying rabbit, drawing the animals close enough for a clean shot. His bow of choice was a short, powerful fifty-five-pound juniper stave, though he would work yew if he had to. His people believed yew belonged to women, just as no woman was ever to touch a hunter’s bow.

He shot targets poorly, because the idea of competition meant nothing to a man who had lived by the bow. But in the field he was flawless. He loved the modern world in small, tender ways, especially photography. Seeing his own reflection in a picture brought him joy. When he had first been found at the slaughterhouse, he had burned his hair down to the scalp in mourning for his mother, sister, and uncle who had died after their camp was destroyed. Clean haircuts and photographs soothed something deep in him.

For a time, he lived in good health. Then in 1915 tuberculosis found him, a sickness his isolated blood had no defense against. Dr. Pope gave him the best care the era could offer, but the disease moved fast. In June of 1916, with his three friends weeping beside him, Ishi looked at them with calm eyes and spoke his final words, “I go, you stay”.

They honored him as he wished. They saw to it that his body was treated according to the faith of his people, and they laid him to rest in an Italian cemetery in San Francisco. The last of the Yahi, carried into history by the men who loved him, and forever woven into the long story of the bow.

And so his name settled into archery like an old truth carried on the wind, meaning far more than the man himself. It stands for the last wild archer who lived exactly as his ancestors had since the beginning, a reminder that the bow was once a lifeline rather than a pastime. . The name, Ishi has become a measure of character, a quiet standard of humility, patience, and honor, because every account of him speaks of a gentle man who hunted cleanly and lived without bitterness despite everything he endured. Among traditional archers up to this day he is remembered, the teacher of Pope, Compton, and Young. . His name carries the weight of survival, the endurance of a man born around eighteen sixty who outlived the destruction of his people and walked alone for years before stepping into the modern world on that late August day. To speak his name now is to remember that a bow is wood and string, an arrow is a promise, and the hunt is a sacred act. His name is not spoken loudly, but with the quiet respect reserved for the last keeper of the old ways, the final ember of a world that will never return.

In 2007 Ishi was inducted into the Archery Hall Of Fame, for the legend he was, and who left the last track in the pines.