Newspaper articles may preserve dates and quotes while sensationalizing their subject.

Good history does not choose one source and surrender to it.

It compares.

It asks who was speaking.

It asks what the speaker wanted.

It notices what was omitted.

Ishi’s archive is unusually rich, which makes this kind of layered reading possible.

The more documents survive, the more contradictions become visible.

Those contradictions are not a weakness in the story.

They are the story.