When Native Met City Lights

Five days after Ishi’s arrival in Yuba City Kroeber took him out for a Sunday drive through the city. Their initial destination was the ocean, about which Ishi had heard. He had already crossed the Bay on a ferry, but now they were heading west toward the beach, where the waves of the Pacific touch the shore. Kroeber anticipated that the “surf… as a phenomenon of nature, would interest him more than the works of civilization.” The car stopped on the bluff above the beach, near the Cliff House, a famous San Francisco landmark. Ishi looked down but saw no nature. His eyes were filled by the sight of people. “Hansi saltu,” he intoned, over and again. Many white people. It was a warm day, and thousands of San Franciscans had come out to the beach. Ishi, living out most of his life with only a few companions, was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.

Ishi and Kroeber could look out and see the sea lions below; behind them rose the eight-story Cliff House, a complex of restaurants, bars, an art gallery, and a mineral museum built by the millionaire Adolpho Sutro. Sutro had made his fortune from mining the earth for silver, particularly at the big bonanza two hundred miles east of San Francisco, just across the Sierra Nevada at a place called the Comstock Lode. Other San Franciscans made their money by financing industrial hydraulic mining; huge pressure hoses trained water jets on mountains, reducing them to sludge from which gold was extracted. The machinery and technology for mining had been created in San Francisco, and money flowed back into the city, financing the growth of its towering buildings, its civic works, and its teeming population.

When Sutro looked at the waves crashing in from the Pacific beneath his Cliff House, he saw its potential as a place where San Franciscans could bathe in ocean saltwater, warmed for their pleasure. With 600 tons of iron, 3.5 million linear feet of lumber, 270,000 cubic feet of concrete, and 100,000 square feet of glass, he built his marvelous public bath house. Sutro decorated by putting on display his collections of Egyptian mummies and Indian totem poles. There was room inside for 7,000 San Franciscans, and the various baths held 1.8 million gallons of sea water. When Ishi and Kroeber came by, the building’s power plant was being connected to the lines of Pacific Gas and Electric. PG&E grew out of a group of hydraulic mining companies of the Gold Rush and now fed electricity to the city, supplied by plants called Rome and Electra in the Sierras and from a dam on the Pit River, one of the streams of Wahganupa. Its headquarters was on Market Street. The baths were outfitted with 86 500-watt clear Mazda lamps, state of the art. San Franciscans from all walks of life had a chance to be edified by nature and the artifacts of various civilizations, brilliantly illuminated—and it had all been financed by the mineral wealth wrenched out of the Sierras.

George Hearst also grew wealthy on silver. When he died his wife, Phoebe, an avid collector like Sutro, financed the University of California’s initial growth and the Anthropology Department in particular, establishing the museum on Parnassus Heights that was Ishi’s new home. George and Phoebe’s son, William Randolph, ran the San Francisco Examiner. He was one of the inventors of “yellow journalism,” a sensationalist brand of reporting that could turn any happening, such as the arrival into the city of a Stone Age man, into a media event. The Examiner had done just that with Ishi, when its reporter set up the action scene of Ishi shooting an arrow at the photographer’s hat.

The museum and grounds were built by silver, Phoebe Hearst’s and Sutro’s, too, for he had given the land to the university in the first place. Sutro and Hearst were the great philanthropists among San Francisco’s plutocracy, hoping to improve the lives of the masses by giving them access to artifacts and art as well as parks and natural ocean baths. They channeled silver and gold into the civilization of San Francisco, but that wealth had flowed to them only by turning vast sections of the Sierras into a toxic wilderness. Everywhere Ishi went that day in San Francisco was connected in hidden ways to the mountain ranges south of his homeland. Even the streams and rivers of the Sierras and Mount Lassen had been dammed, their water converted to hydroelectric power that flowed into the cities on the Bay and lit them up at night.

* * *

His feet, broad and thickly soled through use, pressed down evenly on the pale stone of the city. He took short steps, sliding his feet along carefully, as he always did. Walking, he knew, is about finding the right way along the earth, the trail. Walking is living. His stories were about walking, about when he stepped along the trail. But here it was different, he could already sense. Walking was something the saltu did on the side. And they made night into day with their lights. This was a ghost world, and now he was stepping right into it.

After another packed day of work at the museum, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber sat at home across the city, waiting. He had been waiting for him a long time, dreaming about this man; before he ever saw him for himself, Kroeber believed in him and his people, telling the world about “a totally wild and independent tribe of Indians, without firearms, fleeing at the approach of the white man, hidden away for more than 40 years in one of the longest settled and most densely populated States of the West.” Doubters scoffed that this tribe was imaginary, nothing more than an Old West legend. But the young, bearded anthropologist insisted that they were real, that their existence was an “incontrovertible fact.”

Now the fact was on his way to him. What was this man experiencing?, he wondered. This was what Kroeber did, his profession: he studied man to discover his origins and nature, to find out what made him tick. The wild sensations of the scene seized him, a cacophony of sounds and expectations. The man’s first step into the city was a giant leap into the unknown; it was as if Kroeber himself “were to visit the moon,” he mused. Though he wasn't actually there to see the man arrive in the city, Kroeber recorded the momentous encounter, the last of its kind, for posterity: “There stepped off the ferry boat into the glare of electric lights, into the shouting of hotel runners, and the clanging of trolley cars on Market Street, San Francisco, Ishi, the last wild Indian in the United States.”

San Francisco was a place to behold in 1911. It was a modern and beautiful city, risen like Phoenix from the ashes of the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906. Five years earlier, at 5:12 in the morning of April 18, the San Andreas fault had ruptured, the earth rumbled. Brick and mortar shook, buildings fell or dropped into liquefied earth, streets twisted, and chasms wrenched open, swallowing debris and people. Gas lines broke and enormous fires erupted. There wasn’t enough water in the city to put them out. Desperately, firefighters dynamited buildings to create firebreaks. Unsuccessfully.

Thousands fled to the Ferry Building, which somehow withstood the shock, though rods buckled and rivets sheered off. In the days that followed, you could look out from the Ferry Building tower and behold the devastated city, smoldering, buildings bombed out and black along the city’s arteries; a half-dozen trolley cars that had survived were lined up on a section of intact track, the only order in a street scene strewn with horses, donkeys, and carts, a few of the new horseless carriages, two bicycles, and people, up and down and around the great Market Street, once the Champs Elysées of San Francisco, wearing their black bowler hats, trying to recover but moving about aimless and dazed like newcomers to Purgatory, or like men caught in a Magritte painting.

Kroeber was out in this crowd. After the shaking stopped that morning, he left his hotel apartment on Eddy Street in downtown San Francisco and looked for a trolley on Market Street. He had to get to the other side of the city, but trolleys were out of commission. He took a small step forward and resolved to walk. He passed upstream through the shell-shocked throngs wandering about the surreal scene, making his way over the rubble and buckled cobbles of the city, compelled on to Parnassus Heights, where his responsibilities lay. That was where the Museum of Anthropology, with its irreplaceable collection of art and artifacts from Greece and Egypt and the Indians of North America, stood. He hoped it still stood. It was just three miles, but the journey seemed immeasurably long.

When at last the museum came into view, he was relieved. A chimney had toppled, a front stoop was crooked, but the building had withstood the quake. Venturing inside, he heard a familiar sound that was strange now: the tapping of a typewriter. Upstairs he found the museum secretary, despite the uproar in the city at large, going about her work. Kroeber got to work, too. Cataloguing the damage, he found that the collections had come through well. A small quake months before had inspired him to use copper wire to secure shelving and artifacts. The precautions paid off, and he could write Phoebe Hearst, the patron of the museum, that “the damage sustained was very light under the circumstances.” He gave his report a silver lining: “We all feel that the outcome will be not only a greater San Francisco but a greater University.”