Helen Hunt Jackson

1830-1885
Writer, activist for Native Americans

As expressed in her devastating criticisms of federal Indian policy and white-Indian relations in A Century of Dishonor and the novel Ramona, Helen Hunt Jackson was one of the most influential defenders of Native American rights in late 19th-century America.

Introduction

Helen Hunt Jackson was born Helen Maria Fiske during the first term of President Andrew Jackson, a former Indian fighter and advocate of removing Indians living in the eastern United States to the West. The daughter of Nathan Welby and Deborah (Vinal) Fiske, Helen was raised by a father who was a stern Congregational minister, author, and professor of Latin, Greek, and philosophy at Amherst College. Her mother was also a writer. Undoubtedly, her parents' literary and intellectual interests influenced Jackson's later career, yet she claimed: "I inherited nothing from either of my parents except my mother's gift for cheer." The remainder of her family consisted of two brothers, both of whom died in infancy, and a sister Anne. When Helen was still a youth, her mother died, as did her father three years later, leaving her to be cared for by an aunt. Before his death, however, Jackson's father had provided his spirited daughter with an elite education at the highly regarded Ipswich Female Seminary in Massachusetts and at the Abbott Institute, a select boarding school run by the Reverend J.S.C. Abbott in New York City. As a result, she was a classmate as well as a neighbor of Emily Dickinson, later to become one of America's most distinguished poets. The two remained friends for the rest of their lives.

In 1852, the vivaciously volatile Helen Fiske married U.S. Army captain (later major) Edward Bissell Hunt, brother of a former New York governor. For the next 11 years, she and her husband, an accomplished engineer officer, followed the typically mobile life of a career military family. These years were marked by deep personal tragedy. Jackson's first child Murray died in 1854 of a brain disease when he was less than a year old. In 1863, her husband suffocated while experimenting with an innovative underwater naval vessel or weapon of his own design. Two years later, her other son "Rennie" succumbed to diphtheria. In 1865, the year the Civil War ended, Jackson was alone and grief stricken. After a brief period of mourning, however, the resilient Jackson was eager to embark upon a new life.

Having demonstrated no substantial evidence of the literary ability and reform interest that soon would shape her public career, in 1866 she took up residence in Newport, Rhode Island, where she and her husband had previously been stationed and which was "reputed to have more authors than any other city in the country," according to historian Antoinette May in her book, The Annotated Ramona. After renewing her friendship with Emily Dickinson and meeting Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a soldier, social reformer, and author, Jackson decided to seriously pursue a writing career which eventually would lead to social and political activism.

Jackson Becomes Prolific Writer

With Colonel Higginson's support and friendship, her initial literary efforts were devoted to children's stories, travel sketches, poems, novels, and essays under the pseudonyms "H.H." and "Saxe Holm." Her anonymous work included Verses (1870) and a novel Mercy Philbrick's Choice (1876), in which Emily Dickinson was part-model for the heroine. In time, Jackson would produce over 30 books and hundreds of articles. She most likely would have become better known without the pseudonyms, but popular convention of the time dictated that female writers conceal their true identity. However, once she began to author books about Native Americans or Indians (as they were generally known), she proudly used her full name. Jackson became perhaps the most prolific woman writer of her era in the country. In 1874, the noted Transcendentalist philosopher, essayist, orator, and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regarded her as "the greatest woman poet" and rated her poetry as superior to the work of almost all her American male contemporaries. This was, indeed, high praise from a very respected source and reflected her position as a national cultural leader.

In May 1872, Helen Hunt journeyed to California, whose Indians later would figure prominently in her writing. The winter of 1873-74 found her at Colorado Springs, Colorado, in search of a cure for a respiratory ailment. It was there that she met William Sharpless Jackson, a Pennsylvania Quaker, wealthy banker, and railroad magnate. They were married on October 22, 1875. For the new Mrs. Jackson this was a fortuitous union since it relieved her of financial worries, thus providing the freedom with her husband's support to pursue her fascination with the American West and its Indians from her home in Colorado.

In 1879, a turning point or watershed occurred in Jackson's life and career. During a visit to Boston, she attended a translated lecture by Chief Standing Bear about the federal government's forcible removal of the Ponca Indians from their Nebraska reservation to Indian Territory. Emotionally moved by what she heard, Jackson thereafter became a relentless crusader for the remaining tribes. In addition to exposing the government's mistreatment of Native Americans in her writings, she circulated petitions on their behalf, raised money for lawsuits, wrote letters to newspaper editors, and attempted to arouse public opinion on behalf of the Indians' deteriorating condition. In short, she became a staunch reformer in conflict with such government officials as U.S. Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz over the existing Indian policy of extermination and tribal reservation. According to Antoinette May, "for the first time Helen Hunt Jackson was a woman with a cause, . . . quite literally a holy terror."

Stories from western tribes of mistreatment by whites led Jackson to undertake research that resulted in A Century of Dishonor in 1881. An impassioned documented plea on behalf of the Indians rather than a balanced history, the book caused a national sensation by exposing broken treaties, dishonest deals, unfulfilled promises, and the federal government's corrupt mismanagement of its Indian wards. As a political activist, Jackson sent a copy of her strong indictment to every member of Congress at her own expense with the following comments boldly printed in red on the cover: "Look upon your hands: They are stained with the blood of your relations."

Appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs

Her scathing attack led the U.S. Department of the Interior to authorize her and translator Abbot Kinney to investigate the condition and needs of the so-called Mission Indians in California. She knew the problems they faced by virtue of an earlier writing assignment in 1881 for Century Magazine. By definition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Mission Indians included only those living in the three southernmost counties of California rather than the descendants of all Indians who once were confined in missions by the Franciscan Religious Order in Spanish and later Mexican California from 1769 until 1834. Although President Chester Arthur had designated her special commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1882 — the first woman to hold that position — Jackson's report of 1883 calling for "some atonement" for past neglect and injustice was not acted upon by government authorities.

Jackson continued her struggle to redress Indian grievances and also returned to her earlier career as a writer of poetry, essays, and novels. In 1884, based upon her earlier experience with the California Indians, she hurriedly wrote the popular, commercially successful novel, Ramona. The work, which has been reprinted frequently and adapted to screen and stage, was the highlight of her literary career. In 1886, the North American Review called the book "unquestionably the best novel yet produced by an American woman," ranking it with Uncle Tom's Cabin by her friend Harriet Beecher Stowe as one of the two foremost ethical novels of the century. Notwithstanding such positive reaction, Jackson was disappointed by the public's failure to appreciate the work for its attempt to do for the Indians what Stowe had achieved for the slaves. According to the late California historian Walton Bean:

This novel was often called the Uncle Tom's Cabin of California, but its most enduring effect was to create a collection of regional myths that stimulated the tourist trade. These legends became so ingrained in the culture of Southern California that they were often mistaken for realities. In later years many who visited "Ramona's birthplace" in San Diego or the annual "Ramona Pageant" at Hemet (eighty miles north of San Diego) were surprised and disappointed if they chanced to learn that Ramona was a (fictional) novel rather than a biography.

Sentimental, overstated idealization of paternalistic mission padres and fine old Spanish families on historic California ranchos distracted attention from the author's central thesis regarding the tragic fate of a half-breed senorita and her Indian husband at the hands of prejudiced whites. Whatever its possible political impact, the romantic work sold 600,000 copies in 60 years as the first novel about Southern California.

Nonetheless, historian May claims that Ramona was responsible for enactment of the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act, the first comprehensive reform legislation for the nation's Indians enacted by Congress. Although designed to make Indians "civilized" farmers by dividing tribal reservations into modest individual land allotments, it also opened Indian reservations to white settlement. Jackson would die two years before the act was passed, after nearly a decade of intermittent debate, but her pleas for reform must have had some impact on the act's supporters, especially eastern religious humanitarians.

In June 1884, a severely fractured leg left Jackson a cripple. Despite the handicap, she returned to California to visit Hispanic friends and continue writing. While there, she developed cancer. Nonetheless, she never lost hope for the future until death claimed her on August 12, 1885. In fact, her last letter was sent to President Grover Cleveland urging him to read A Century of Dishonor. According to Theodore Fuller, she wrote: "I am dying happier in the belief I have that it is your hand that is destined to strike the first steady blow toward lifting the burden of infamy from our country and righting the wrongs of the Indian race." Temporarily interred in San Francisco, she later was buried near the summit of Mount Jackson, Colorado, a Cheyenne peak named for her, about four miles from Colorado Springs. Finally, to avoid possible vandalism and commercialism, her body was removed permanently to Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs.

In the morally rigid Victorian era, when middle-class American women were supposed to follow the "cult of domesticity" as dutiful mothers and housewives, Helen Hunt Jackson had the courage and conviction to try to make a positive difference in the lives of those who had been victimized by ignorance, prejudice, corruption, and cruelty. According to Carl Degler, she was described by some contemporaries as "the most brilliant, impetuous, and thoroughly individual woman of her time." Yet, ironically, she is hardly remembered today, except perhaps by the Native Americans she tried to help by attempting to awaken the national conscience to their oppression and suffering. It is reasonable to assume that her own personal losses of loved ones made her very sympathetic to those disinherited people whose losses substantially exceeded hers. Antoinette May perhaps has left the most appropriate tribute to Jackson's character, life, and work:

Passionate, daring, defiant, an individualist who lived by her own rules, moving as freely in an age of stagecoaches and steamships as jet setters do today, Helen lived a life that few women of her day had the courage to live. In any era she would qualify as an original.

For Native Americans, she indeed was a much needed champion on behalf of human decency and dignity in an era when Indians were generally considered subhuman savages. Unfortunately for Jackson, the sword proved mightier than the pen as exemplified by continued genocide, the ill-fated Dawes Severalty Act, and the enduring social and economic problems of American Indians today. Nonetheless, Helen Hunt Jackson did the best she could with what she had at a time when public opinion and officials were largely indifferent to her uncompromising crusade. It is not surprising that the military massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, including that of at least 200 Sioux men, women, and children, occurred only five years after Jackson's untimely death — a tragic reminder of her Century of Dishonor.

Source: DISCovering Biography, Gale, 1997.