"Industrial & Picturesque Narrative": Helen Hunt Jackson's California Travel Writing for the Century

The end of the Civil War marked the beginning of a new era in American magazine publishing, an era of demographic and geographic expansion of the American public, but also of increasingly specialized readerships. The beginning of Helen Hunt Jackson's career as a writer coincided with this new era. Taking up the pen in the months immediately after the end of hostilities, Jackson—then the Civil War widow Helen Hunt—would flourish in the 1870s through her sophisticated navigation of the magazine culture of the period. Working as a poet, travel writer, domestic advice writer, and novelist, Jackson recognized that she spoke to a number of different audiences, and she cultivated distinct authorial personas to appeal to her diverse readerships.

Much of this work was forgotten after Jackson's death, and her reputation came to rest upon two books—or, more properly speaking, two books and two strikingly distinct projects. As an activist writer, Jackson has been remembered as the author of the classic of legal journalism A Century of Dishonor (1881), long a key resource for critical studies of Native American rights and history. As a popular writer, Jackson has been remembered as the author of the sentimental novel Ramona (1884), whose imagery inspired the early twentieth-century recuperation of California's Spanish heritage and the enshrinement of the mission style as a semi-official California architecture.¹ The two books could hardly be more different. A Century of Dishonor presents a rigorously focused defense of Native American rights within the frameworks of U.S. and international law. By contrast, Ramona is a generic chimera, many books in one: a narrative tour of California's natural beauty, a Cooperesque celebration of "vanishing Americans," a study of the California economy, and a story of orphaned girlhood in search of a loving mother—not to mention the source of what may be the world's only annually produced anti-genocide musical, the Ramona Pageant of Hemet, California.

The divide separating A Century of Dishonor's legalistic human rights activism from the kaleidoscopic and even campy aesthetics of Ramona deserves more attention. Undoubtedly, the two projects shared a common concern for the plight of Native Americans in post-Reconstruction America. But their differences suggest, at the very least, a disconnect between means and ends. To the degree to which Ramona can be read as an appeal on behalf of Native American rights, a continuation of the project laid out in A Century of Dishonor, the novel must be read against its romantic interpretation of mission- and Mexican-era California. Any reader who takes Jackson seriously as a writer and activist in the 1880s must ask how someone whose central purpose was to raise consciousness about Native American legal rights, and whose original point of interest had been the struggle of the Ponca tribe for a midwestern homeland, ended up being identified with the campaign to market Romantic California.

This article does not resolve the problem posed by Jackson's two legacies. Rather, it examines the emergence of this disjunction within Jackson's writing in the last half-decade of her life, seeking to understand its significance in terms of the articulation of genres and publics, politics, and aesthetics in the magazine world of the 1880s. The subject of this article is a series of five travel essays Jackson published in the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in 1883. These articles offer a unique vantage point from which to consider, on the one hand, Jackson's trajectory, her expanding ambitions to reach not only readerships but a public; and, on the other hand, her confrontation with a recently articulated standard of cultural sophistication, a standard which heralded the division of readerships and the clash of tastes as a new aesthetic value. This new standard, I will suggest, played an important role in transforming both the function of magazine writing and its meaning in relation to the public and to the world of literature at the end of the nineteenth century.

Jackson's Century articles have significant implications for understanding not only the dynamics of Ramona...