Doing Good and Making Trouble: A Look at Helen Hunt Jackson

Every spring since 1923, thousands of playgoers have attended an open-air performance known as the Ramona Pageant in the San Jacinto foothills near Hemet, California. Mexican music echoes throughout the natural amphitheater as Native Americans dance and chant, the US cavalry charges in, and Franciscan priests pray for them all. Nearly 400 costumed volunteers enact the love story of Alessandro, a Luiseño Indian,1 and Ramona, an orphan of mixed race, as they try to survive rejection by their families and abuse by white settlers.

Woven into the romance of Alessandro and Ramona is the tragic history of Southern California’s native people, a tale of genocide and land theft that Ramona’s creator, Helen Hunt Jackson, dedicated the last six years of her life to exposing. Yet in many ways, the spectacle eclipsed her message. The love story Jackson invented was supposed to be the “sugar coating of the pill” of Indian policy reform she fought for in both fiction and nonfiction. Californians preferred the sugar coating, the vibrant costumes of a multiethnic past.

In 1884, when the novel Ramona was published, Helen Hunt Jackson was one of America’s most popular women writers, unafraid to tackle genres as diverse as poetry and investigative journalism. In fact, for a woman who either complained of illness or dreaded its onset every day, Jackson was remarkably prolific from 1865 to 1885, her final two decades. She was born Helen Maria Fiske in 1830 to Calvinist parents, who instilled in their daughter a discipline that would allow her to overcome adversity, both personally and professionally. Helen grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, and by sixteen, she was an orphan, like her future protagonist Ramona. When she was thirty-three, her first husband died, leaving her with a young son. Two years later, he died as well. Her years afterward in Colorado, where she relocated for her health, were certainly her happiest. She met her second husband and launched her most ambitious writing projects. As her biographer Kate Phillips writes, “Jackson’s efforts to keep cheerful and productive in the face of difficulty became an integral part of her identity.”

Like her Amherst neighbor Emily Dickinson, Jackson fiercely guarded her privacy: interviews were unwelcome, biographers shunned, and she published her early verse, stories, and travel articles (many of which documented the nation’s westward expansion) under pseudonyms. Thomas Wentworth Higginson mentored both writers. Jackson’s first novel, Mercy Philbrick’s Choice, is that rare thing: a female artist’s coming of age drama, partly autobiographical, which sold well and was praised for local color. What interrupted her novelistic goals was a singular event in 1879: she attended a Boston lecture by Ponca Chief Standing Bear, who spoke about his tribe’s forced removal from their ancestral lands. The chief’s pleas moved her to act, in part because they confirmed the effects of land appropriation and industry she had witnessed in western states.

After 1879, Jackson set fiction aside to advocate for Native American policy reform and reparations. For the next six years until she died, she worked for Indian rights, first as a special agent on Indian Affairs reporting from Southern California; then as the author of A Century of Dishonor (1881), the first serious study of US federal Indian policy; and finally as creator of Ramona (1884), which she hoped would do for Native Americans what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for African American slaves. As she wrote to a friend, “A fire has been kindled within me which will never go out.” Whereas before, Jackson had written for love, money, or to drive away depression (“ill spirits”), now she wrote with social purpose, lobbying Congress to end violence and removals to Indian Territory, honor existing treaties, protect ancestral lands, and grant Native Americans legal rights as citizens.

Her task would have defeated most people because—officially (as in California)2 or unofficially, the US was committed to genocide as a way to open lands to its white citizens. Rather than continue to negotiate with tribes as if they were foreign nations, in 1871 the US passed the Indian Appropriations Act, making all Native Americans wards of the state. In California and Colorado, where Jackson carried out her reform efforts, the general mood was “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Jackson faced hostility everywhere she went. Colorado journalist Carlyle Channing Davis, a contemporary, admitted that “Jackson was quite without a genuine sympathizer with her work in the entire State of Colorado.”

Undaunted and in her fifties, she visited twenty Indian villages and reservations, first on assignment for Century magazine, then as a government agent commissioned to write a report on the condition and needs of the Mission Indians. What struck her co-commissioner, Abbot Kinney, in 1883 was her openness. “She could go up to utter strangers, people of the most diverse kind—diverse in nature, social position, work, education, ideals,” he noted, “and in a few minutes…, they seemed to pour out their in-most ideas to her.” It didn’t always work. She also sported a hat made of an owl’s head until informed that for most Native Americans it meant death.

Much of what Jackson saw and learned in Southern California appears in Ramona. Already on page 12 of the novel, its author is explaining Mexican land theft:

…and that was the way it had come about that Señora Moreno was a poor woman. Tract after tract, her lands had been taken away from her; it looked for a time as if nothing would be left. Every one of the claims based on deeds of gift from Governor Pio Pico, her husband’s most intimate friend, was disallowed…. The people of the United States have never in the least realized that the taking possession of California was not only a conquering of Mexico but a conquering of California as well.

The destruction of Alessandro’s village at Temecula is based on a real event, as documented in court records and newspapers at the time. In 1875, the sheriff of San Diego County rode into the Luiseño village at Temecula and served an eviction notice. He also confiscated the Indians’ livestock to pay court costs for the lawsuit that forced them from their homes. After the eviction, many of the Indians settled nearby at Pechanga, “a spot so barren and dry no white man had thought it worthwhile to take up the land,” Jackson observed.

Even Alessandro’s death, the climax of the story, is based on the 1883 murder of Juan Diego, a Cahuilla Indian, by Sam Temple, a San Jacinto wagon driver. Temple accused Diego of stealing one of his horses, rode to Diego’s home near Hemet, and murdered him while Diego’s wife watched in horror. Temple pleaded self-defense, was tried before a jury of six local white citizens, and was acquitted. “It is easy to see that killing of Indians is not a very dangerous thing,” wrote Jackson at the time.

The late novelist Michael Dorris, who taught Native American studies, quite correctly describes Ramona as propaganda, its purpose to elicit sympathy for the novel’s interracial outcasts. Ramona and Alessandro speak formal English, not dialects, as do the white Americans, and their behavior is exemplary, the antithesis of a “wild Indian.” Middle-class readers, as the scholar John C. Havard points out, knew nothing about Cahuilla Indians but understood the injustice of losing one’s property, with its hard-earned domestic comforts, and the ability to care for a child. Whatever her strategies—a travel writer’s flair for local color, superhuman characters, and a gripping drama—the novel was a bestseller. Sales and reviews would have delighted anyone but Jackson, who quickly realized that the novel’s appeal as a love story was overtaking her reform message. So powerful was its appeal by 1908 (twenty-three years after her death) that George Wharton James retraced Jackson’s steps for Through Ramona’s Country, adding his own myths to her fiction. The novelist’s fame continued for several decades following her death, according to Phillips, and then as realism became prized in literature, she was “condemned, as it were, to ‘sweeping spiders’ in back rooms with other neglected authors.”

If ever a nineteenth-century author needed a second look, it is Jackson, whom both Teddy Roosevelt in his Winning of the West (1889) and later the mystery writer Raymond Chandler dismissed for her “sentimental slop.” Starting in 1946, historians like Carey McWilliams, Mike Davis, and Kevin Starr would claim that Ramona provided a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that newcomers to California could embrace more easily than its brutal colonial past. They fault Jackson’s depictions of the Missions as paternalistic and picturesque, which show the influence of her mentor and good friend Antonio F. Coronel, a Mexican-born rancher and once mayor of Los Angeles. Coronel’s idealized views reinforced the mission literature she read that suppressed any mention of its forced Indian labor. No one would have been more outraged than Jackson to see Ramona being used as a tourist billboard, fueling the very transformation of land and property rights she protested.

Not until recently have scholars like Martin Padgett, John Havard, John M. Gonzales, and Phillips sought to reverse the charge that Ramona is a failed reform novel by describing the many ways the novel challenged white racism toward Native Americans and promoted models of racial tolerance. Phillips effectively argues that Jackson’s “romantic racialism,” the notion of a Noble Savage, was widespread in nineteenth-century literature. “The confusion between sentimentalism and realism evident in Jackson’s fiction was endemic to her era,” she points out. In his 1941 essay “Sentimentalist vs. Realist,” historian Allan Nevins rose to Jackson’s defense by including Ramona in America’s muckraking history: its appeal to emotion being essential to its reform aims. “That her books were sentimental there can be no doubt. They were as sentimental as Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Up from Slavery or How the Other Half Lives or The Jungle…America owes much to our long list of sentimental books.”

Nor is it fair, according to the scholar Kimberly E. Armstrong, to blame Jackson for “reshaping the imagination of Southern California,” as one of her detractors suggests. That was accomplished by Ramona’s packaging, which emphasized the natural beauty of the novel’s setting to the exclusion of its non-Anglo victims. “Covers, advertisements, illustrations, and prefaces that the publisher chose for her novel responded to growing interest in Ramona-related sites as travel destinations and sites of mythmaking,” writes Armstrong. Though the novel’s text with its sympathetic portraits was unchanged, “paratexts” led readers to believe these Native American injustices had been solved. They encouraged the novel not to be read for its political themes but instead as a travelogue. “In remaking Ramona into a travelogue,” claims Armstrong, “Jackson’s publishers softened and obscured the polemical message of the novel and replaced it with a directive that encouraged readers to visit the home of Ramona herself;…”

Penguin made a different choice in 2002 when it reissued Ramona with an introduction by Dorris and an afterword by historian Valerie Sherer Mathes, which frame the novel as the natural extension of the author’s reform advocacy in A Century of Dishonor and as a Special Agent for the US Government. Dorris, writing in 1988, wonders what Jackson would think of “the high unemployment, low per capita income, poor health, and legal representation Native Americans currently experience.” Clearly, he insists, there is still a need to expose our government’s “broken promises.”

Dorris isn’t alone in seeing Jackson’s reform work as unfinished. The political scientist Norman Finkelstein credits A Century of Dishonor with providing the moral backbone for his investigations into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom (2018), he writes: “The book was largely ignored, then forgotten, and finally rediscovered by later generations ready to hear and bear the truth…. The present volume was modeled after her searing requiem.” Jackson never lost hope that to the student of American history, it would seem “well-nigh incredible” what was done to the Indian nations.

A Century of Dishonor still has the capacity to inflame readers, judging by comments on its amazon.com book page, and to inspire academics like Finkelstein. Jackson’s meticulous record of imperialism preserves the laws and actions that left Native Americans homeless, starving, and near extinction. It runs to over 500 pages, yet its author apologizes for giving only “outline sketches” of a history that includes broken treaties; mistreatment; forced removal from their lands to reservations on land unsuitable for farming that could not sustain them; and massacres of Native Americans by whites. Jackson traces federal policy toward the tribes, beginning in 1778 when a newly minted Congress negotiated with them as independent nations, offering the possibility of their becoming states and allowing for the defense of their lands from intruders, to 1792, when US troops began defending settlers from “hostilities.” As she reports on Congress’ “bad faith,” she offers testimonies like that of an 1869 presidential commission that found, contrary to popular myth, that Native Americans were industrious; nearly always the victims, not the aggressors, of violence; and that “the border history of the white man’s connection with the Indian is a sickening record of murder, outrage, robbery, and wrongs….” C. B. Brierley, a surgeon assigned to treat Native American prisoners, wrote to his superiors: “I came among them greatly prejudiced against them; but after being with them, I was compelled to admit that they were honest in their intentions, and really desired peace.” Reinforcing eye-witness accounts by government officials are native testimonies like those of Chief Joseph and Sitting Bull, who explain that without the ability to care and provide for their families, many adults are choosing to die rather than become dependent. When Jackson was writing her “requiem,” less than 300,000 natives remained, excluding Alaska, out of many millions when Europeans arrived.

Jackson was an idealist and in her author’s note to A Century of Dishonor claims that because her countrymen “are not at heart unjust…as soon as they fairly understand how cruelly [fair play] has been denied to the Indian, they will rise up and demand it for him.” When they failed to rise up (or pass the bills she lobbied for), the author turned to fiction to achieve her political aims. To a friend she wrote, “In my Century of Dishonor, I tried to attack people’s consciences directly and they would not listen. Now I have sugared my pill, and it remains to be seen if it will go down.” It’s safe to say that this moral firebrand wanted more than Hemet’s Ramona Pageant.

What is Jackson’s true legacy? For Phillips she “created the first figures in the long line of disappointed, deracinated heroes who populate the later Southern California fiction of writers as diverse as Nathaniel West, Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Pynchon, and Joan Didion.” As Ramona and Alessandro are slowly stripped of their agency and begin their search for shelter and solace, the narrative grows darker, more dystopian. John Havard especially admires the way the novelist presents Ramona and Alessandro’s interracial marriage as legitimate, whereas the ideology that punishes them is both illegitimate and un-American. Yet, Havard agrees with Nevins that the sympathy for Indian dispossession Jackson has skillfully crafted in the first 350 pages of her novel is diluted by a happy ending—Ramona’s rescue by the aristocratic Felipe—which inadvertently sends readers the message that Ramona is better off with her lover dead.

This, and not Jackson’s romanticizing of the Spanish Mission system, is the “artistic blunder” that according to Nevins diminishes the tragedy and its potential to outrage readers, inciting them to action. “The whole intention of the story,” he complains, “was to illustrate the fact that the wrong done to the race had never been righted….it was important the reader be left with an indelible memory of injustice, his [sic] feelings still harrowed by the accumulated sorrow of these waifs of the West.” Though Ramona ends with the word “Indian,” its focus has shifted from the tribes’ suffering in Cahuilla village to Felipe and Ramona’s new life in Mexico, a return to a golden age no longer possible in Southern California.

If Ramona mourns a “paradise lost,” it is not the Spanish Missions but the ideals of a young nation its author was struggling to reconcile with the realities of rapid expansion on the West Coast. Many critics have pointed out that her character “Aunt” Ri Hyer is a stand-in for Jackson herself, who, once terrified of the Indian massacres she had read about in New England newspapers, grew in racial tolerance and admiration. Aunt Hyer’s rag carpets with their “hit-er-miss pattren” of colors and shapes become the pluralistic image Jackson hoped for California, if not for the nation. One of the strongest arguments for rereading her work is that racism is still with us and multiculturalism a prominent theme in LA novels, like N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, Dorothy Hughes’ In a Lonely Place, Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love, Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls, Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People, and T. C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain. To Padgett and others, Jackson’s message may have been lost on its readers, but she speaks volumes today. Ramona can be read, notes Padgett, “to inform our understanding of contemporary debates over multiculturalism, mestizaje (or racial mixing), and the politics of identity in the United States.” Far from a failed Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he argues that the novel exemplifies the role literature can play as an agent of social change.

Recognition for Jackson as a regionalist is similarly overdue. Bryan Wagner in “Helen Hunt Jackson’s Errant Local Color” (2002) shows how the novelist used the conventions of local color and travel writing, especially of the Deep South, to present the modernization of the West as a fall from grace. “She had to find a language powerful enough,” he explains, “to counteract the prevailing myth of Manifest Destiny.” Pastoral settings, eccentric characters, and vernacular speech were all expertly employed to protest the spread of “civilisation,” where people and places were under siege. Though her language was often “sentimental,” Phillips warns that terms like sentimentalist and regionalist were often used to dismiss female writers who dominated both genres. Jackson, who began writing travel essays in 1865, “was among the first American women writers to maintain a sustained focus on regionalism,” writes Phillips, preceding nineteenth-century writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Unlike other regionalists, she didn’t exoticize or stand apart from people and places she wrote about, but felt a solidarity and natural sympathy that she also expressed in private letters. But then Jackson, according to Phillips, always thought of herself as a rural person—an Amherst, not a Boston, girl.

In a letter to Higginson dated July 27, 1885, two weeks before she died, Jackson wrote: “My ‘Century of Dishonor’ and ‘Ramona’ are the only things I have done of which I am glad now. The rest is of no moment. They will live and they will bear fruit….” It’s hard to argue with Jackson’s assessment of her own work: her verses, beloved by nineteenth-century readers for their uplifting messages, have none of the intimacy and strangeness that make Dickinson’s so memorable. Her popular travel writing gave her raw material for her most ambitious work, Ramona, still in print after 135 years. A Century of Dishonor has, as Finkelstein notes, been rediscovered and reprinted, its “searing requiem” for a forgotten people finding the audience it deserves.

1. Many American Indian scholars and writers use the terms Native American and Indian interchangeably. This essay does as well.

2. “By demonstrating that the state would not punish Indian killers, but instead reward them,” writes historian Benjamin Madley in An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873, “militia expeditions helped inspire vigilantes to kill at least 6,460 California Indians between 1846 and 1873.” The US Army also joined in the killing, Madley notes, killing at least 1,600 native Californians.