![]() ![]() In the late 1860s, when Ishi was a small boy, a rancher named Norman Kingsley and three other whites shot 30 Yahi, including babies and young children, in a cave on Mill Creek. These actions would lead in turn to ferocious extermination campaigns, in which Indian men - and often women and children - were slaughtered wholesale. In response, the increasingly desperate Indians would steal livestock and food, and sometimes murder settlers in revenge. The pattern was familiar and tragic: White settlers encroached on Indian lands, drove the natives away and sometimes killed them. As Theodora Kroeber recounts in her 1961 classic, "Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America," Ishi was born around 1860, when the bloody American campaign against California Indians was approaching its genocidal climax. Ishi was the last surviving member of the Yahi, a small tribe that lived in the rugged river canyons near Mount Lassen. ![]()
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