Yana Indians

In the northern Sierra Mountains of California lived the Yana tribe of Americans Indians.  In the latter half of the 1850 decade they probably numbered about 3,000 individuals.  Their territory was approximately 40 by 60 miles of canyons, caves, streams, woods, and meadows.  The tribe consisted of four distinct branches, the Northern, Central, and Southern Yana, and the Yahi.

In 1848 gold was discovered in their lands and white men came storming through in search of the elusive metal that could make a man rich overnight.  When the Yana tried to defend their land with their crude weaponry of bows and arrows they were decimated in large numbers by the guns of the whites.  In a short while nearly all Yana were wiped out.  What few remained were hiding in caves deep within hidden mountain canyons.  The Yahi, numbering about 400 individuals, refused to make war as it was against their beliefs.

In the latter half of the 1860s four raids by whites killed off nearly all the remaining members of the Yahi.  By 1872 there were no more than a dozen Yahi remaining on the face of the planet, and they were forced to stay in hiding in a cave for decades.

In 1908 some power company engineers stumbled into a camp of the last four Yahi alive.  An older man and a younger woman ran and were never found again.  An old woman remained alone.  Later that night her son carried her away, nursed her for her last three years, and in 1911 after her death the final Yahi alive walked into Oroville, California to accept his fate.  He was thought to have been born in 1862, and if that were true then he was about 49 years of age.

A part of the Yahi culture was that a person’s name was never given to an enemy, and so he refused to give his name to the white man who had never been his friend.  While he lived with the white man he was known as Ishe, the Yana language word for man.  He lived on for another five years, dying of tuberculosis in 1916.  When he died, one more Native American tribe disappeared from earth because of the white man.