The previous Portals told the story of how 78 Native Americans, most of them college students, sailed to the former federal prison on Alcatraz Island on Nov. 20, 1969, disembarked and claimed it. Calling themselves “Indians of All Tribes,” they prepared to hold the island until their demands were met.

The activists wanted to draw national attention to the plight of American Indians and to the U.S. government’s long record of broken promises. Their spokesman, a charismatic Mohawk former ironworker, bartender and San Francisco State University student named Richard Oakes, told a reporter, “We might — might — just wake up the conscience of America.”

But as Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior write in “Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee,” the occupiers also had more concrete goals. They planned to open a Center for Native American Studies, an American Indian Spiritual Center, an Indian Center of Ecology, an Indian Training School, and an American Indian Museum on the island.

At first, the occupation received laudatory press coverage, and the young occupiers were viewed sympathetically by many San Franciscans. Donations of food, clothing and money poured in. When occupiers held an “open house” on Thanksgiving — choosing the day with intentional irony — Native Americans from around the Bay Area came to visit and a San Francisco restaurant provided 200 turkey dinners.

But a month into the occupation, the mood on the island grew darker. Thanks to boredom, hard partying and anarchism, “fights and accidents became more common, as did a general lack of cohesion and purpose among those who weren’t part of the leadership,” Smith and Warrior write. Street punks and winos from the Mission began to show up. Drinking and drug use, initially banned, became rampant. “The island had become a truly wild place, a strange combination of a constant powwow and a street fight,” Smith and Warrior write.

Despite idealistic talk of pan-Indian unity, discord among the occupiers grew. Many had been jealous of spokesman Oakes from the start, and resentment grew as he spent more time off the island, hobnobbing with powerful people. At a tense council meeting, a Pomo woman named Luwana Quitiquit said that although all letters addressed to Indians of All Tribes were opened and any checks in them deposited, Oakes had insisted that letters addressed to him be given to him unopened. She believed each of those letters contained a check. Oakes was ousted as spokesman.

Despite this and other problems, the occupation continued to inspire Indians from around the country. They had previously felt invisible, but “Alcatraz had blown away that fog of invisibility like nothing that had occurred in the previous decade,” Smith and Warrior write. “Indians of All Tribes was more than any one person, it was a living thing inventing itself by the hour.”

Then, on Jan. 3, 1970, tragedy struck. Oakes’ 12-year-old daughter, Yvonne, was fatally injured when she fell three stories down a stairwell.

Yvonne died Jan. 8. That day, The Chronicle ran the second of an excoriating two-part series on the occupation. It depicted the island as something out of “Lord of the Flies,” where children ran amok, drunkenness and vandalism were rampant, and the island’s security force, satirically named the Bureau of Caucasian Affairs, had become a gang of thugs.

Public opinion about the occupation turned negative. That month, most of the remaining students who had been original occupiers left the island and returned to school.

At the same time, negotiations over the Indians’ demands began. The White House gave the job to Leonard Garment, known as Richard Nixon’s “house liberal.” He realized that a violent confrontation would be a public-relations nightmare. And because Nixon himself had what Smith and Warrior call “a soft spot for Indians,” Garment was empowered to make considerable concessions. He sent an adviser named Robert Robertson to negotiate.

The Indians insisted that the government give them clear title to the island and pay $500,000 for improvements. Robertson rejected these demands and returned to Washington, reporting to Garment and Vice President Spiro Agnew that “reason is a commodity they want nothing to do with. All they want is the island and an unending flow of money to do what they want.”

Trivia time The previous trivia question: What was the capacity of the six saltwater tanks at Sutro Baths? Answer: 1.8 million gallons. This week’s trivia question: What San Francisco waiter was known as “the rudest waiter in the world”? Editor’s note Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday.

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In March, Robertson returned with Washington’s last, best offer. The government would demolish seven buildings and replace them with an Indian cultural center and a museum. The operation would be run by the U.S. Park Service, staffed largely by Indians, and overseen by a board of directors made up of elected tribal officials from around the country. The government agreed to study the feasibility of opening a university on the island. The entire project would have a “maximal Indian quality.”

In retrospect, this appears to have been a generous offer. But the Indians flatly rejected it. Alcatraz had become a symbol, and no concessions could make up for the loss of that symbol. As Smith and Warrior write, “For increasing numbers of people on the island, the point of the occupation was to occupy Alcatraz.”

On June 1, 1970, fires consumed four historic buildings on the island. Occupiers claimed that provocateurs who had sneaked onto the island at night were responsible, but few believed them. The evidence suggested they were intentionally set by occupiers.

The occupation would last for another year, but it had peaked. On June 11, 1971, federal marshals removed the last 15 occupiers.

What did the occupation achieve? It may have influenced Nixon’s 1970 call for a new policy of “self-determination without termination.” It led to the creation of D-Q University, a two-year Native American university near Davis. It inspired Indians across the country, and it drew the world’s attention to their issues.

But it also divided the native community, resulted in a death, and generally exposed the limitations of symbolic, media-driven activism. Fifty years later, its legacy remains contested.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com