Helen Hunt Jackson - misunderstood romantic, misremembered advocate of Native American rights - lingered some weeks in Los Angeles between December 1881 and the end of January 1882, on assignment for The Century Magazine to write about Southern California as a destination for adventurous tourists. She apparently came with a larger purpose than a series of travel sketches, although her purpose was never fully realized.The seductive power of an invented past, created by rival mythmakers seeking to preserve their place in newly American Los Angeles, made her plan a failure and Helen Hunt Jackson famous.
Jackson was already known for A Century of Dishonor, an account of the crimes committed in the name of Manifest Destiny against Native Americans (published earlier in 1881). Jackson knew a Californian variation of this bleak story. It implicated Spanish and Mexican colonial practices, the mission system under Jun pero Serra, and the hostility of California's new possessors toward the state's indigenous communities.
Jackson traveled what would soon become a well-worn tourist route from Santa Barbara to San Diego, encountering Native Americans, Latino Californians, and Anglo newcomers as she researched four pieces for The Century Magazine. The first was an uncritical account of the life of Serra (published in May 1883), followed by her observations on the so-called Mission Indians (August), and a boosterish account of the riches of Southern California agriculture (October).
The series ended with a poetic, intimate evocation of Los Angeles as a place suspended between a languid Spanish past and its inevitable American future (published in November).
Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885). She was a journalist, poet, novelist, and social activist whose most lasting achievement, entirely unintended, was the creation of Ramonaland - an ecology of sentiments about a Southern California that never was. Used under a Creative Commons License
Old Basket Weaver. Jackson wrote about the indigenous communities of Southern California and co-authored a blistering report in 1883 to the Bureau of Indian Affairs pleading for federal action to improve their condition. Illustrations by Henry Sandham accompanied Jackson's account of her findings in The Century Magazine. Used under a Creative Commons License
Jackson the travel writer was also Jackson the activist. Even as she researched Serra's life in Santa Barbara and visited tourist destinations around Los Angeles, she was arranging to be appointed a special agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to investigate the condition of native communities in Southern California. Since she did not know the country or the language, her appointment from Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price in January 1883 included the services of Abbot Kinney, whose many interests included Native American ethnography. (Jackson had met Kinney while in Los Angeles and had corresponded with him about their joint project during the first weeks of 1882.)
With Kinney's help as guide and translator, Jackson visited native rancherias and smaller native settlements in San Diego and Los Angeles counties and in the desert valleys around Riverside and San Bernardino. Conditions there appalled her.
Jackson's time in Southern California united three aspects of her life: as journalist, social critic, and romantic. Her outrage at the treatment of native communities fires the Report on the Condition and Needs of the Mission Indians that Jackson and Kinney submitted to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in July 1883. Her melodramatic recasting of these issues dooms the native and mestizo characters in Ramona, the novel of Southern California life she completed in early 1884.
Jackson hoped her report to the Bureau of Indian Affairs would change federal policy. She intended her novel to change the hearts of sentimental, middle-class readers, first through the serialization of Ramona in the pages of The Christian Union, a progressive Protestant weekly, and then through the republication of Ramona that immediately followed.
But instead of inciting protest, Ramona enthralled generations of Anglo readers, furnishing a theater of sentiment in which they learned to identify a place with a sensibility. This affective landscape - elegiac, picturesque, and contemplative - was under construction before Ramona, but Jackson brought her empathy for Native Americans, Mexican laborers, and old Californio families[1] to an emerging sense of place in Southern California and gave it a piercing, melancholy sweetness.
Jackson did not create the image of an idyllic land of abundance and hospitality under a vaguely Spanish sun, but Jackson's name, as the instigator of Ramona memories, is most often recalled when Southern Californians think nostalgically of their home.
As a novel, Ramona was wildly successful. As social criticism, it was a failure. Igniting support for native communities was Jackson's goal, but her strategy - placing fictional memories in a real landscape - sabotaged her intentions. Readers sighed over the sad fates of Ramona and her husband Alessandro, but they longed to be in the places where they felt Jackson's characters still lived. Jackson died in mid-1885, probably knowing that Ramona had not achieved the political effect she had sought.
Ramona failed to be another Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chelsea Leah Pearson argues (in her Master's thesis Call me a Californio' - Translating Hemispheric Legacies in Helen Hunt Jackson, Don Antonio Coronel, and Jos Mart ), because Jackson was unable to manage the multiple, competing, and intersecting historical substitutions that were underway in Southern California in the 1880s. Among those substitutions was a fixed notion of race in place of the fluid racial categories of pre-American California.
