He was photographed, questioned, stared at, and written about before almost anyone around him could speak to him.

The label that would follow him for the rest of his life came soon afterward.

He became known as Ishi.

But “Ishi” was not his personal name.

In the language spoken by the Yahi people, the word meant “man.” According to the anthropologists who later worked with him, he would not tell strangers his own name because Yahi custom required another person to formally introduce him.

There was no one left in his immediate Yahi community who could do that.

That fact transformed a simple question — “What is your name?” — into the first tragedy of the story.

The name most of the world remembers was not the name his family had given him.

It was the word chosen because the social world that could properly speak his name had been shattered.

The University of California anthropologists who learned about the stranger in Oroville recognized that his language appeared to belong to the Yana language family of Northern California.