Historical Novels: Truth and Fiction

             The historical novel is a story based on true events. The most common historical novels are simply written with an earlier era background, with clothes and events of that era interspersed in the story. However, many, the “true” historical novels are closely related to the documented original events.

One of the very best examples that comes to mind is “Sacajawea,” whose author Anna Lee Waldo begins each chapter with excerpts from the Lewis and Clark journals or other factual and recorded researched materials. Following the facts, through her imagination, Waldo writes a story of how that information may have played out. The novel is the easy, pleasurable reading of history without the sometimes boring, tedious dates and facts.

            The latest true historical novel of note that I read recently is “Only the Wind Remembers,” by Marlo Schalesky. The story was founded on the true story of Ishi, the last Yahi who walked out of the woods in Oroville, California. You don’t have to remember the “tedious” date, but in case you want to it was August 29, 1911. Defined as the last Stone Age Indian in North America, he was named Ishi, the Yahi word for man.

            In Schalesky’s novel, Ishi’s story comes alive. Ishi was the last survivor of his people. Weak from lack of food, bewildered by the failure of the gods to answer his prayers and knowing he was dying, Ishi decided to surrender to the inevitable. He sadly turned his back on the once happy camp of his boyhood and walked into the white man’s world so he would not die alone.

He was discovered naked by men working in a slaughter house. One of them clubbed him and called the county sheriff. The sheriff put Ishi in a tiny jail cell and sent the story to the newspapers where it was read by men at the San Francisco Museum of Anthropology. Thomas Morgan brought Ishi to the museum, calling the incidental find of the last surviving member of a wild, untainted Indian tribe, “a miracle, and exactly what Dr. Kroeber had been looking for.” Dr. Alfred Kroeber and Dr. Saxton Pope (real anthropologists) wanted to learn Ishi’s language and sent for the famous linguist Dr. Edward Sapir (also real) to work with Ishi.

Thomas Morgan’s wife, Allison, had been raised an orphan. A Mrs. Whitson had taken a personal interest in Allison when she visited the orphanage to teach the girls to be ladies. She had introduced her to Thomas, stood as her mother when she and Thomas married and it was Mrs. Whitson, supporter of the museum, who gave Allison the job of assistant curator in the only Indian museum west of the Mississippi. Much against the better judgment of Mrs. Whitson, Thomas and the “social elites” of the day, Allison soon became highly criticized as she began to spend time with Ishi and learn his language. Finally, the problem was solved when they found suitable time for her to spend with Ishi and with a chaperone.

While the imaginative, fictitious stories of the Morgans and Mrs. Whitson intertwines it way through the Ishi story, we read many actual legends, such as the wood duck and U-Tut-Na and U-Tut-Ni as was told by the Indian. But there is no record of the tale of the Great Eagle which also weaves its way through Ishi’s novel.

Both the novel Ishi and the real Ishi died of the white man’s disease, tuberculosis (March 25, 1916), with his friends visiting him in his final hours. Yet, the world did not forget him.

The patron whose support established the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco was Mrs. Phoebe A. Hearst, after whom the museum was named in 1991. The museum moved from San Francisco to Kroeber Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, where you can see a section devoted specifically to Ishi. Also the museum is largest, most comprehensive gallery of California Indian artifacts in the world

For those who would rather read a biography of this lone Indian, the Library owns the book, “Ishi in Two Worlds: a Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America” by Theodora Kroeber.