Ishi spent decades hiding out from white settlers' genocidal campaign against California Indians. Then he spent five years as an object of civilization's fascination with his vanished way of life.
Last week's Portals told the story of how Ishi's tiny band of Yahi Indians stayed out of settlers' view for almost 50 years in their river canyon territory near Mount Lassen. Finally, Ishi was the only Yahi left. In 1911, starving and exhausted, this middle-aged man - the last "wild," or aboriginal, Indian in North America - stumbled out of the woods and into a corral near Oroville in Butte County.
Two professors of anthropology at UC Berkeley, Thomas Waterman and Alfred Kroeber, learned about this mysterious arrival from the Stone Age and brought him to San Francisco. Kroeber, a seminal figure in the new field, gave him a room in the new Museum of Anthropology on Parnassus Avenue and the name Ishi.
With the exception of a single trip to his people's old territory, Ishi was to live the rest of his life in the city.
As Kroeber's widow, Theodora Kroeber, wrote in her classic 1961 book, "Ishi in Two Worlds," the shy, gentle Indian was initially overwhelmed by the new world he had entered. Unexpected sounds, like cannon fire from the Presidio, unnerved him.
But he soon embraced his new life. As Kroeber notes, only extraordinary mental toughness and spiritual equilibrium could have enabled him to endure decades of concealment and the loss of everyone he'd ever known.
"Ishi had kept his morale through grief and an absolute solitariness; the impact of civilization could not budge it," Kroeber writes. Through everything, Ishi preserved his sense of self.
The public was curious about the "wild man," and the Museum of Anthropology was about to have an opening party to which 1,000 guests were invited. The last thing Waterman and Alfred Kroeber wanted, however, was to turn Ishi into a freak show.
Ishi was asked if he wanted to be there, and was told he could stay for as long as he liked in one of the smaller exhibition rooms. He agreed.
"He was excited about the party, which as he understood it was to be on the sensible lines of an Indian house warming to which you invited your guests for a feast," Theodora Kroeber writes.
Friends with doctor
Ishi enjoyed the reception, which set the stage for his subsequent relations with the public. Every Sunday afternoon, from 2 to 4:30 p.m., Alfred Kroeber and Ishi would hold court at the museum. Kroeber answered questions, translating for Ishi, and Ishi would demonstrate a skill such as stringing a bow or making arrowheads, which he would then give to a member of the audience.
Besides Kroeber and Waterman, both of whom had him over to their houses for dinner, Ishi was close to a physician named Saxton Pope. The doctor asked Ishi to teach him the art of archery, and the two men began practicing on the grass at the edge of Sutro Forest.
They spent hours together, speaking a pidgin Yana-English. Pope adored Ishi, and Ishi thought that Popey, as he called the doctor, was "quite the brightest, the least predictable, and the most fascinating person in the world."
He also respected Pope as a kuwi, or powerful healer. "It would be difficult, truly, to say which of the two meant the most to the other," Theodora Kroeber writes.
Neither Alfred Kroeber nor Waterman could afford to pay the modest sum Ishi needed for food, transportation, entertainment and sundries, so the museum arranged for him to have a job as janitor and draw a salary. Ishi was a proud man who valued his financial independence - from time to time he would ask to see his money and would absorbedly count it.
Inner Sunset strolls
Ishi's time in San Francisco was mostly his own. He enjoyed walking down to the shops on Seventh Avenue and Judah Street, greeting storekeepers and chatting regularly with two small girls he befriended.
He also liked riding on streetcars and ferries: One of his favorite trips was from the museum to UC Berkeley. And he explored the thick forest behind the Museum of Anthropology, making occasional visits to a cave on Mount Sutro.
In May 1914, Kroeber and Pope, along with Pope's 11-year-old son, accompanied Ishi on a camping trip to the Yahi's old territory. Ishi was apprehensive at first, but then "gave himself over to the venture, at last wholly," Kroeber's widow writes. "Going back to the old heartland in the company of the three living people who meant most to him would seem to have been an adventure emotionally akin to a psychoanalysis."
But if it was healing for Ishi to visit the scene of his old life, he had no desire to return to it permanently. By the end of the trip, Ishi was "eager to be back in the museum, to be home."
Fatal illness
Exposure to so many people in his new home, however, proved fatal. In fall 1915, he became seriously ill with tuberculosis - a disease for which he, like other native peoples, had no immunity.
At first, Ishi was hospitalized, but once he realized he was dying, he made it clear that he wanted to die at home, and he was moved back to the museum on Parnassus Avenue.
"Ishi lived on with good days and bad, stoical, uncomplaining, interested in whatever went on, affectionate and responsive, until the spring," Kroeber writes. "He died on March 25, 1916. Popey, his kuwi, was with him at the end."
Alfred Kroeber, who was traveling at the time, wanted him cremated in accordance with what he believed was Yahi practice. "Say for me that science can go to hell. We propose to stand by our friends," Kroeber wrote to the museum's acting director, Edward Gifford.
Pope, however, decided that his responsibility to science overrode Kroeber's wishes, and he persuaded Gifford to have Ishi's brain removed before the body was cremated.
Battle over brain
As Orin Starn notes in "Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last 'Wild' Indian," Kroeber, confronted with a fait accompli, had Ishi's brain shipped to the Smithsonian. It was stored there for decades before being returned in 2000 to Indian groups in California, who buried it in Yahi territory.
Of Ishi, his friend Pope wrote, "He looked upon us as sophisticated children - smart, but not wise. We knew many things, and much that is false. He knew nature, which is always true.
"His were the qualities of character that last forever. He was kind; he had courage and self-restraint, and though all had been taken from him, there was no bitterness in his heart. His soul was that of a child, his mind that of a philosopher."
Editor's note
Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Every Saturday, Gary Kamiya's Portals of the Past will tell one of those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco's extraordinary history - from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond.
Trivia time
Last week's trivia question: What is the steepest intersection in San Francisco?
Answer: Filbert and Kearny streets.
This week's trivia question: What prominent early San Franciscan was known as the "generous miser"?

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book "Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco," awarded the 2013 Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail:metro@sfchronicle.com