Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America

Douglas Cazaux Sackman

Jan 2010 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

When Ishi, "the last wild Indian," came out of hiding in August 1911, he was quickly whisked away by train to San Francisco to meet Alfred Kroeber, one of the fathers of American anthropology. When Kroeber and Ishi came face to face, it was a momentous event, not only for each man but also for the cultures they represented. Each stood on the brink--one was in danger of losing something vital while the other was in danger of disappearing altogether. Ishi was a survivor, and he viewed the bright lights of the big city with a mixture of awe and bemusement. What surprised everyone is how handily he adapted himself to the modern city while maintaining his sense of self and his culture. Kroeber was professionally trained to document Ishi's culture and his civilization. What he didn't count on was how deeply working with the man would lead him to question his own profession and his civilization--how it would rekindle a wildness of his own. Although Ishi's story has been told before in film and fiction, Wild Men is the first book to focus on the depth of Ishi and Kroeber's friendship. Exploring what their intertwined stories tell us about Indian survival in modern America and about America's fascination with the wild, this text is an ideal supplement for courses on Native American history, the U.S. West, and the history of California.

Ratings and reviews

“This is a splendid narrative—touching, stark, and humane. Wild Men illuminates the lives and the worlds of these two remarkable men from the inside out.” Brian DeLay, University of California, Berkeley “Wild Men is one of those remarkable books that restores the lives of long-dead individuals to full immediacy and actuality. Calling attention to unexpected connections, finding and fielding the most telling and compelling of examples, and making a reckoning with tragedy’s capacity to coexist with comedy, Douglas Sackman has found, in the lives of Ishi and Alfred Kroeber, a parable that explores the most important dimensions of Western American history. Wild Men now leads my ‘top ten’ list of books that every person who cares about the American West should read.” Patricia Nelson Limerick, author of Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, and Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West, University of Colorado, Boulder “Sackman provides an important revision to the historical interpretations of Ishi’s life. Rather than being the victim of modernization, Ishi engaged modernity and shaped it….Readers can see how Ishi’s life was informed by and how he informed American history in the early twentieth century.” William Bauer, University of Nevada, Las Vegas “Considering Ishi and his anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber, together is a beautiful stroke of genius and justice; this book interrogates the two men’s lives together and finds in their differences and their resemblances much that has never been said before about the times, the places, and the characters of each. It’s a timely reconsideration of who each man was and what his circumstances were, in an era that is not quite bygone enough, since we are still wrestling with its meaning and legacies. It is a graceful work of meta-anthropology to subject Kroeber to the same scrutiny.” Rebecca Solnit, author of River of Shadows: Eadward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West and A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster

About the author

Douglas Cazaux Sackman is Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound. He is the author of Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (2005) and the editor of A Companion to American Environmental History (2010).