Survivors scattered into rugged country and increasingly avoided contact with settlers.

It is difficult to reconstruct every detail with certainty because much of the written record came from settlers, soldiers, newspapers, and anthropologists rather than from Yahi writers.

Names for specific attacks vary.

Numbers vary.

Some stories were recorded years later.

But the overall pattern is not uncertain.

The population collapsed.

Communities that had once moved through their homeland openly were reduced to tiny groups hiding in canyons, ravines, and remote camps.

Ishi was probably born around 1860 or shortly afterward, meaning that violence and concealment shaped much of the world he knew from childhood.

This matters because the phrase “last wild Indian,” which newspapers later attached to him, suggested a man who had somehow remained untouched by American society until 1911.