Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885) · CatalogHelen Hunt JacksonHelen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885) · CatalogAmerican poet, novelist and advocate for Native American rights.
Author
Helen Hunt Jackson
1830-1885 · American poet, novelist and advocate for Native American rights
Helen Hunt Jackson, photographed by Charles F. Conly, c. 1884. Source · Public domain
About Helen Hunt Jackson
Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885), born Helen Maria Fiske in Amherst, Massachusetts, was a poet, essayist and novelist and a lifelong friend of her Amherst schoolmate Emily Dickinson. After the deaths of her first husband, the army engineer Edward Bissell Hunt, and of both their sons, she began to write, publishing poems and travel sketches under the initials H.H. She moved to Colorado Springs for her health in 1873 and married William Sharpless Jackson in 1875. After hearing the Ponca chief Standing Bear speak in Boston in 1879, she devoted her last years to the rights of Native Americans, writing A Century of Dishonor (1881), serving in 1882–1883 as a special agent of the Interior Department to report on the Mission Indians of Southern California, and publishing Ramona (1884). She died in San Francisco in 1885.
Ramona is a novel by Helen Hunt Jackson, serialized in the Christian Union and published as a book by Roberts Brothers in 1884. Jackson wrote it after years of campaigning for Native American rights, and she hoped it would move readers to sympathy for the Indians of Southern California much as Uncle Tom's Cabin had done for enslaved people.
