Ishi had been found alone and starving outside Oroville, California in 1911. The anthropologists Alfred Louis Kroeber and Thomas Waterman took him to the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco. There, he was studied by the anthropologists, before his death in 1916. Theodora Kroeber married Alfred Kroeber in 1926. Though she had never met Ishi, she decided to write a biography of him. 