Early in the morning of August 29, 1911, two butchers hear dogs barking in the corral of their slaughterhouse outside Oroville, California. When they go out to check, they encounter Ishi, believed to be the last surviving member of the Native American Yahi tribe.

By the first decade of the 20th century, Euro-Americans had so overwhelmed the North American continent that scarcely any Native Americans remained who had not been assimilated into Anglo society to some degree. Ishi appears to have been something of an exception. Found lost and starving, Ishi was unfamiliar with white American ways and spoke no English.

Authorities took the Native American man into custody for his own protection. News of the so-called “Stone Age Indian” attracted the attention of a young Berkeley anthropologist named Thomas Waterman. Gathering what partial vocabularies existed of northern California Native dialects, the speakers of which had mostly vanished, Waterman went to Oroville to meet Ishi. After unsuccessfully hazarding words from several dialects, Waterman tried a few words from the language of the Yana Indians.

Source: history.com for the complete article