October 8, 2025 • 50 mins
In this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, host Clay Newcomb continues the story of Ishi, known as “The Last Stone Age Man,” following his relocation from the small town of Oroville, California, where he emerged in 1911 to the museum in Berkeley, California. During this period, Ishi forms a remarkable friendship with Saxton Pope — the namesake of the Pope and Young Club. Archery historian Gene Hopkins joins Clay to explore Ishi’s transition and adaptation to modern society, as well as the circumstances surrounding his tragic death.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
The story of Ishi, the last Yahee Indians showing up
in Oraville, California, nineteen eleven has got to be one
of America's most fascinating stories. This episode is more redemptive
in some ways than the first, but ultimately the scales
tip toward it being even more tragic. These events took
place between September fourth, nineteen eleven and March twenty fifth,
(00:29):
nineteen sixteen, when Hi died, but it wouldn't be into
the nineteen nineties, when Ishi's remains were put back into
the dirt of his homeland that this story really ends.
But if you're a bowhunter, the ripples of Ishi's life
reverberated into our modern bow hunting culture more than you
(00:50):
might know. I really doubt that you're gonna want to
miss this one. And as a note, we interrupted this
series for our ted kopple in, but we're back on
track and I hope that everyone is having a great
start to the fall.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
And the medical doctor that they assigned Ishi to was
doctor Saxton Pope, Saxon, Pope of the Pope and Young
Club that we have today. Saxton Pope, father of Bohunting.
Saxon Pope was assigned to be the medical doctor for Ishi.
Pope became Ishi's closest friend. By all accounts, more so
(01:30):
than Krober, more sou than Waterman, more so than Sambawa.
Pope was Ishi's best friend.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
My name is Clay nukemb and this is the Bear
Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land.
Presented by FHF Gear American Maid, purpose built hunting and
(02:09):
fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the
place as we explore. The singing we've just heard was
(02:42):
the voice of a man who, on August twenty ninth,
nineteen eleven, wandered into a stockyard in Oraville, California. His
hair was singed near to the scalp in mourning. He
was emaciated. The only clothing he wore was a shredded
piece of canvas wagon cover. Spoke no English and appeared destitute.
(03:03):
The local sheriff took him into the jail, where he
stayed for several days until anthropologists from the University of California,
who had read in the newspaper about a Stone Age
man who could understand no man's language had wandered into
town and these men came and got him. Rumors had
circulated for the last two decades that a small band
(03:25):
of Yanna Indians remained in the remote region of northern California,
in the Deer and Mill Creek region, but few believed
it was true. How could it be true? At one
time there had been bounties for the scalps of these
Indians in the state of California, and they were the
targets of a decadees long genocide. But living the entirety
(03:47):
of his fifty years of life in hiding, completely isolated
from the technology of the Western world, one man remained.
He never revealed his name, but was simply referred to
to is Ishi, which in his native language simply meant man.
The story that this man would tell and the lessons
(04:08):
he'd teach, would alter the knowledge of Stone Age civilizations
and dramatically alter the trajectory of archery. This is the
story of Hi's life from nineteen eleven until nineteen sixteen,
before a tragic ending. In the last episode, we left
off with is She less than a week after his
(04:29):
arrival in Oraville, heading to San Francisco, California, with doctor
Waterman at the permission of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
They would soon learn of the complexity of the culture
of the Yahee, a subtribe of the Yanna. This is
archery historian Jene Hopkins of Columbus, Indiana.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
So he's you know, they keep him in the Oroville
jail just for a couple three days until Waterman can
get there. And Waterman gets there and he RECOGNI is
how important this find is. You know, this person is
in the contributions to our understanding of culture is going
to be This guy is a gold mine for us.
(05:12):
And he gets permission to take him back to the
university anthropology department, and he takes issue and puts him
on the train and now issue. All the time he
was living in the mountains, when he was up on
Mount Lassen, which was in the northeast part of their range.
When he was on mounta Lasson, he could look down
(05:33):
in the valleys and he could see the train. As
a young man in the eighteen sixties and seventies and eighties,
when he was up on the mountain, he could watch
that train go through the valleys, and his mother would
tell him that's the white man's there was a word
he used, monster. But you don't need to fear it
(05:54):
because it never leaves its tracks. It will not hurt you,
it will never leave its tracks. Now Here he is
in nineteen eleven, only having been captured just a couple
of days earlier. Waterman's taking them to the train station
and putting him on that train. And can you imagine
coming out of a culture that was truly stone Age,
(06:17):
and within two days you're on a train and you're
going to the big city and you're seeing buildings and
the vehicles and the trains and everything that goes on
inside a big city in nineteen eleven modern society. So
when she gets on the train and they're taking Waterman's
taking him back to the university, the University of California
(06:41):
and Berkeley, and they're going into you know, they're leaving
a civilization of culture that's truly stone Age. And he's
lived with nothing but a ball and arrow. He's lived
with nothing but fire and fire starters. He's lived having
to kill or catch or harvest anything and everything that
he would eat, except what he would raid from the cabins.
(07:03):
But he would never take you know, he'd never take
any canned goods. He would only take the stores that
were not canned because they didn't understand what canned goods were.
They didn't understand there were food inside those cans. But
here he is, just two days after being captured. He's
on a train going back to the big city. He'd
never seen more than forty people, and now he's in
(07:26):
a city where there's hundreds of thousands of people. It
must have been mind blowing for him. Can you imagine
what was going through his head. It must have been intimidating,
It must have been scary, but he didn't show it.
He didn't show it. He was very inquisitive. He was
fascinated his demeanor and his actions, and he didn't try
(07:50):
to escape, he didn't try to run. It was pure fascination.
So Waterman gets Issue back and they introduce Issue to
(08:12):
Alfred Kroeber, who was Waterman's partner in the anthropology department,
and Krober takes Issue basically under his wing, and they
give him a place to live in the museum there
at the Department of Anthropology. They don't want Issue to
feel like he's a captured inmate. They want Issue to
(08:33):
feel comfortable, They want the Issue to feel welcome, They
want him to feel like this could be your home.
And Issue is again fascinated where everything going on around him,
so inquisitive about everything he's seeing. And inside the anthropology department,
you know, there's a lot of items. Included in those
(08:56):
items are a lot of cadavers and a lot of
skeletons and things that you know, Issui, in his way
of thinking, in his culture, was pretty intimidating, So that's
something he had to get used to. You know that
they would try to keep Issuy apart from the skeletons
and all the remains that they would have in a
(09:18):
typical anthropology department.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
It's interesting and not surprising that Ishi had issues with
the Native American remains stored at the University of California.
All he'd ever known was the way his culture dealt
with the dead, likely cremating them. But the details of
all this remain a mystery. But here these people were
storing human remains in boxes. Seventy nine years later, a
(09:43):
US federal law called the Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act of nineteen ninety would require institutions to return
human remains and funeral objects to the tribes if requested later.
That very law would affect ishi remains.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
So Issue was big news. Now big news across the country.
Last wild man captured in California. I use the analogy
if we would today capture a bigfoot and we would
bring him down and we would put him on display right,
and it would make newspaper headlines across the world. That's
why it was with Issue newspapers across the country. We're
(10:25):
telling the story of Issi on the front page. So
people were coming from all over the country to see
this last wild man. So now Crowber and watermen are
trying to figure out, why, what am I going to do?
How are we going to do this? We can't just
open it up, you know, we can't just let everybody
come in, which they did for a couple of weeks.
It got kind of out of hand, and then they decided, no,
(10:48):
we're going to have to schedule time. We're only going
to have a couple of hours in the afternoon. People
can come by and see Issue. So they give Issue
new clothes, pants, shirt, a jacket, tried to give him shoes,
he wouldn't take the shoes, and then he would They
would set up greeting a meet and greets more or
(11:08):
less for people to come in and people, local school
kids were coming, dignitarios were coming from across the country
to meet Issue. Krober would introduce Issu, I would like
you to meet mister Smith, and Issue would try to
it's best to pronounce the name because he was very respectful.
(11:29):
That's another thing about Ishi. You know, Yahi culture must
have been a very respectful culture. So it was very
important to him when he would be introduced to somebody
that he would be able to repeat your name, and
he would try his best to pronounce, and his articulation
was very good. So you know is she was a
smart man. He was a very smart man. He just
hadn't been taught the things of our culture. He was
(11:51):
taught the things of his culture. But he picked up
the things of our culture very quickly. And at that
time anthropology was a fairly new science. So we have T. T.
Waterman and we have Alfred Kroeber, the two anthropology professors
there at the University of California. Waterman takes him back
there and then Kroeber. They start to study more and
(12:15):
more of Issue, and they're actually starting to build now.
They teach Issue a few words of English. Issue teaches
them a few words of Yahi, and over a period
of time, Ishi gets to the point where he can
has a vocabulary of about five hundred English words. But
he would take a lot of those words in Yahie
eyes that because in the Yahi language it was actually
(12:38):
a dual language. Women spoke one way, men spoke another way.
So a good example, let's use the word hat in English,
it's hat. Yahi would have a word for hat, Yahi
word for hat. Well, let's pretend it's English. So the
women would say hat, the men would say hat.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Not.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
So they would put a suffix on the back of
their words. So when a man was speaking to a man,
this was a hat, And when a woman was speaking
to a woman, or a man was speaking to a woman,
was a hat. So is has he learned English a
lot of his words he would do that. He would
put the male suffix on the end of a lot
(13:20):
of his words. So when you listen, you can actually
go out and google, go to YouTube. There's some stories
out there where they actually recorded Ishi talking. There are
wax recordings. There are one hundred and forty seven or
hundred and forty eight different wax recordings of Ishi talking
and singing and telling Yahi stories, so you can hear
(13:42):
his voice. Today.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
There are five hours and forty one minutes of recordings
of Ishi talking and singing in Yahi, recorded by Waterman
and Krober. Here's a clip of Ishi described in the
History of the Yahi language. Wants to do?
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Of course.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
It come Pick's life barely overlapped with the technology making
it possible to record his voice. Can you imagine the
life that the man lived who you've just heard. Gene
(14:33):
is now going to tell us about another relationship that
she had, and for many of us, this relationship might
be the one that impacts us the most today.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Now, interestingly, again one of the books which I give
credibility to doctor Saxon Pope. So when issue was brought
to the university, the first people that he was introduced
to Waterman, who came to Oroville to get him. Obert
was the other anthropologist. When they took him back to
the university. Krober became a big part of his life,
(15:06):
actually became closer to him than Waterman, but then there
was also a medical doctor, and the medical doctor that
they assigned Ishi to was doctor Saxton Pope, Saxon Pope
of the Pope and Young Club that we have today.
Saxton Pope, father of Bohunting. Saxon Pope was assigned to
(15:27):
be the medical doctor for Ishi. Pope became Ishi's closest friend.
By all accounts, more so than Krober, more so than Waterman,
more so than sam Bawa. Pope was Ishi's best friend.
Issue would call him Pope. He wouldn't say Pope, he
would say Pope. Remember again the ah he had the
(15:47):
suffix they would put on the end of the words.
So Pope became Pope. Pope was his best friend. One
account says that Ishi actually shared his real name with Pope,
and I believe the story the book is very credible.
But Pope, out of respect for Ishi, never told anybody
what his name was. So did he We don't know.
(16:11):
Could likely. I think Pope didn't know his real name,
but he never shared it. So now we're into late
nineteen eleven, I think this is really critical. We talk
about Saxton Pope and how important Saxton Pope was to
us as bow hunters. Saxon. Pope wrote the book nineteen
twenty three, Hunting with the Bow and Arrow. That book
(16:32):
was a combination or culmination of a lot of stories
and a lot of things he learned from Ishi. How
to hunt with Yahi styles, how to call, how to decoy,
how to make equipment. A lot of that book, Hunting
with the Bone Arrow nineteen twenty three is what he
learned from Ishi. That book is what really launched our sport.
That book got Doug Easton into bow hunting. That was
(16:54):
a big deal, now, Pope, So I'm going to back
up now, that nineteen twenty three book, which was the end,
the result. The beginning of that was him being assigned
to Issue as his medical doctor in nineteen twelve and
early nineteen twelve. Pope had been seeing Issue since he
was captured a doctor patient relationship in nineteen twelve. Spring
(17:19):
of nineteen twelve, Pope is looking out his office window
and he sees Issue on the lawn shooting a bow.
He's out there by himself shooting a bow. Pope gets
up and walks out and Issu shows him how to
shoot a bow. Issui introduces Pope to the bow. Now
Pope had an interest in archery. But here is issue now,
taking Pope and teaching him how to shoot a bow,
(17:41):
how to hunt with a bow. In nineteen twelve, that's
when Pope became more than his doctor. That's when their
friendship started. That's when they started to realize that they
were brothers of the bow. And from that point forward,
there weren't days go by that they weren't going out
(18:02):
and shooting. That issue wasn't teaching Pope something about archery
and hunting with the bow and arrow?
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Is She's impact on Saxton Pope, who the Pope and
Young Club would later be named after, is immeasurable. That
impact is if you're not familiar, The Pope and Young
Club is America's premier bow hunting conservation organization, still in
existence today. Archery was on its way to being completely
lost in a world enamored with the technology of the firearm,
(18:32):
but some people still had interest in this archaic form
of hunting.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
So by nineteen fourteen, is she has been He's gotten
very comfortable with his life there at the university. They
have made him an assistant janitor. They gave him a job.
They figured he she was costing them about twenty five
dollars a week for food and bardon. They gave him
(19:00):
a job as assistant janitor, and they gave him the
salary of twenty five dollars a week. So Issu not
just because they wanted him to earn his own living,
but because but more because they wanted him to have
the pride that he wasn't living off of them. He
was taking care of himself. He was making his own living.
(19:24):
And he would take his twenty five dollars a week
salary and he would They taught him how to sign
his name. He was paid a check and he would
go down and cash the check and then he would
take his change back there. His cash back in half dollars,
and he would take his fifty cent pieces and he
would stack them into stacks of twenty so he could count.
(19:48):
And then he he was in his cult. He never
had to worry about thieves, He never had to worry
about somebody taking something that didn't belong to him. So
he would keep all his money on his table. Pope
and Krober both that's not a good idea. So Krober
took him back to the office and showed him the safe,
and is she we can pick your money, and we
(20:09):
can put it in the safe here, and we'll have
a little box and we'll have your name on it.
This is yours, and you can get it out anytime
you want. But it's not wise to keep your money
on the table like you've been doing. So from that
point on, is She kept his money in that safe,
and he would spend about half of his weekly salary
on ice cream and on food and things like that.
(20:31):
He loved ice cream. With the other half he would
take every week and put it into the bank.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Can you imagine describing the value of currency to a
fifty year old man who walked out of the stone age.
This coin represents value that you can go and trade
for food and clothes and stuff you need. Can you
imagine describing to him the banking system. These people will
keep your money safe. It must have been a wild concept,
but he understood it immediately. Here's more from Jane, giving
(21:01):
us a picture of is She's new life in San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
So okay in nineteen fourteen. Again, issue's very comfortable. Now
he's been making his own living. He's the assistant janitor.
He's now picked up about four to five hundred words
of English. He's able to walk the city by himself.
He's able to go shopping by himself. He's interacting, he's mingling,
(21:28):
he's become part of the community, and he goes to
Again Pope is the doctor. Pope is one of the
most noteworthy, successful, looked up to surgeons in the country.
He's the head of the department, the surgery department at
the University of California. By the time he's in his
mid thirties. Pope would live Is. She come into to
(21:49):
the hospital with him and meet the patients, and Is
She would even wear a lab coat and walk into
the room and sometimes by himself. He'd walk into the
patients room and look the patient, not say anything, just
look at the patient. And then he'd walk out, and
the patients knew who he was. It wasn't like who
was that guy? You know, they knew the story of Issue.
(22:10):
They knew who he was. You know. He was a
very respected, looked up to again, cheerful, he was never
in a bad mood, so he was good for people.
So Is she would come into the hospital, Pope would
actually take him into the operating room and Issue would
be able to observe Pope doing operations. Here's a man
again three years ago was coming out of a stone
(22:32):
Age civilization, and now he's watching Pope perform surgeries removing kidneys.
And Ishi was fascinated obviously by that, and so there
were several stories about Issue would debate po on some
of the treatments. Why do you do that? You don't
need to do that, You just do this, you know,
(22:52):
madsines and herbs and things like this. You don't need
to cut him, you can do this. And at other times,
something really radical, like removing the kidney, it was like,
how will that man live? You know, can you imagine
three years ago you were in stone Age and now
you're watching surgeries removing a kidney, You're watching them recover
(23:12):
and living. It was unbelievable. Oh, here is one story
I want to tell. So remember when Issue came down.
For the last forty years of his life, his world
was four and five people. That was it. That was
(23:34):
all the civilization he knew. Overnight, he's put into a
civilization where there are thousands of people, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands, writing trains, seeing cars going two shows. Well,
they take Issue to basically a vaudeville show where they're
singing and dancing and there's a beautiful lady singing and
(23:57):
Issui and Krober and Waterman and Pope are all at
the show. And is she? They think, is SHEI would
be really interested in the show, But in reality, is
she is not even watching the show? What is he
fascinated by? He's fascinated because this is the first time
he's been in a room with so many people, and
(24:19):
they just said it was like the show didn't exist.
The show to him was being in a room with
hundreds of people at the same time think about is she.
Since he was ten years old, his world is four
and five people, a sister, cousin, a mother, an old
man who might have been an uncle, and himself. He
(24:39):
never had an experience of dating, of having a woman
in his life. That was something that he never had
the chance to experience. So when he went to the show,
the newspaper guy was there and he wrote a story.
And his story was he had a story he wanted
to tell. Regardless of what happened, he already had a
(25:02):
story and it was how issue was infatuated with the dancer,
and obviously he had thoughts of the lady. But in reality,
all the people around him said he didn't even look
at her. And I've got a picture of him and
her and Waterman and Kroeber and Pope after the show
is over with. He doesn't care about her. He carried
(25:24):
about the room full of people. That's what he cared about.
They would take him, and they thought he would be
wowed by the buildings there at Berkeley and at San Francisco.
He wasn't excited at all about the big buildings. They
think that's because when he spent his years growing up
in the mountains, it was nothing for him to be
(25:46):
up on the side of the mountains. He was always
up high. He would jump from the side of the
cliff onto a tree, never thought anything about it. He
would get out on the ledges of the buildings and
just walk. The ledges didn't bother him at all. Heights
didn't bother him at all. He wasn't fascinated by the
big buildings. He was fascinated by the people.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Now, Jean's gonna tell us about a trip that was
proposed to Ishi.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
So nineteen fourteen, Pope, Waterman and Krober have the idea
issues at the peak of his health. He's no longer
the emaciated, starved Indian that they found in nineteen eleven.
He's a very healthy man. Now. You can see pictures
of Ishi in nineteen fourteen. He's a pretty muscled guy.
(26:38):
They decide that wouldn't it be fantastic if we could
take Issui back up into the country where he came from.
We could take him back up to the Ahi country.
We can let him tell us and show us where
all of these things happened, Kingsley's Cave, massacre, Grizzly Bear's
(26:58):
hiding place. Let's go, let's go up in the spring
in nineteen fourteen, and let's go back with Issue. So
they approached Issue with this idea, and is she was
not so good about that. He was not so comfortable
with that. So was it because it brought back bad memories.
I don't want to go back there. That's where all
my people were killed. Or was it because they thought
(27:21):
he thought they might be taking him back there and
they were going to leave him. We don't know what
is she was thinking, but he wasn't comfortable with the
idea going back. Finally he relented. Finally he said, Okay,
I'll go back, and they took one room of the
museum and that was their staging room and all the
equipment they were going to take on the trip with them.
(27:41):
They'd stage in that room, but there were also skeletons
and things in that room. So is she says, you're
this is not good. I mean, you know, everything's just
going to be polluted with bad spirits. So they had
to take all their equipment and rap it up and
show Ishi that has wrapped up. It can't be exposed
(28:03):
to the bad spirits, and it's good. And issue was fine,
and then they went. They went on a long pack
horse pack trip up into the area where the Ahi lived,
and they spent a few weeks up there, and Ishi
loved it. He by the time they started the trip,
he was excited. So they go up into the mountains
(28:24):
and he shows them wherever, you know, this is where
I killed a bear. And he walks and he says, here,
and he starts digging in the ground and he actually
finds the skull and the claws of the bear that
he killed. He found the spot where he buried the bear.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Is she buried a bear? This story confirms something that
I've recently been learning about from my book project on
the American black bear. Ceremonial disposal of bear remains was
common across North America. Many animals they would dispose of
without ceremony. The bear was different and required more effort.
(28:58):
Some tribes through beares into rivers, and others buried them
like humans. This confused archaeologists for a long time, leading
them to believe that many tribes didn't eat bears because
they didn't find bare bones and refuse piles. Only later
would they learn about the ceremonial disposal practices and going
(29:19):
back to issue being concerned with their gear being stored
in a room with human remains. I'd like to read
a quote from Theodora Kroeber's book Eschi in Two Worlds,
where she writes about his spiritual doctrine. This is what
she said. He was an introvert, reserved, contemplative, and philosophical.
(29:40):
He lived at ease with the supernatural and the mystical,
which were pervasive in all aspects of life. He felt
no need to differentiate mystical truth from directly evidential or
material truth, or the supernatural from the natural. One was
as manifest as the other within his systems. Of values
and persons and beliefs. The promoter, the boaster, the aggressor,
(30:05):
the egotist, the innovator would have been looked at askance.
The ideal was the man of restraint, dignity, rectitude, He
of the middle way. Life proceeded within the limits of
known and proper pattern, from birth through death and beyond.
(30:26):
End of quote. I find fascinating the intersection of the
spirit world in the natural world. I think these things
are still relevant today. But let's get back to the
trip to Ishi's homeland.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
He took them to the cave. He took them to
the grizzly bear's hiding place. In the grizzly bears hiding place,
there were still some things when they left. They left behind.
There were some residues, some remnants that the settlers hadn't
stolen that were left behind. They would swim in the creek,
would hunt. They would kill deer. Pope wanted to kill
(31:03):
a deer. Issues was teaching him how to hunt. Pope smoked,
and is she said they went two days, they didn't
kill a deer. Is She says, you're not killing a
deer because you're smoking. You have to quit smoking. So
Pope quit smoking. The next day he killed a deer.
Is She said, see, I told you you know so
Is She was imparting on them all of his wisdom
(31:24):
about living in the country and making a living off
the country. And so they spent a couple of months
up there on the Springtime Adventure. It was Pope, it
was Krober, it was Waterman, it was Pope's oldest son,
Saxton Junr. And it was Issu.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
The ripples of this historic trip with Is she teaching
Saxon Pope how to effectively kill game with the primitive
bow are still being felt today. Many of the skills
that modern bow hunters have and even take for granted,
like how to wait before you track a bowshot animal
and then blood trail, it was likely learned from Ishi
(32:05):
on this trip. But I've got to warn you things
are about to existentially change for Ishi.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
And they come back and they make plans to go
back in the fall. Well in the fall, and then
especially by the spring, Issue started showing signs of sickness.
So by the fall of nineteen fourteen, he had a fever,
he had a cough. They tested him for different things
like tuberculosis. Negative tests it's just a cold, it's just
(32:40):
something going on, And then they planned to go in
nineteen fifteen. Well, in nineteen fifteen, Issu became morale to
the point where he wasn't able to make the trip,
so they never made it back. They only made the
one trip in nineteen fourteen. Now, Issu's health deteriorated from
that point, although his TB tests were still showing negative,
(33:04):
But at that time in medicine, TV tests were often negative.
Even if he would have been positive, it was not
unusual to get a negative test, and by nineteen By
the fall of nineteen fifteen and early nineteen sixteen, full
blown tuberculosis had come and Issu's health was getting poor,
(33:26):
and by March of nineteen sixteen, Is she died of tuberculosis. Now,
if you know tuberculosis, it's a terrible, terrible, terrible death,
And tuberculosis in the early part of the nineteen hundreds
was a very common disease across the US. Waterman Krober's
(33:50):
own wife, his first wife, had to tuberculosis. Interesting because
is she would go to Krober's house for dinner. Often
he would spend several nights staying at Crober's house. His
Crober's wife had tuberculosis. Could he have got the tuberculosis
from his wife? Crober's wife. Crober's wife passed away of
(34:12):
tuberculosis in nineteen thirteen, or all the time that is,
she spent in the hospital with Doctor Pope. Many patients
in the hospital were there because of tuberculosis. Why weren't
they shielding him from that? They knew that he was
a compromised immunity because of his culture, because of his background.
(34:34):
So some of the criticism probably rightfully so, so why
didn't they shelter him more? Why didn't they protect him
more from white man's disease? But he got tuberculosis, so
he died. Pope was grief stricken. This was his best friend.
(34:54):
They were truly best friends. Waterman had left for Europe
several months before that. Kro Krober had gone to Europe.
Kroeber had gotten word that the tuberculosis tests were positive.
Now he knew Issue's days were numbered, but he couldn't
get back. He got all the way back to New York,
(35:16):
but his business schedule kept him in New York. He
was communicating via telegram back with the people at the hospital,
keeping track of Issue. Knowing that he was progressively getting
worker worse, eventually getting to the point where death is imminent.
And he left word there will be no autopsy. We
(35:40):
will respect Issue's culture. There is no need to do
an autopsy. We know he died of tuberculosis. Science be damned,
Science can go to hell. Are the words that he wrote.
There will be no autopsy, and he sent the letter.
He sent it via letter. The letter didn't arrive in time.
Is she died. Pope conducted an autopsy. Now he did
(36:04):
it respectfully. Pope being a medical doctor, he didn't think
like Kroeber is an anthropologist. But he did the autopsy.
What wasn't talked about at the time was that he
also took Issue's brain and they were studying the brain.
Now by nineteen seventeen, Kroeber is back at the university again.
(36:29):
Krober is over the emotional impact of Issu dying. He
knows that the brain is there. What are we going
to do? They'd taken the body and cremated what they
thought was the IHI desire for cremation. They took the
body and cremated it, put it in a ceramic urn.
(36:50):
The IHI would have said, put it in a basket
and bury it. And they took it to the local
cemetery and put it in more or less a mausoleum.
But the brain stayed in the museum, and in nineteen
seventeen Krober sent a letter to the Smithsonian. There was
a gentleman at the Smithsonian who was collecting brains from
(37:12):
different civilizations, studying what. I don't know why, I don't know,
but he had brains from all different cultures, all different civilizations.
Krober made a deal to send Issu's brain to the Smithsonian,
to the sky for his collection, his brain collection, and
he did. He sent the brain to the Smithsonian in
nineteen seventeen. It didn't get cremated with the body. But
(37:36):
this was all done kind of on the sly and
it wasn't talked about. It wasn't even people at the
hospital didn't even know it. So the stories start to
come out. Somehow, people start to hear that issue's brain
had been removed, and they start to do some investigation.
Where's the brain? What happened to it? We don't know,
(37:58):
it's not here being in this Smithsonian. People didn't know.
So there were a couple of people that actually started
on the trail, starting researching what happened to the brain,
And in nineteen eighty nine they found the letters where
Krober had sent the communication to the guy at the
Smithsonian about the brain. The guy had said, yes, I
(38:18):
would love to have it, and they find evidence that
it is it did get sent to the Smithsonian. But
remember back if you were alive in the eighties, there
was this big native repatriation movement. All you know, you
can no longer dig for artifacts bones which people collected,
(38:40):
private people collected bones, universities collected bones of natives. George
Bush signed a law that those had to be repatriated
if they were requested. So some local natives requested issues brain.
They found out about the brain, they requested the brain,
and they requested the cremated remains so they could take
(39:02):
it to the mountains and bury it as the how
he would have wanted. So they found that the cremated
remains right away. It was common knowledge people, you know,
it was there in the local cemetery. But the brain
was a dead end. And it started actually got a
response from somebody who should have and probably didn't know better,
(39:24):
that the brain had been incinerated because this mith Estonian
didn't want it to get out that they had the brain.
They didn't want the bad publicity, so they disposed of it.
The story was they disposed of it to prevent that
from happening. We don't have it. In reality, they didn't.
(39:45):
In reality it was still there, but it took several
years of this two people digging before they got to
somebody that knew where it was. And they found somebody
who knew where it was, and they got the brain
and they took it back with the ashes, the cremated ashes,
(40:07):
and they took it to the base of Mount Lassen
there in the Aahi country and they buried it. Now
interesting remember the cremated ashes were in an urn, the
ceramic urn. The urn when they got it out of
(40:29):
basically the mausoleum had a cement plug in it, so
they couldn't open it to get the ashes out. They
wanted to put the ashes in the ground, so the
break the urn open. When they broke it open, there
were the ashes, There was some bone, There was some
obsidian flakes in there which Pope had put in before
(40:52):
they cremated issue. And there was a letter that somebody
had put in the urn a yellowed piece of paper.
After the cremation, the people doing the repatriation found that letter.
It was folded up, and you know what, they never
opened it. They never read it. They respected that whoever
(41:16):
wrote it put it in there as person to person.
This is from them to issue. It's none of our business.
So they buried it with the ashes, and they buried
the brain. They didn't incinerate the brain. They carried the
brain from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, d c. As
carry on baggage on a plane back to California, took
(41:41):
it up into the mountains with the ashes and buried
the ashes along with the whole brain and the letter,
and never opened the letter. We don't know who the
letter was from speculation it was probably Pope, that was
his best friend. What did it say? No idea fascinating And.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
She's contribution to linguistics, anthropology and our understanding of indigenous
Americans is hard to quantify. But what we can quantify
is is she's contribution to archery. I want to hear
about this from Gene, a man who's dedicated his life
to archery.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
So is she's contribution to us? You know, as we
said here, today in a room full of archery and
bow hunting. And you know my life, I've you know,
I've been hunting with the bow and arrow for sixty years.
It's all I've ever done. I told you my first
big game animal were grasshoppers in the cow pasture when
I was five and six seven years old. I thought
that was a big deal. You know, to me, a
grasshopper was a big game hunt. I was out there
(43:01):
with my bow and arrow shooting grasshoppers and putting them
in my pocket, and then taking them to the farm
pond and catching bluegills in bass. What is she did
for us in that day, on that day in nineteen
twelve when Pope looked out that window and saw is
she shooting the bow? And Pope left his office and
went down there and started shooting with him. And from
that point they go up into the mountains in nineteen
(43:22):
fourteen and they go hunting, and is She's teaching Pope
how to hunt white tailed deer and how to call
and how to decoy and how to get close. And
then is she dies and Pope continues And something that
I think not many people know or understand too, is
how it all fits together in nineteen fifteen. Is she
(43:44):
went was asked to be part of the Pan Pacific
Exhibition there in California. It's kind of like the World's Fair. Is.
She was on the show card for the Pan Pacific
nineteen fifteen. Remember again, all across the country, Issue was
front Age News. One of the people who read one
of those stories was Will Compton. Chief Compton. Chief Compton
(44:07):
comes to the Pan Pacific in nineteen fifteen to see Issi.
He also goes to the Japanese Archery exhibit, which is
there that year too. And while he's there at the
Japanese Archery exhibit, this tall athletic man comes up and
stands next to him, looking at the same exhibit, and
Compton introduces himself to the man. The man says, Hello,
(44:30):
I'm Art Young or Art glad to meet you. Do
you hunt with a bone aero or do you shoot
a bone arrow? No? I think I would like to. Well,
why don't you come back and let's go meet this
guy named Ishi. And then they get friends with Pope
because Pope is part of Issue's circle. So now we
have Pope, Compton and Young coming together because of Issue is.
(44:54):
She dies in nineteen sixteen Pope and young continue to
hunt across the world. They go to Alaska, they go
to Africa. They hunt with their bow and arrow. They
document their hunts, they write stories for the magazine. They
publish books about hunting with the bow and arrow. Art
goes on a hunt to Alaska, makes a movie, a
(45:15):
silent black and white movie of hunting Alaska called Alaskan Adventures.
You can google it and look at it on YouTube.
He comes back with that movie and he goes around
the country showing that silent black and white movie at
movie theaters across the country. Well, because it's silent, he
goes too, and he sits on stage and he narrates
(45:37):
the movie for the audience, and then after the show
he does shooting exhibitions. Well, he's doing this show in
nineteen twenty eight in Detroit in the audience as a
young man by the name of Fred Bhaer. Fred introduces
himself to Art, finds out Art's going to be at
a I think it was either a Lions Club or
(45:57):
Certoma club meeting a couple weeks later, and he goes
to that and he becomes friends with Art, and Art
and Fred end up in Fred's basement Art teaching Fred
how to make archery equipments. That's how Fred Bher got
into archery. That's how Fred bhar and why Fred Behaer
started Bear Archery Company a few years later in nineteen
(46:19):
thirty three. Art died in nineteen thirty five. Compton died
in nineteen thirty eight. Fred bher starts Bear Archery in
nineteen thirty three. Fred Bhaer genius at marketing, probably with
in my mind, without doubt, the most important man for
marketing our sport. He understood it's not good enough just
(46:43):
to make equipment. It's not good enough just to sell
bows and arrows. We've got to build a sport. We've
got to market this to people so that they want
to do this. Otherwise they're not even going to know
it exists. So Fred Bhaer goes out and brings archery
to the world. Fred Bher, Glenn's St. Charles Lynn, Saint Charles.
They make movies, they make TV shows, The American Sportsman.
(47:07):
One of my earliest memories of bull hunting was getting
up on Saturday morning and watching The American Sportsman on ABC,
and here is Gwenn, Saint Charles, and Fred Bhaer hunting Alaska.
That fired me up, That just lit my flame and
never went out. Then I become friends with Gwen Saint Charles,
(47:29):
I get to meet Fred Bhaer because I'm a bear
dealer in the seventies and eighties, and I get to
meet these guys, I get to become friends. And that
goes all the way back to issue. If is She
hadn't been the glue that brought together Art Young, Saxton Pope,
and Chief Compton Fred Behar wouldn't have gone to that movie.
(47:49):
Fred Bhaer might not have started bear archery. We're here
today because is She brought those people together.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
In nineteen sixty one, Glenn Saint Charles and Fred Baer
and several others founded the Pope and Young Club, which
influenced North American hunting culture significantly and specifically through bow hunting.
Their mission is to preserve wildlife, promote bow hunting, and
protect hunting. I think clubs like the Pop and Young
(48:25):
Club and the Boone and Crocket Club are extremely important
and relevant even today. These clubs are typically just known
as record keeping organizations for animals. That's kind of what
they've been become known for. You know, their scoring systems
for gauging the size of antlers and skulls. But they
really do so much more to protect our heritage as
(48:47):
American hunters, and I think these organizations deserve our support.
And I think it's super interesting how they can be
tracked back to this man Ischi that I can see
a hero of our culture, a hero of this continent.
I think it's super interesting how it all goes back
to him. I can't thank you enough for listening to
(49:13):
Bear Grease, for listening to Brints, this country Life, for
listening to Lakes Backwoods University. We're putting our heart and
soul into telling these stories. We can't thank you guys
enough for just following along. Please share this feed with
your buddies this week. And I just hope everyone has
(49:34):
a great fault. I hope you get to hunt. I
hope you're successful. I hope you get to spend some
incredible time with your friends and family in the woods.
And I just every day I am just more and more
thankful for the life that we get to lead amidst
the chaos of the earth that surrounds us. We've got
(49:56):
a great treasure in wild places and our ability to
go and hunt them and acquire wild game for our family,
and to let these activities of our culture be a
conduit to our children for a value system of respect, responsibility, honesty, integrity,
(50:18):
the things that I think wild places produce inside of us.
For that reason, keep the wild places wild, because that's
where
Speaker 2 (50:25):
The bears live.
The story of Ishi, the last Yahee Indians showing up
in Oraville, California, nineteen eleven has got to be one
of America's most fascinating stories. This episode is more redemptive
in some ways than the first, but ultimately the scales
tip toward it being even more tragic. These events took
place between September fourth, nineteen eleven and March twenty fifth,
(00:29):
nineteen sixteen, when Hi died, but it wouldn't be into
the nineteen nineties, when Ishi's remains were put back into
the dirt of his homeland that this story really ends.
But if you're a bowhunter, the ripples of Ishi's life
reverberated into our modern bow hunting culture more than you
(00:50):
might know. I really doubt that you're gonna want to
miss this one. And as a note, we interrupted this
series for our ted kopple in, but we're back on
track and I hope that everyone is having a great
start to the fall.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
And the medical doctor that they assigned Ishi to was
doctor Saxton Pope, Saxon, Pope of the Pope and Young
Club that we have today. Saxton Pope, father of Bohunting.
Saxon Pope was assigned to be the medical doctor for Ishi.
Pope became Ishi's closest friend. By all accounts, more so
(01:30):
than Krober, more sou than Waterman, more so than Sambawa.
Pope was Ishi's best friend.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
My name is Clay nukemb and this is the Bear
Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land.
Presented by FHF Gear American Maid, purpose built hunting and
(02:09):
fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the
place as we explore. The singing we've just heard was
(02:42):
the voice of a man who, on August twenty ninth,
nineteen eleven, wandered into a stockyard in Oraville, California. His
hair was singed near to the scalp in mourning. He
was emaciated. The only clothing he wore was a shredded
piece of canvas wagon cover. Spoke no English and appeared destitute.
(03:03):
The local sheriff took him into the jail, where he
stayed for several days until anthropologists from the University of California,
who had read in the newspaper about a Stone Age
man who could understand no man's language had wandered into
town and these men came and got him. Rumors had
circulated for the last two decades that a small band
(03:25):
of Yanna Indians remained in the remote region of northern California,
in the Deer and Mill Creek region, but few believed
it was true. How could it be true? At one
time there had been bounties for the scalps of these
Indians in the state of California, and they were the
targets of a decadees long genocide. But living the entirety
(03:47):
of his fifty years of life in hiding, completely isolated
from the technology of the Western world, one man remained.
He never revealed his name, but was simply referred to
to is Ishi, which in his native language simply meant man.
The story that this man would tell and the lessons
(04:08):
he'd teach, would alter the knowledge of Stone Age civilizations
and dramatically alter the trajectory of archery. This is the
story of Hi's life from nineteen eleven until nineteen sixteen,
before a tragic ending. In the last episode, we left
off with is She less than a week after his
(04:29):
arrival in Oraville, heading to San Francisco, California, with doctor
Waterman at the permission of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
They would soon learn of the complexity of the culture
of the Yahee, a subtribe of the Yanna. This is
archery historian Jene Hopkins of Columbus, Indiana.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
So he's you know, they keep him in the Oroville
jail just for a couple three days until Waterman can
get there. And Waterman gets there and he RECOGNI is
how important this find is. You know, this person is
in the contributions to our understanding of culture is going
to be This guy is a gold mine for us.
(05:12):
And he gets permission to take him back to the
university anthropology department, and he takes issue and puts him
on the train and now issue. All the time he
was living in the mountains, when he was up on
Mount Lassen, which was in the northeast part of their range.
When he was on mounta Lasson, he could look down
(05:33):
in the valleys and he could see the train. As
a young man in the eighteen sixties and seventies and eighties,
when he was up on the mountain, he could watch
that train go through the valleys, and his mother would
tell him that's the white man's there was a word
he used, monster. But you don't need to fear it
(05:54):
because it never leaves its tracks. It will not hurt you,
it will never leave its tracks. Now Here he is
in nineteen eleven, only having been captured just a couple
of days earlier. Waterman's taking them to the train station
and putting him on that train. And can you imagine
coming out of a culture that was truly stone Age,
(06:17):
and within two days you're on a train and you're
going to the big city and you're seeing buildings and
the vehicles and the trains and everything that goes on
inside a big city in nineteen eleven modern society. So
when she gets on the train and they're taking Waterman's
taking him back to the university, the University of California
(06:41):
and Berkeley, and they're going into you know, they're leaving
a civilization of culture that's truly stone Age. And he's
lived with nothing but a ball and arrow. He's lived
with nothing but fire and fire starters. He's lived having
to kill or catch or harvest anything and everything that
he would eat, except what he would raid from the cabins.
(07:03):
But he would never take you know, he'd never take
any canned goods. He would only take the stores that
were not canned because they didn't understand what canned goods were.
They didn't understand there were food inside those cans. But
here he is, just two days after being captured. He's
on a train going back to the big city. He'd
never seen more than forty people, and now he's in
(07:26):
a city where there's hundreds of thousands of people. It
must have been mind blowing for him. Can you imagine
what was going through his head. It must have been intimidating,
It must have been scary, but he didn't show it.
He didn't show it. He was very inquisitive. He was
fascinated his demeanor and his actions, and he didn't try
(07:50):
to escape, he didn't try to run. It was pure fascination.
So Waterman gets Issue back and they introduce Issue to
(08:12):
Alfred Kroeber, who was Waterman's partner in the anthropology department,
and Krober takes Issue basically under his wing, and they
give him a place to live in the museum there
at the Department of Anthropology. They don't want Issue to
feel like he's a captured inmate. They want Issue to
(08:33):
feel comfortable, They want the Issue to feel welcome, They
want him to feel like this could be your home.
And Issue is again fascinated where everything going on around him,
so inquisitive about everything he's seeing. And inside the anthropology department,
you know, there's a lot of items. Included in those
(08:56):
items are a lot of cadavers and a lot of
skeletons and things that you know, Issui, in his way
of thinking, in his culture, was pretty intimidating, So that's
something he had to get used to. You know that
they would try to keep Issuy apart from the skeletons
and all the remains that they would have in a
(09:18):
typical anthropology department.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
It's interesting and not surprising that Ishi had issues with
the Native American remains stored at the University of California.
All he'd ever known was the way his culture dealt
with the dead, likely cremating them. But the details of
all this remain a mystery. But here these people were
storing human remains in boxes. Seventy nine years later, a
(09:43):
US federal law called the Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act of nineteen ninety would require institutions to return
human remains and funeral objects to the tribes if requested later.
That very law would affect ishi remains.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
So Issue was big news. Now big news across the country.
Last wild man captured in California. I use the analogy
if we would today capture a bigfoot and we would
bring him down and we would put him on display right,
and it would make newspaper headlines across the world. That's
why it was with Issue newspapers across the country. We're
(10:25):
telling the story of Issi on the front page. So
people were coming from all over the country to see
this last wild man. So now Crowber and watermen are
trying to figure out, why, what am I going to do?
How are we going to do this? We can't just
open it up, you know, we can't just let everybody
come in, which they did for a couple of weeks.
It got kind of out of hand, and then they decided, no,
(10:48):
we're going to have to schedule time. We're only going
to have a couple of hours in the afternoon. People
can come by and see Issue. So they give Issue
new clothes, pants, shirt, a jacket, tried to give him shoes,
he wouldn't take the shoes, and then he would They
would set up greeting a meet and greets more or
(11:08):
less for people to come in and people, local school
kids were coming, dignitarios were coming from across the country
to meet Issue. Krober would introduce Issu, I would like
you to meet mister Smith, and Issue would try to
it's best to pronounce the name because he was very respectful.
(11:29):
That's another thing about Ishi. You know, Yahi culture must
have been a very respectful culture. So it was very
important to him when he would be introduced to somebody
that he would be able to repeat your name, and
he would try his best to pronounce, and his articulation
was very good. So you know is she was a
smart man. He was a very smart man. He just
hadn't been taught the things of our culture. He was
(11:51):
taught the things of his culture. But he picked up
the things of our culture very quickly. And at that
time anthropology was a fairly new science. So we have T. T.
Waterman and we have Alfred Kroeber, the two anthropology professors
there at the University of California. Waterman takes him back
there and then Kroeber. They start to study more and
(12:15):
more of Issue, and they're actually starting to build now.
They teach Issue a few words of English. Issue teaches
them a few words of Yahi, and over a period
of time, Ishi gets to the point where he can
has a vocabulary of about five hundred English words. But
he would take a lot of those words in Yahie
eyes that because in the Yahi language it was actually
(12:38):
a dual language. Women spoke one way, men spoke another way.
So a good example, let's use the word hat in English,
it's hat. Yahi would have a word for hat, Yahi
word for hat. Well, let's pretend it's English. So the
women would say hat, the men would say hat.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Not.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
So they would put a suffix on the back of
their words. So when a man was speaking to a man,
this was a hat, And when a woman was speaking
to a woman, or a man was speaking to a woman,
was a hat. So is has he learned English a
lot of his words he would do that. He would
put the male suffix on the end of a lot
(13:20):
of his words. So when you listen, you can actually
go out and google, go to YouTube. There's some stories
out there where they actually recorded Ishi talking. There are
wax recordings. There are one hundred and forty seven or
hundred and forty eight different wax recordings of Ishi talking
and singing and telling Yahi stories, so you can hear
(13:42):
his voice. Today.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
There are five hours and forty one minutes of recordings
of Ishi talking and singing in Yahi, recorded by Waterman
and Krober. Here's a clip of Ishi described in the
History of the Yahi language. Wants to do?
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Of course.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
It come Pick's life barely overlapped with the technology making
it possible to record his voice. Can you imagine the
life that the man lived who you've just heard. Gene
(14:33):
is now going to tell us about another relationship that
she had, and for many of us, this relationship might
be the one that impacts us the most today.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Now, interestingly, again one of the books which I give
credibility to doctor Saxon Pope. So when issue was brought
to the university, the first people that he was introduced
to Waterman, who came to Oroville to get him. Obert
was the other anthropologist. When they took him back to
the university. Krober became a big part of his life,
(15:06):
actually became closer to him than Waterman, but then there
was also a medical doctor, and the medical doctor that
they assigned Ishi to was doctor Saxton Pope, Saxon Pope
of the Pope and Young Club that we have today.
Saxton Pope, father of Bohunting. Saxon Pope was assigned to
(15:27):
be the medical doctor for Ishi. Pope became Ishi's closest friend.
By all accounts, more so than Krober, more so than Waterman,
more so than sam Bawa. Pope was Ishi's best friend.
Issue would call him Pope. He wouldn't say Pope, he
would say Pope. Remember again the ah he had the
(15:47):
suffix they would put on the end of the words.
So Pope became Pope. Pope was his best friend. One
account says that Ishi actually shared his real name with Pope,
and I believe the story the book is very credible.
But Pope, out of respect for Ishi, never told anybody
what his name was. So did he We don't know.
(16:11):
Could likely. I think Pope didn't know his real name,
but he never shared it. So now we're into late
nineteen eleven, I think this is really critical. We talk
about Saxton Pope and how important Saxton Pope was to
us as bow hunters. Saxon. Pope wrote the book nineteen
twenty three, Hunting with the Bow and Arrow. That book
(16:32):
was a combination or culmination of a lot of stories
and a lot of things he learned from Ishi. How
to hunt with Yahi styles, how to call, how to decoy,
how to make equipment. A lot of that book, Hunting
with the Bone Arrow nineteen twenty three is what he
learned from Ishi. That book is what really launched our sport.
That book got Doug Easton into bow hunting. That was
(16:54):
a big deal, now, Pope, So I'm going to back
up now, that nineteen twenty three book, which was the end,
the result. The beginning of that was him being assigned
to Issue as his medical doctor in nineteen twelve and
early nineteen twelve. Pope had been seeing Issue since he
was captured a doctor patient relationship in nineteen twelve. Spring
(17:19):
of nineteen twelve, Pope is looking out his office window
and he sees Issue on the lawn shooting a bow.
He's out there by himself shooting a bow. Pope gets
up and walks out and Issu shows him how to
shoot a bow. Issui introduces Pope to the bow. Now
Pope had an interest in archery. But here is issue now,
taking Pope and teaching him how to shoot a bow,
(17:41):
how to hunt with a bow. In nineteen twelve, that's
when Pope became more than his doctor. That's when their
friendship started. That's when they started to realize that they
were brothers of the bow. And from that point forward,
there weren't days go by that they weren't going out
(18:02):
and shooting. That issue wasn't teaching Pope something about archery
and hunting with the bow and arrow?
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Is She's impact on Saxton Pope, who the Pope and
Young Club would later be named after, is immeasurable. That
impact is if you're not familiar, The Pope and Young
Club is America's premier bow hunting conservation organization, still in
existence today. Archery was on its way to being completely
lost in a world enamored with the technology of the firearm,
(18:32):
but some people still had interest in this archaic form
of hunting.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
So by nineteen fourteen, is she has been He's gotten
very comfortable with his life there at the university. They
have made him an assistant janitor. They gave him a job.
They figured he she was costing them about twenty five
dollars a week for food and bardon. They gave him
(19:00):
a job as assistant janitor, and they gave him the
salary of twenty five dollars a week. So Issu not
just because they wanted him to earn his own living,
but because but more because they wanted him to have
the pride that he wasn't living off of them. He
was taking care of himself. He was making his own living.
(19:24):
And he would take his twenty five dollars a week
salary and he would They taught him how to sign
his name. He was paid a check and he would
go down and cash the check and then he would
take his change back there. His cash back in half dollars,
and he would take his fifty cent pieces and he
would stack them into stacks of twenty so he could count.
(19:48):
And then he he was in his cult. He never
had to worry about thieves, He never had to worry
about somebody taking something that didn't belong to him. So
he would keep all his money on his table. Pope
and Krober both that's not a good idea. So Krober
took him back to the office and showed him the safe,
and is she we can pick your money, and we
(20:09):
can put it in the safe here, and we'll have
a little box and we'll have your name on it.
This is yours, and you can get it out anytime
you want. But it's not wise to keep your money
on the table like you've been doing. So from that
point on, is She kept his money in that safe,
and he would spend about half of his weekly salary
on ice cream and on food and things like that.
(20:31):
He loved ice cream. With the other half he would
take every week and put it into the bank.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Can you imagine describing the value of currency to a
fifty year old man who walked out of the stone age.
This coin represents value that you can go and trade
for food and clothes and stuff you need. Can you
imagine describing to him the banking system. These people will
keep your money safe. It must have been a wild concept,
but he understood it immediately. Here's more from Jane, giving
(21:01):
us a picture of is She's new life in San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
So okay in nineteen fourteen. Again, issue's very comfortable. Now
he's been making his own living. He's the assistant janitor.
He's now picked up about four to five hundred words
of English. He's able to walk the city by himself.
He's able to go shopping by himself. He's interacting, he's mingling,
(21:28):
he's become part of the community, and he goes to
Again Pope is the doctor. Pope is one of the
most noteworthy, successful, looked up to surgeons in the country.
He's the head of the department, the surgery department at
the University of California. By the time he's in his
mid thirties. Pope would live Is. She come into to
(21:49):
the hospital with him and meet the patients, and Is
She would even wear a lab coat and walk into
the room and sometimes by himself. He'd walk into the
patients room and look the patient, not say anything, just
look at the patient. And then he'd walk out, and
the patients knew who he was. It wasn't like who
was that guy? You know, they knew the story of Issue.
(22:10):
They knew who he was. You know. He was a
very respected, looked up to again, cheerful, he was never
in a bad mood, so he was good for people.
So Is she would come into the hospital, Pope would
actually take him into the operating room and Issue would
be able to observe Pope doing operations. Here's a man
again three years ago was coming out of a stone
(22:32):
Age civilization, and now he's watching Pope perform surgeries removing kidneys.
And Ishi was fascinated obviously by that, and so there
were several stories about Issue would debate po on some
of the treatments. Why do you do that? You don't
need to do that, You just do this, you know,
(22:52):
madsines and herbs and things like this. You don't need
to cut him, you can do this. And at other times,
something really radical, like removing the kidney, it was like,
how will that man live? You know, can you imagine
three years ago you were in stone Age and now
you're watching surgeries removing a kidney, You're watching them recover
(23:12):
and living. It was unbelievable. Oh, here is one story
I want to tell. So remember when Issue came down.
For the last forty years of his life, his world
was four and five people. That was it. That was
(23:34):
all the civilization he knew. Overnight, he's put into a
civilization where there are thousands of people, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands, writing trains, seeing cars going two shows. Well,
they take Issue to basically a vaudeville show where they're
singing and dancing and there's a beautiful lady singing and
(23:57):
Issui and Krober and Waterman and Pope are all at
the show. And is she? They think, is SHEI would
be really interested in the show, But in reality, is
she is not even watching the show? What is he
fascinated by? He's fascinated because this is the first time
he's been in a room with so many people, and
(24:19):
they just said it was like the show didn't exist.
The show to him was being in a room with
hundreds of people at the same time think about is she.
Since he was ten years old, his world is four
and five people, a sister, cousin, a mother, an old
man who might have been an uncle, and himself. He
(24:39):
never had an experience of dating, of having a woman
in his life. That was something that he never had
the chance to experience. So when he went to the show,
the newspaper guy was there and he wrote a story.
And his story was he had a story he wanted
to tell. Regardless of what happened, he already had a
(25:02):
story and it was how issue was infatuated with the dancer,
and obviously he had thoughts of the lady. But in reality,
all the people around him said he didn't even look
at her. And I've got a picture of him and
her and Waterman and Kroeber and Pope after the show
is over with. He doesn't care about her. He carried
(25:24):
about the room full of people. That's what he cared about.
They would take him, and they thought he would be
wowed by the buildings there at Berkeley and at San Francisco.
He wasn't excited at all about the big buildings. They
think that's because when he spent his years growing up
in the mountains, it was nothing for him to be
(25:46):
up on the side of the mountains. He was always
up high. He would jump from the side of the
cliff onto a tree, never thought anything about it. He
would get out on the ledges of the buildings and
just walk. The ledges didn't bother him at all. Heights
didn't bother him at all. He wasn't fascinated by the
big buildings. He was fascinated by the people.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Now, Jean's gonna tell us about a trip that was
proposed to Ishi.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
So nineteen fourteen, Pope, Waterman and Krober have the idea
issues at the peak of his health. He's no longer
the emaciated, starved Indian that they found in nineteen eleven.
He's a very healthy man. Now. You can see pictures
of Ishi in nineteen fourteen. He's a pretty muscled guy.
(26:38):
They decide that wouldn't it be fantastic if we could
take Issui back up into the country where he came from.
We could take him back up to the Ahi country.
We can let him tell us and show us where
all of these things happened, Kingsley's Cave, massacre, Grizzly Bear's
(26:58):
hiding place. Let's go, let's go up in the spring
in nineteen fourteen, and let's go back with Issue. So
they approached Issue with this idea, and is she was
not so good about that. He was not so comfortable
with that. So was it because it brought back bad memories.
I don't want to go back there. That's where all
my people were killed. Or was it because they thought
(27:21):
he thought they might be taking him back there and
they were going to leave him. We don't know what
is she was thinking, but he wasn't comfortable with the
idea going back. Finally he relented. Finally he said, Okay,
I'll go back, and they took one room of the
museum and that was their staging room and all the
equipment they were going to take on the trip with them.
(27:41):
They'd stage in that room, but there were also skeletons
and things in that room. So is she says, you're
this is not good. I mean, you know, everything's just
going to be polluted with bad spirits. So they had
to take all their equipment and rap it up and
show Ishi that has wrapped up. It can't be exposed
(28:03):
to the bad spirits, and it's good. And issue was fine,
and then they went. They went on a long pack
horse pack trip up into the area where the Ahi lived,
and they spent a few weeks up there, and Ishi
loved it. He by the time they started the trip,
he was excited. So they go up into the mountains
(28:24):
and he shows them wherever, you know, this is where
I killed a bear. And he walks and he says, here,
and he starts digging in the ground and he actually
finds the skull and the claws of the bear that
he killed. He found the spot where he buried the bear.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Is she buried a bear? This story confirms something that
I've recently been learning about from my book project on
the American black bear. Ceremonial disposal of bear remains was
common across North America. Many animals they would dispose of
without ceremony. The bear was different and required more effort.
(28:58):
Some tribes through beares into rivers, and others buried them
like humans. This confused archaeologists for a long time, leading
them to believe that many tribes didn't eat bears because
they didn't find bare bones and refuse piles. Only later
would they learn about the ceremonial disposal practices and going
(29:19):
back to issue being concerned with their gear being stored
in a room with human remains. I'd like to read
a quote from Theodora Kroeber's book Eschi in Two Worlds,
where she writes about his spiritual doctrine. This is what
she said. He was an introvert, reserved, contemplative, and philosophical.
(29:40):
He lived at ease with the supernatural and the mystical,
which were pervasive in all aspects of life. He felt
no need to differentiate mystical truth from directly evidential or
material truth, or the supernatural from the natural. One was
as manifest as the other within his systems. Of values
and persons and beliefs. The promoter, the boaster, the aggressor,
(30:05):
the egotist, the innovator would have been looked at askance.
The ideal was the man of restraint, dignity, rectitude, He
of the middle way. Life proceeded within the limits of
known and proper pattern, from birth through death and beyond.
(30:26):
End of quote. I find fascinating the intersection of the
spirit world in the natural world. I think these things
are still relevant today. But let's get back to the
trip to Ishi's homeland.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
He took them to the cave. He took them to
the grizzly bear's hiding place. In the grizzly bears hiding place,
there were still some things when they left. They left behind.
There were some residues, some remnants that the settlers hadn't
stolen that were left behind. They would swim in the creek,
would hunt. They would kill deer. Pope wanted to kill
(31:03):
a deer. Issues was teaching him how to hunt. Pope smoked,
and is she said they went two days, they didn't
kill a deer. Is She says, you're not killing a
deer because you're smoking. You have to quit smoking. So
Pope quit smoking. The next day he killed a deer.
Is She said, see, I told you you know so
Is She was imparting on them all of his wisdom
(31:24):
about living in the country and making a living off
the country. And so they spent a couple of months
up there on the Springtime Adventure. It was Pope, it
was Krober, it was Waterman, it was Pope's oldest son,
Saxton Junr. And it was Issu.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
The ripples of this historic trip with Is she teaching
Saxon Pope how to effectively kill game with the primitive
bow are still being felt today. Many of the skills
that modern bow hunters have and even take for granted,
like how to wait before you track a bowshot animal
and then blood trail, it was likely learned from Ishi
(32:05):
on this trip. But I've got to warn you things
are about to existentially change for Ishi.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
And they come back and they make plans to go
back in the fall. Well in the fall, and then
especially by the spring, Issue started showing signs of sickness.
So by the fall of nineteen fourteen, he had a fever,
he had a cough. They tested him for different things
like tuberculosis. Negative tests it's just a cold, it's just
(32:40):
something going on, And then they planned to go in
nineteen fifteen. Well, in nineteen fifteen, Issu became morale to
the point where he wasn't able to make the trip,
so they never made it back. They only made the
one trip in nineteen fourteen. Now, Issu's health deteriorated from
that point, although his TB tests were still showing negative,
(33:04):
But at that time in medicine, TV tests were often negative.
Even if he would have been positive, it was not
unusual to get a negative test, and by nineteen By
the fall of nineteen fifteen and early nineteen sixteen, full
blown tuberculosis had come and Issu's health was getting poor,
(33:26):
and by March of nineteen sixteen, Is she died of tuberculosis. Now,
if you know tuberculosis, it's a terrible, terrible, terrible death,
And tuberculosis in the early part of the nineteen hundreds
was a very common disease across the US. Waterman Krober's
(33:50):
own wife, his first wife, had to tuberculosis. Interesting because
is she would go to Krober's house for dinner. Often
he would spend several nights staying at Crober's house. His
Crober's wife had tuberculosis. Could he have got the tuberculosis
from his wife? Crober's wife. Crober's wife passed away of
(34:12):
tuberculosis in nineteen thirteen, or all the time that is,
she spent in the hospital with Doctor Pope. Many patients
in the hospital were there because of tuberculosis. Why weren't
they shielding him from that? They knew that he was
a compromised immunity because of his culture, because of his background.
(34:34):
So some of the criticism probably rightfully so, so why
didn't they shelter him more? Why didn't they protect him
more from white man's disease? But he got tuberculosis, so
he died. Pope was grief stricken. This was his best friend.
(34:54):
They were truly best friends. Waterman had left for Europe
several months before that. Kro Krober had gone to Europe.
Kroeber had gotten word that the tuberculosis tests were positive.
Now he knew Issue's days were numbered, but he couldn't
get back. He got all the way back to New York,
(35:16):
but his business schedule kept him in New York. He
was communicating via telegram back with the people at the hospital,
keeping track of Issue. Knowing that he was progressively getting
worker worse, eventually getting to the point where death is imminent.
And he left word there will be no autopsy. We
(35:40):
will respect Issue's culture. There is no need to do
an autopsy. We know he died of tuberculosis. Science be damned,
Science can go to hell. Are the words that he wrote.
There will be no autopsy, and he sent the letter.
He sent it via letter. The letter didn't arrive in time.
Is she died. Pope conducted an autopsy. Now he did
(36:04):
it respectfully. Pope being a medical doctor, he didn't think
like Kroeber is an anthropologist. But he did the autopsy.
What wasn't talked about at the time was that he
also took Issue's brain and they were studying the brain.
Now by nineteen seventeen, Kroeber is back at the university again.
(36:29):
Krober is over the emotional impact of Issu dying. He
knows that the brain is there. What are we going
to do? They'd taken the body and cremated what they
thought was the IHI desire for cremation. They took the
body and cremated it, put it in a ceramic urn.
(36:50):
The IHI would have said, put it in a basket
and bury it. And they took it to the local
cemetery and put it in more or less a mausoleum.
But the brain stayed in the museum, and in nineteen
seventeen Krober sent a letter to the Smithsonian. There was
a gentleman at the Smithsonian who was collecting brains from
(37:12):
different civilizations, studying what. I don't know why, I don't know,
but he had brains from all different cultures, all different civilizations.
Krober made a deal to send Issu's brain to the Smithsonian,
to the sky for his collection, his brain collection, and
he did. He sent the brain to the Smithsonian in
nineteen seventeen. It didn't get cremated with the body. But
(37:36):
this was all done kind of on the sly and
it wasn't talked about. It wasn't even people at the
hospital didn't even know it. So the stories start to
come out. Somehow, people start to hear that issue's brain
had been removed, and they start to do some investigation.
Where's the brain? What happened to it? We don't know,
(37:58):
it's not here being in this Smithsonian. People didn't know.
So there were a couple of people that actually started
on the trail, starting researching what happened to the brain,
And in nineteen eighty nine they found the letters where
Krober had sent the communication to the guy at the
Smithsonian about the brain. The guy had said, yes, I
(38:18):
would love to have it, and they find evidence that
it is it did get sent to the Smithsonian. But
remember back if you were alive in the eighties, there
was this big native repatriation movement. All you know, you
can no longer dig for artifacts bones which people collected,
(38:40):
private people collected bones, universities collected bones of natives. George
Bush signed a law that those had to be repatriated
if they were requested. So some local natives requested issues brain.
They found out about the brain, they requested the brain,
and they requested the cremated remains so they could take
(39:02):
it to the mountains and bury it as the how
he would have wanted. So they found that the cremated
remains right away. It was common knowledge people, you know,
it was there in the local cemetery. But the brain
was a dead end. And it started actually got a
response from somebody who should have and probably didn't know better,
(39:24):
that the brain had been incinerated because this mith Estonian
didn't want it to get out that they had the brain.
They didn't want the bad publicity, so they disposed of it.
The story was they disposed of it to prevent that
from happening. We don't have it. In reality, they didn't.
(39:45):
In reality it was still there, but it took several
years of this two people digging before they got to
somebody that knew where it was. And they found somebody
who knew where it was, and they got the brain
and they took it back with the ashes, the cremated ashes,
(40:07):
and they took it to the base of Mount Lassen
there in the Aahi country and they buried it. Now
interesting remember the cremated ashes were in an urn, the
ceramic urn. The urn when they got it out of
(40:29):
basically the mausoleum had a cement plug in it, so
they couldn't open it to get the ashes out. They
wanted to put the ashes in the ground, so the
break the urn open. When they broke it open, there
were the ashes, There was some bone, There was some
obsidian flakes in there which Pope had put in before
(40:52):
they cremated issue. And there was a letter that somebody
had put in the urn a yellowed piece of paper.
After the cremation, the people doing the repatriation found that letter.
It was folded up, and you know what, they never
opened it. They never read it. They respected that whoever
(41:16):
wrote it put it in there as person to person.
This is from them to issue. It's none of our business.
So they buried it with the ashes, and they buried
the brain. They didn't incinerate the brain. They carried the
brain from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, d c. As
carry on baggage on a plane back to California, took
(41:41):
it up into the mountains with the ashes and buried
the ashes along with the whole brain and the letter,
and never opened the letter. We don't know who the
letter was from speculation it was probably Pope, that was
his best friend. What did it say? No idea fascinating And.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
She's contribution to linguistics, anthropology and our understanding of indigenous
Americans is hard to quantify. But what we can quantify
is is she's contribution to archery. I want to hear
about this from Gene, a man who's dedicated his life
to archery.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
So is she's contribution to us? You know, as we
said here, today in a room full of archery and
bow hunting. And you know my life, I've you know,
I've been hunting with the bow and arrow for sixty years.
It's all I've ever done. I told you my first
big game animal were grasshoppers in the cow pasture when
I was five and six seven years old. I thought
that was a big deal. You know, to me, a
grasshopper was a big game hunt. I was out there
(43:01):
with my bow and arrow shooting grasshoppers and putting them
in my pocket, and then taking them to the farm
pond and catching bluegills in bass. What is she did
for us in that day, on that day in nineteen
twelve when Pope looked out that window and saw is
she shooting the bow? And Pope left his office and
went down there and started shooting with him. And from
that point they go up into the mountains in nineteen
(43:22):
fourteen and they go hunting, and is She's teaching Pope
how to hunt white tailed deer and how to call
and how to decoy and how to get close. And
then is she dies and Pope continues And something that
I think not many people know or understand too, is
how it all fits together in nineteen fifteen. Is she
(43:44):
went was asked to be part of the Pan Pacific
Exhibition there in California. It's kind of like the World's Fair. Is.
She was on the show card for the Pan Pacific
nineteen fifteen. Remember again, all across the country, Issue was
front Age News. One of the people who read one
of those stories was Will Compton. Chief Compton. Chief Compton
(44:07):
comes to the Pan Pacific in nineteen fifteen to see Issi.
He also goes to the Japanese Archery exhibit, which is
there that year too. And while he's there at the
Japanese Archery exhibit, this tall athletic man comes up and
stands next to him, looking at the same exhibit, and
Compton introduces himself to the man. The man says, Hello,
(44:30):
I'm Art Young or Art glad to meet you. Do
you hunt with a bone aero or do you shoot
a bone arrow? No? I think I would like to. Well,
why don't you come back and let's go meet this
guy named Ishi. And then they get friends with Pope
because Pope is part of Issue's circle. So now we
have Pope, Compton and Young coming together because of Issue is.
(44:54):
She dies in nineteen sixteen Pope and young continue to
hunt across the world. They go to Alaska, they go
to Africa. They hunt with their bow and arrow. They
document their hunts, they write stories for the magazine. They
publish books about hunting with the bow and arrow. Art
goes on a hunt to Alaska, makes a movie, a
(45:15):
silent black and white movie of hunting Alaska called Alaskan Adventures.
You can google it and look at it on YouTube.
He comes back with that movie and he goes around
the country showing that silent black and white movie at
movie theaters across the country. Well, because it's silent, he
goes too, and he sits on stage and he narrates
(45:37):
the movie for the audience, and then after the show
he does shooting exhibitions. Well, he's doing this show in
nineteen twenty eight in Detroit in the audience as a
young man by the name of Fred Bhaer. Fred introduces
himself to Art, finds out Art's going to be at
a I think it was either a Lions Club or
(45:57):
Certoma club meeting a couple weeks later, and he goes
to that and he becomes friends with Art, and Art
and Fred end up in Fred's basement Art teaching Fred
how to make archery equipments. That's how Fred Bher got
into archery. That's how Fred bhar and why Fred Behaer
started Bear Archery Company a few years later in nineteen
(46:19):
thirty three. Art died in nineteen thirty five. Compton died
in nineteen thirty eight. Fred bher starts Bear Archery in
nineteen thirty three. Fred Bhaer genius at marketing, probably with
in my mind, without doubt, the most important man for
marketing our sport. He understood it's not good enough just
(46:43):
to make equipment. It's not good enough just to sell
bows and arrows. We've got to build a sport. We've
got to market this to people so that they want
to do this. Otherwise they're not even going to know
it exists. So Fred Bhaer goes out and brings archery
to the world. Fred Bher, Glenn's St. Charles Lynn, Saint Charles.
They make movies, they make TV shows, The American Sportsman.
(47:07):
One of my earliest memories of bull hunting was getting
up on Saturday morning and watching The American Sportsman on ABC,
and here is Gwenn, Saint Charles, and Fred Bhaer hunting Alaska.
That fired me up, That just lit my flame and
never went out. Then I become friends with Gwen Saint Charles,
(47:29):
I get to meet Fred Bhaer because I'm a bear
dealer in the seventies and eighties, and I get to
meet these guys, I get to become friends. And that
goes all the way back to issue. If is She
hadn't been the glue that brought together Art Young, Saxton Pope,
and Chief Compton Fred Behar wouldn't have gone to that movie.
(47:49):
Fred Bhaer might not have started bear archery. We're here
today because is She brought those people together.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
In nineteen sixty one, Glenn Saint Charles and Fred Baer
and several others founded the Pope and Young Club, which
influenced North American hunting culture significantly and specifically through bow hunting.
Their mission is to preserve wildlife, promote bow hunting, and
protect hunting. I think clubs like the Pop and Young
(48:25):
Club and the Boone and Crocket Club are extremely important
and relevant even today. These clubs are typically just known
as record keeping organizations for animals. That's kind of what
they've been become known for. You know, their scoring systems
for gauging the size of antlers and skulls. But they
really do so much more to protect our heritage as
(48:47):
American hunters, and I think these organizations deserve our support.
And I think it's super interesting how they can be
tracked back to this man Ischi that I can see
a hero of our culture, a hero of this continent.
I think it's super interesting how it all goes back
to him. I can't thank you enough for listening to
(49:13):
Bear Grease, for listening to Brints, this country Life, for
listening to Lakes Backwoods University. We're putting our heart and
soul into telling these stories. We can't thank you guys
enough for just following along. Please share this feed with
your buddies this week. And I just hope everyone has
(49:34):
a great fault. I hope you get to hunt. I
hope you're successful. I hope you get to spend some
incredible time with your friends and family in the woods.
And I just every day I am just more and more
thankful for the life that we get to lead amidst
the chaos of the earth that surrounds us. We've got
(49:56):
a great treasure in wild places and our ability to
go and hunt them and acquire wild game for our family,
and to let these activities of our culture be a
conduit to our children for a value system of respect, responsibility, honesty, integrity,
(50:18):
the things that I think wild places produce inside of us.
For that reason, keep the wild places wild, because that's
where
Speaker 2 (50:25):
The bears live.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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