THE LAST WILD TRIBE OF CALIFORNIA 243 



a spirit of curiosity, to the contents of the camp — bows, arrows, skin 

 bhinlcets — and after prying about, went back to camp for dinner. When 

 tliey returned next day the okl woman was gone. 



Such was the tragic end of the hist 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. 



Xearly 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." Xo 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. 

 AYhen 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 

 Xozi 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 uUsi (" [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, siwin'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 caiion 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 ais to say that the middle- 

 aged woman who was seen was his sister, that the very old woman was 



