Introduction

Before Ishi
Ishi Enters Civilization
Ishi Among the Anthopologists
Ishi's Death

Maps

"Readers of Theodora Kroeber's Ishi in Two Worlds (1961) feel a tie beyond intellectual interest to this last Stone Age California Indian, who, in 1911 was found half-starved at Oroville and thereafter lived at the University of California. In her graceful and sensitive study, Mrs. Kroeber gave us an appreciation not only of Ishi's contributions to our knowledge of prehistoric California, but traced his Yahi people's post-gold rush tribulations with advancing white civilization south of Mount Lassen. This newer work is a proper accompaniment to the earlier one. Its documents have the immediacy of eyewitness history and show us as much about the backgrounds of white informants as about the Yahi. . . . The volume's intriguing photographs are themselves effective storytellers."—American West

"His personal story has been told eloquently in Theodora Kroeber's early book. Her present collaboration with the well-known anthropologist Robert F. Heizer has accomplished something different and important. It has brought together not only most of the anthropological articles written by A. L. Kroeber, Waterman, Sapir, Nettl, and others, but also correspondence among Ishi's friends at the time of his death, and many early newspaper articles. The accumulation of accounts written by early California travelers, army officers, and participants in the fierce campaigns against the Mill Creek (Yahi) Indians between 1860 and 1875 documents some of the most tragic and most sickening instances of the hatred many settlers felt toward the Indians and the savagery with which they treated them. The result is a many-faceted volume which supplements the earlier works and provides a solid nugget of original materials about a series of historical events and a fascinating person."—Choice

"Brings together the full documentation of Ishi and his Yahi background, providing a vivid portrait of the interaction between indigenous Indian groups and encroaching white settlers. . . . [An] important collection of original source materials."—Library Journal

"These documents record both the chronology of the way anthropologists work and the way Ishi changed in response to Western culture, until his death from tuberculosis in 1916. The book is a penetrating study of the ways that we come to understand what it is to be human—and to be different."—Booklist