Hello and welcome to this edition of the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World

Service. Today we're going all the way back to 1911 when a mysterious Native American

called Ishi emerged from a North Californian forest after more than three decades in hiding.

Ishi was the last surviving member of the Yahee tribe. In 2012, Louise Hidalgo retraced

his story. She spoke to the author Ursula Legin and filmmaker Jed Riff.

His name was Ishi and he was a member of the Northern California tribe which was methodically

attacked and massacred and exterminated until there were about four or five of them left

who went into hiding in the rugged hills up there and managed to hide out while California

was settled and grew up. This is early 20th century.

Author Ursula Legin, Ishi's story would catch the imagination of artists down the generations,

including filmmaker Jed Riff, who's made a documentary about Ishi's life.

He first came into a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Orville, California. Ishi was

very thin, but he wasn't starving. He had some small food items with him in a little

leather pouch, but he only had a shirt on top of his covering top of his body and we don't

know why he came out at that time, but he let himself be captured after almost 50 years

in hiding. So whether it was intentional or not, we don't know.

Ursula Legin, whose father would become a friend of Ishi's, believes that she knows

why Ishi emerged from the wilderness that day.

He came down out of hiding, I think, in despair to seek death and all he knew from white

people was death, and I think he came down to get killed.

Before the white man, there had been 10 million Native Americans. By 1911, there were less

than 300,000. The Californian gold rush had brought a wave of new settlers west. Ishi's

...