It is my birthday week so today I am talking about my new favorite queen, the American poet and writer who became an activist demanding better treatment of Native Americans from the United States government. Her name was Helen Hunt Jackson, and I will share some of her poetry throughout the story.

We will start the story with Deborah & Nathan Fiske, in Amherst, Massachusetts. The couple both suffered from chronic illness through their lives. Nathan was a Unitarian minister, author, and professor of Latin, Greek, and philosophy at Amherst College. Unitarians did not believe in the concepts of sin and of eternal punishment for sins. Appealing to reason, not to emotion. They believed that God is one person. They did not believe in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

Their daughter, Helen Maria Fiske, was born on October 15 of 1830. Deborah encouraged Helen to have a cheerful disposition and Helen was smart and she worked hard to live up to her father’s expectations. As a result of their parent’s disabilities, Helen and her younger sister Ann often stayed with relatives.

Deborah died from tuberculosis when Helen was fourteen. A few years later, Nathan Fiske was also suffering from tuberculosis. His doctor advised him to find a new climate to alleviate his symptoms. He arranged for Fiske's education to be paid for and left on his last adventure. He was in Palestine in the summer of her 17th year when her father died of dysentery. He was buried on Mt. Zion.

Helen’s maternal grandfather, Deacon David Vinal, assumed financial responsibility for the sisters. Julius A. Palmer, a prominent Boston attorney and state legislature representative, took on the role as their guardian, and the girls moved into his puritan home. Palmer sent Helen to the private schools and while she was away for education, she formed a long lasting friendship with the young Emily Dickinson.

After school, Helen moved to Albany, New York. The following year, a Governor’s Ball was held in Albany. Helen went, and met Lieutenant Edward Bissell Hunt, who was also in attendance. Hunt graduated from West Point, was an Army Corps of Engineers officer and a civil engineer. The couple married on October 28th of that year. She lived the life of a young army wife, traveling from post to post. Helen said she was almost too happy to trust the future. A woman's intuition is often right.

Helen gave birth to a son the year after the wedding. His name was Murray. Sadly, Murray was born with a disease attacking his brain and he did not live to see his first birthday. She became pregnant soon after and had a second son, Warren, a year after they lost Murray. They nicknamed him "Rennie".

Eight years later, Helen’s husband was testing one of his own designs of an early submarine weapon for the military when he fell and suffered a concussion, overcome by gunpowder fumes. It was a devastating loss. The perhaps most profound loss next. Up to this time, her life had been absorbed in domestic and social duties. Her son Warren, her last living family member, soon died due to diphtheria.

When she was young, her mother had encouraged her to expand on her vivid imagination by writing. Helen also suffered from chronic illness like her parents, and she took inspiration from her mom and started to write poetry, withdrawing from public view to grieve. Two months later, her first poem was published. She emerged months later dressed in all too familiar mourning clothes, but now determined to pursue a literary career.

“And every bird I ever knew Back and forth in the summer flew;

And breezes wafted over me The scent of every flower and tree:

Till I forgot the pain and gloom And silence of my darkened room“

Most of Hunt's early melancholic work grew out of this heavy experience of loss and sorrow. Like her mother, she continued turning negatives into positives in spite of great hardship. She was 36 years old and writing had become her greatest passion. She moved to a lively community of artists and writers in Newport, Rhode Island where she met the women's rights activist, Unitarian minister, author and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He would become her most important literary mentor.

“Only a night from old to new;

Only a sleep from night to morn.

The new is but the old come true;

Each sunrise sees a new year born.”

After living in Boston for two years, she spent a few years traveling through England, France, Germany, Austria and Italy. She soaked up inspiration and wrote from her writing desk from back home, which she brought with her on all her journeys.

She wrote about popular culture, domestic life, children’s literature and travel, using her editorial connections to cover the costs for her cross-country trips. Her career began.

She became well known in the literary world, publishing poetry in many popular magazines and a book, followed by a string of novels. She used the pseudonyms “H.H.”, “Rip van Winkle,” and “Saxe Holm.”

Helen was a good business woman and made connections with editors at the New York Independent, New York Times, Century Magazine, and the New York Daily Tribune. Her circle of friends included publishers and authors including Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who admired and published her poetry. The smart woman used her connections to help her shy and reluctant childhood friend Emily Dickinson get her initial work published.

Helen visited California for the first time in 1872. While there, she explored the Missions in Southern California and took an eight day trip to Yosemite. She was enamored with the native populations she met.

“When one thinks in the wilderness, alone, many things become clear.

I have been learning, all these years in the wilderness,

as if I had had a teacher.”

Helen received bad news in 1873. Like her parents, she suffered from chronic health issues throughout her life, and now, like her parents, Helen had tuberculosis. When her mother passed away, tuberculosis management was difficult and often of limited effect but people were now seeking tuberculosis treatment in Colorado Springs because of its dry climate and fresh mountain air. At the time, one-third of the people living in Colorado Springs had tuberculosis staying in boarding houses, or sanatoriums with hospital-like facilities.

She moved to the small town of Colorado Springs with 3,000 residents and very few amenities and was quickly disappointed. She said, “There stretched before me, to the east, a bleak, bare, desolate plain, rose behind me, to the west, a dark range of mountains, snow-topped, rocky-walled, stern, cruel, relentless. Between them lay the town – small, straight, new, treeless. One might die of such a place alone, but death by disease would be more natural.”

She wasn’t happy with the challenges of western life at first, but she stayed cheerful. Helen said her mother’s tireless “gift of cheer” was her greatest inheritance. Soon Helen understood and appreciated the beauty of the local scenery. She fell in love with the Pikes Peak region. Her admiration for the natural beauty of the west showed in her work, andher work, boosted tourism to the region. Helen said her mother’s tireless “gift of cheer” was her greatest inheritance.

“Today that plain and those mountains are to me well-nigh the fairest spot on earth. Today I say one might almost live in such a place alone!”

William Sharpless Jackson, a trusted business associate of the Founder of Colorado Springs, wealthy banker and railroad executive for the Denver and Rio Grande Railway became fast friends with Helen. They married in 1875. After they wed, Helen took his name and became known in her writing as Helen Hunt Jackson.

Helen and William had the most fabulous home in town at the corner of Kiowa and Weber streets. It was a leader in architecture and technology. Inside was one of the first indoor bathrooms in town. William had the exterior of the house remodeled to give Helen a picture-perfect view of Cheyenne Mountain out her window. One of her most popular poems is Cheyenne Mountain.

The Jackson’s entertained at their home regularly. Helen lavishly filled the rooms with pieces from her travels, reflecting her insatiable curiosity about the world and its people.

A lamp hung, attached to a hemp belt embellished with camel hair, Cowrie shells and red and black wool over pottery and an ornately carved Shell Dish, created by Haida craftsmen from the Pacific Coast.

There were also many pictures of her loved ones, including her beloved son Rennie that sat on bookshelves next to her purse, made from the inner ear of a whale. The shelves were full of fiction, poetry, natural sciences, travel guides, and books on spiritualism and the afterlife. On the back of a chair, an unfinished Navajo Chief’s Blanket produced in 1870, featuring diamonds woven atop an alternating background of stripes, cut from the loom and made into a saddle blanket.

There were native woven baskets from a Yokut tribe in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Heavily carved, unpainted wooden Spanish Stirrups, tear-drop shaped with cone and leaf designs, illuminated from the soft glow behind Asian decorative brass lighting fixtures made from incense burners.

“Dead men tell no tales," says the proverb.

One wishes they could.

We should miss some spicy contributions to magazine and newspaper literature; and a sudden silence would fall upon some loud-mouthed living.”

Helen traveled to Boston in 1879, attending a lecture by Chief Standing Bear about the creation of the Great Sioux Reservation. During the lecture, Standing Bear described the forced removal of the Ponca from their reservation in Nebraska, and transfer to a Reservation in Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma. They suffered from disease, harsh climate, and poor supplies. Upset about the mistreatment of Native Americans by government agents, she became an activist on an all-consuming mission on behalf of the Native Americans.

For several years, she investigated, raised money, circulated petitions, and documented the corruption of the agents, military officers and settlers who encroached on the land.

She publicized government misconduct in letters to The New York Times about the United States Government’s response to the Sand Creek and Meeker Massacres. She wrote on behalf of the Ponca and publicly battled William Byers of the Rocky Mountain News and Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz,whom she once called "the most adroit liar I ever knew." The locals in Colorado Springs were not always keen on Helen's fiercely independent nature, or her fiery advocacy for Native rights at the time.

In 1881, Jackson condemned state and federal Indian policies and recounted a history of broken treaties in her book, A Century of Dishonor. The book called for significant reform in government policy towards the Native Americans. Jackson sent a copy to every member of Congress with a quote from Benjamin Franklin printed in red on the cover: "Look upon your hands: they are stained with the blood of your relations."

Helen needed rest after some years of advocacy, let’s not forget she had a chronic illness. So she spent a significant amount of time among the Mission Indians in Southern California.

Don Antonio Coronel, former mayor of the city, had served as inspector of missions for the Mexican government. He was a well-known early local historian and taught Helen about the history and mistreatment of the tribes brought to the Missions. In 1852, an estimated 15,000 Mission Indians lived in Southern California. By the time of Jackson's visit, they numbered fewer than 4,000.

“The wild mustard in Southern California

is like that spoken of in the New Testament.

Its gold is as distinct a value to the eye

as the nugget of gold in the pocket.”

When the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price recommended her to be appointed as an Interior Department agent; she was named Special Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Southern California. She would document the location and condition of various bands, and determine what lands, if any, should be purchased for their use. At one point, she hired a law firm and fought to protect the rights of a native family facing dispossession from their land at the foot of the San Jacinto Mountains.

In 1883, Jackson completed a 56-page report on the Conditions and Needs of the Mission Indians. In the report, she recommended extensive government relief for the Mission Indians, including the purchase of new lands for reservations and the establishment of more Indian schools. The report was well received and legislation was drawn up based on her findings. The bill passed the U.S. Senate but died in the House of Representatives.

She knew she needed a wider audience and decided to write about it for the masses. She said, "I am going to write a novel, which will set forth some Indian experiences in a way to move people's hearts. People will read a novel when they will not read serious books. If I could write a story that would do for the Indian one-hundredth part what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for the person of color, I would be thankful for the rest of my life."

With an outline she started in California, Helen began writing in December 1883 while sick with stomach cancer in her New York hotel room and completed it in three months. She cared enough to undermine her health to better their lives.

In 1884, Helen published Ramona. The book achieved rapid success and aroused public sentiment. In the novel, Ramona is a half native and half Scots orphan in Spanish Californio society. The romantic story coincided with the arrival of railroad lines in the region, inspiring countless tourists to want to see the places described in the novel.

Historian Antoinette May argued that the popularity of the novel contributed to Congress passing the Dawes Act in 1887. This was the first American law to address Indian land rights and it forced the breakup of communal lands and redistribution to individual households, with sales of what the government said was "surplus land".

When few other white Americans would do so, she stood up for this cause and brought the topic to light. She wanted to write a children's story about Indian issues, but her health would not allow it. Helen was dying.

The last letter she wrote was to President Grover Cleveland. “From my deathbed I send you a message of heartfelt thanks for what you have already done for the Indians. I ask you to read my Century of Dishonor. I am dying happier for the belief I have that it is your hand that is destined to strike the first steady blow toward lifting this burden of infamy from our country and righting the wrongs of the Indian race.”

Cancer took Helen Hunt Jackson’s life on August 12, 1885 in San Francisco.

I shall be found with 'Indians'

engraved on my brain when I am dead.

A fire has been kindled within me, which will never go out.

Her husband arranged for her burial near seven cascading waterfalls on a one-acre plot at Inspiration Point, overlooking Colorado Springs. Her remains were later moved to Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs.

One year after her death, the North American Review called Ramona "unquestionably the best novel yet produced by an American woman" and named it one of two of the most ethical novels of the 19th century, along with Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Helen believed her niece would be a good bride for her husband after she passed, indicating this to William in a letter from her deathbed. After Helen died, William Sharpless Jackson remarried to Helen’s niece and namesake. Together William and Helen’s niece Helen had seven children in the house in Colorado Springs.

Darling,' he said, 'I never meant To hurt you; and his eyes were wet.

'I would not hurt you for the world: Am I to blame if I forget?'

'Forgive my selfish tears!' she cried, 'Forgive! I knew that it was not

Because you meant to hurt me, sweet- I knew it was that you forgot!'

But all the same, deep in her heart, Rankled this thought, and rankles yet 'When love is at its best, one loves So much that he cannot forget

The family took an active role in preserving the legacy of Helen Hunt Jackson’s life, literature and advocacy work. Several rooms from the home furnished with her possessions are preserved in the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. The Helen Hunt Jackson Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Ramona High School in Riverside, California and Ramona Elementary in Hemet, California are both named after her. She was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 1985. Helen Hunt Falls, in North Cheyenne Cañon Park in Colorado Springs, was named in her memory. Visitors can enjoy the view from the base of the falls or take a short walk to the top and admire the view from the bridge across the falls.

When Time is spent, Eternity begins.

Sources:

https://www.cspm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Helen-Hunt-Jackson-Exhbit-Text.pdf

https://somethingrhymed.com/2014/05/01/emily-dickinson-and-helen-hunt-jackson/

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