Lawrence Holcomb

The Last Yahi: a Novel About Ishi Lawrence Holcomb

On August 29, 1911, a barefoot, half-starved, gaunt Indian gave himself up to White civilization at a slaughterhouse in Oroville, California. We never learned his name, but we soon learned of his tragedy: mainly that he was the last member of his tribe, the Yahi, to be alive in the wilderness. However, he became known to the world as Ishi, the last human to live freely in the Paleolithic Stone Age on the North American Continent. Through Ishi we can imagine a mythological, primeval view of Manifest Destiny and look back, as if with a telescope through time, into the interior of the mind and into the evolution of human thought. Through Ishi we can discover the decency of humanity, and perhaps we can forgive ourselves for our ancestors hateful genocide, especially against the Native Americans of Northern California.