San Francisco at the time still carried substantial tuberculosis burden.
Doctors knew the disease well.
They also knew there was no antibiotic cure.
Treatment meant rest.
Fresh air.
Nutrition.
Isolation in sanatoria when possible.
Ishi developed symptoms.
By late 1914, physicians believed he had tuberculosis.
The irony is difficult to miss.
He survived armed violence.
Hunger.
Isolation.
Decades of hiding.
Then the city that gave him shelter also exposed him to disease.
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis can progress slowly.
Cough.
Weakness.
Weight loss.
Fever.
Night sweats.
Fatigue.
In an era before effective antibiotics, a diagnosis could be terrifying.
Ishi was hospitalized several times.
There were periods of improvement.
Then decline.
The museum community around him understood what the disease could mean.
Pope was a physician.
Kroeber knew Ishi's health was fragile.
Waterman knew.
Still, there was only so much medicine could do.
By 1916, the end was approaching.
March 25, 1916
Ishi died on March 25, 1916.
He had lived in the museum world for roughly four and a half years.
He was likely in his mid-fifties.
The exact age could never be established.
Accounts describe friends around him.
Pope later wrote emotionally about his death.
The press reported that the famous "last Yahi" was gone.
For the public, this seemed to complete the story.
A final survivor appears.
Shares his world.
Dies.
Culture ends.
But what happened after death exposed the deepest contradiction between Ishi's values and the institution studying him.
He Did Not Want His Body Treated as a Specimen
During his years at the museum, Ishi had lived around collections containing Native American human remains.
Excavated ancestors.
Bones treated as scientific specimens.
The Hearst Museum now states that he was distressed by this and that he wanted his own body cremated according to Yahi tradition.
When Ishi died, Kroeber was away.
An autopsy was proposed.
Kroeber reportedly sent an urgent message opposing it.
The language attributed to him was unusually forceful.
If anyone appealed to "the interests of science," he wanted the idea rejected.
Science, he essentially said, could go to hell.
They should stand by their friend.
But the autopsy happened anyway.
Saxton Pope performed it.
The man who had spent years befriending Ishi and learning archery from him now participated in a procedure Ishi's expressed beliefs opposed.
His brain was removed.
Then another contradiction.
Kroeber, who had opposed the autopsy, later arranged for the brain to be sent to the Smithsonian.
The Hearst Museum today calls the actions after Ishi's death shameful.
That institutional acknowledgment is important.
For decades, Ishi's story was told as a touching friendship between anthropologists and the last Yahi.
The full story is harder.
They cared about him.
They learned from him.
They preserved extraordinary knowledge.
And they still violated his wishes.
Human relationships can contain affection and exploitation at the same time.
Cremation
Most of Ishi's body was cremated.
His ashes were placed in a cemetery niche south of San Francisco.
The inscription identified him in the language anthropology had created around him.
The last Yana.
The last Yahi.
A man transformed into an ending.
But one part of him remained thousands of miles away.
His brain entered the Smithsonian's collections.
For decades, most people did not know.
Even many scholars interested in Ishi were unaware of the location.
The person had become separated after death.
Ashes in California.
Brain in Washington.
A body divided between institutions.
1961: The Story Returns
Forty-five years after Ishi died, Theodora Kroeber published Ishi in Two Worlds.
She had never met him.
She married Alfred Kroeber after Ishi's death.
Her book drew on archival records, field notes, memories and her husband's material.
It became enormously influential.
For generations of Californians, this was Ishi's story.
The book is compassionate by the standards of much earlier anthropology.
It foregrounded the destruction of the Yahi.
It made Ishi human for readers who might otherwise know him only as a museum specimen.
But it also helped cement certain romantic narratives.
The last wild Indian.
The pure survivor of a vanished Stone Age culture.
The faithful friendship with anthropologists.
Modern scholarship has complicated those images.
That does not make Ishi in Two Worlds worthless.
UC Press still describes it as an essential historical document while explicitly framing it within a history of white violence, racism and dehumanization.
Historical books can be both valuable and limited.
Sometimes their limitations become part of what later generations need to study.
The Last Man Myth
Ishi's story fits an ancient narrative pattern.
The last survivor.
The final speaker.
The final witness.
Everyone else gone.
There is emotional power in that structure.
It produces instant tragedy.
But "last man" stories are dangerous.
They can make Indigenous survival invisible.
If audiences believe Native peoples vanished, they stop seeing living Native communities.
They turn history into elegy.
California Indians did not disappear.
Communities survived.
Families survived.
Languages survived in different degrees.
Political identities survived.
Traditional knowledge survived.
People adapted.
Some identities were nearly destroyed.
Others were transformed.
Some languages lost fluent speakers.
But extinction language can unintentionally finish the colonial project symbolically by erasing survivors.
That is why modern Native scholars often approach Ishi's story differently.
He represents catastrophic loss.
But he also represents survival.
1990s: The Brain Becomes Public
Near the end of the twentieth century, questions about Ishi's remains resurfaced.
Researchers and Native activists began investigating what had happened after his death.
The answer led to the Smithsonian.
His brain had been preserved there for decades.
This discovery arrived in a very different political world from 1916.
Native American communities were demanding repatriation of ancestral remains and sacred objects.
Museums were being forced to reconsider collections created through grave excavation, colonial violence and unequal acquisition.
The National Museum of the American Indian Act and NAGPRA had changed institutional obligations across the United States.
Ishi's case became symbolic.
He had clearly expressed discomfort with the treatment of human remains.
He had requested cremation.
Yet his brain had become a collection object.
If repatriation meant anything, advocates argued, Ishi should be allowed to return home.
Who Could Receive Him?
Even repatriation revealed the problem with the "last of his people" narrative.
If Ishi had literally no related people left, who could claim him?
Research identified Native communities with cultural and linguistic relationships to the Yana.
Maidu, Redding and Pit River representatives became involved.
The process demonstrated that living Native people did have relationships to the history Ishi represented.
The Hearst Museum states that in 2000, after sustained work by Maidu, Redding and Pit River tribes, Ishi's brain and ashes were repatriated, reunited and buried in a secret location near Deer Creek.
The secret location matters.
For once, the public does not get everything.
No tourist marker.
No museum case.
No scientific specimen number.
No coordinates for curiosity seekers.