By the year 1872, the “mountain Indians” of Northern California were believed to be extinct—wiped out by civilian militia, government soldiers, starvation, and disease. In August of 1911 an emaciated, disoriented, naked, Native American man was discovered in a slaughterhouse corral near Oroville, California. Unable or, more likely, unwilling to communicate his name to the white anthropologists who cared for and studied him, he was dubbed “Ishi,” the Yahi word for “man.”

Published in 1961 but written with 1950’s sensibilities and 1950’s anthropological conventions, Ishi in Two Worlds ultimately sold over one million copies. Author Theodora Kroeber spent the first half of her book in an ethnographic accounting of Ishi’s tribe, the Yana, and the second half in a biographical presentation of Ishi’s assimilation, slight as it was, to white culture.

In describing the fate of the Yana, Kroeber never used the word ‘genocide’ but I’ve never read a more vivid example. The hill tribes, unwilling to kowtow to white suprematism, were systematically and brutally exterminated.

Kroeber’s accounting of the demise of the Yana and of Ishi’s sad but graceful resignation to his fate moved me quite viscerally. Accessible and clearly written, it is no wonder that this book inspired so much empathy and compassion for Ishi, America’s last “wild Indian.”