Then the hidden group diminished again.

By 1911, Ishi appears to have been alone.

Exactly how and when the last people around him died is uncertain.

The surviving record does not allow a complete reconstruction.

What is clear is that the man who appeared near Oroville was not simply wandering.

He had reached the end of a survival strategy that had lasted decades.

Hunger, isolation, and perhaps environmental pressures had made remaining hidden impossible.

When dogs cornered him near a slaughterhouse outside Oroville, the concealment that had protected him for much of his life was over.

The United States had not “found” an untouched man.

It had encountered one of the last survivors of a community it had helped destroy.