Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/247

Rh a spirit of curiosity, to the contents of the camp—bows, arrows, skin blankets—and after prying about, went back to camp for dinner. When they returned next day the old woman was gone.

Such was the tragic end of the last remnant of the Yahi tribe. Except for one individual, our account closes here. The members of the tribe who were seen at this time seem to have perished from cold, hunger, and exposure, without ever returning to their camp.

Nearly three years later, in August, 1911, at a slaughter-house four miles from Oroville, eighty miles away, one morning there suddenly appeared from nowhere a naked Indian. His only garment was an old castoff undershirt. He was thin, hungry, greatly worn, and of most unusual appearance. The people in charge of the premises telephoned to the sheriff and reported with some excitement the presence of a "wild man." No one, Indian or white, could make him understand a word. The sheriff of Butte County came out, took the wild man in charge and gave him, as the most available lodging, the insane cell of the jail. When the news reached the university, the appearance of this strange Indian was at once connected with the Yahi tribe of Deer Creek, in which the department of anthropology had long been interested. It fell to the lot of the present writer to journey to Oroville to identify him. Our only resource was to "try him out" with a vocabulary in the Nozi dialect, since there was no material in existence in what was thought to be his own proper language. The first impression received of the wild Indian was the sight of him, draped in a canvas apron they had hurriedly put on him at the slaughter-house, sitting on the edge of a cot in his cell, still uncertain of his fate, and answering ulisi ("[I don't] understand") to all the questions that were being fired at him in English, Spanish, and half a dozen Indian languages, by visitors. The present writer's amateur attempts at Yana were equally unintelligible to him for a long time. An agreement was finally reached, however, on the word for the material of which his cot was made, si'win'i, or yellow pine. His face lightened up at this word, though he evidently could hardly trust his senses. These were probably the first intelligible sounds he had heard from a human being in three years.

Since those days he has become a regular member of the Museum staff. He has revisited Deer Creek cañon in our company, and there is not a foot of the country he does not know. There is not the slightest doubt that it has been his home. He led the party to the old lodges in the jungle at Bear's Hiding Place, he communicated scores of place names up and down the stream for miles, and even led the way over to his old lurking places on Mill Creek, some distance to the north. In other words, he has told us all he could, in a general way, about the tribe. He has, however, been curiously backward in telling the intimate history of his own immediate group. He has gone so far as to say that the middle aged woman who was seen was his sister, that the very old woman was