Being In and Not Among: The Anti-Imperial Impulses of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Bits of Travel at Home

In “Bowlder Canyon,” a sketch from the Colorado section of her 1878 book Bits of Travel at Home, Helen Hunt Jackson distinguishes between two different ways of engaging the natural landscape. Writing of her exploration of this north-central Colorado canyon, Jackson contrasts being in the mountains with merely being among them. “‘In’ the mountains is a phrase we have come to use carelessly when we mean among them,” Jackson writes, “[b]ut it is a significant thing that we say ‘in’ and do not say ‘among.’” She continues:

Among the Rocky Mountains it is especially significant. Hour by hour one sinks and rises and climbs and descends in labyrinths of wedged hills. Each hour you are hemmed in by a new circle of peaks, among which no visible outlet appears; and each hour you escape, mount to a new level, and are again circled by a different and more glorious horizon. You come to feel that you yourself are, as it were, a member of the mountain race; the sky is the family roof, and you and they are at home together under it. This it is to be “in the mountains.”

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Using the domestic metaphor of the home to describe her experience, Jackson articulates a vibrant connection to nature. To be among the mountains is to view nature as merely an object of your observation. In contrast, to be in the mountains is to feel as if the natural world were your home, to realize a subjective link between self and nature that depends on aesthetic and philosophical rather than material concerns.

This distinction between being in the mountains and being merely among them is a central theme of Bits of Travel at Home, a collection of travel writing divided into three sections cataloguing Jackson’s experiences of the social and natural landscapes of California, New England, and Colorado. Especially in the first section of the book, which focuses on a trip from Chicago to California and a tour of the Yosemite Valley in its nascent days as a tourist destination, Jackson comes to embrace an intimacy with nature and with other people that reveals her shifting sensibility toward the US imperial imperative. Her tour of Yosemite relies on the beginnings of a tourist infrastructure serving the region, as the valley was becoming accessible by the development of new roads and trails as well as new hotels to lodge the influx of leisure travelers. However, Jackson is quick to move beyond the comparative comforts of such developed domestic spaces, portraying herself instead as a female adventurer who defies gender expectations by engaging in physically demanding explorations of the unsettled wilderness of the Yosemite Valley. Such a self-representation, however, also relies on Jackson’s privileged position as a middle-class white woman; her ability to “rough it” in nature is counterbalanced by a lingering desire at times to distinguish herself from the “rough” masses. In this way, Bits of Travel at Home offers a complex portrait of the privilege of wilderness tourism. Jackson subtly critiques masculine adventure narratives by detailing her own adventurous impulses, but she also occasionally reasserts the racial and class privileges that enable her to realize these desires for adventure. As Anne McClintock points out in Imperial Leather, “race, gender, and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other. . . . Rather, they come into existence in and through relation to each other—if in contradictory and conflictual ways” (5). In Bits of Travel at Home, we witness that intersection of identities as Jackson struggles with her own conflicted responses to privilege and oppression, to imperial power and its evident abuses.

Jackson’s Bits of Travel at Home has been underappreciated for its complicated engagement with the nationalist and imperialist politics of her time. Jackson herself is perhaps best known for her 1884 novel Ramona and her avid defense of Native American tribal rights in the final years of her life, leaving her other work largely overlooked.¹ But Bits of Travel at Home offers us...