![]() Suffice to say, by the time a worn and hungry stranger appeared in late August at a slaughterhouse in Oroville, a town some 70 miles north of Sacramento, the butchers initially thought the darker-toned man was Mexican. ![]() The story of Ishi and his tribe stretches back centuries before his time at the Affiliated Colleges, a long thread in the history of indigenous Californians cut short by settlers and disease. ![]() Among these curios, bought or plundered from cultures long since extinct, lived an assistant janitor known as Ishi, a man whom the San Francisco Examiner called “the greatest anthropological treasure…ever captured.” In 1914, this anthropology museum, originally intended for the Hastings College of the Law, housed artifacts from the Phoebe Hearst Collection-Greek coins, Egyptian mummies and the like. Riding a streetcar toward the ocean, one would first pass the College of Dentistry and Pharmacy, then the Romanesque stone façade of the College of Medicine and finally, most curiously, the University Museum of Anthropology. One hundred years ago, before UCSF became a global brand in the health sciences, Parnassus Avenue was home to the Affiliated Colleges of the University of California. Fifteen years later, in time for UCSF’s sesquicentennial, we offer a long-due conclusion to Ishi’s story. In 1999, the UCSF Synapse published a short article about the continued efforts to repatriate the remains of Ishi, who spent the last years of his life on the Parnassus campus before dying in 1916. ![]()
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