SOURCE: “The Indian Matter of Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona: From Fact to Fiction,” in American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 4, Winter, 1975, pp. 331-46.

In the following essay, Byers discusses how Helen Hunt Jackson took the factual information from her report on the Mission Indians of California and fashioned it into the novel Ramona.

In 1881 Helen Hunt Jackson published her A Century of Dishonor, one of the most scathing indictments of the United States Government on the treatment of the Indian population, or on any other charges, ever put forth. The work was the outgrowth of a rising feeling, beginning in 1872 when she traveled in California and shortly afterwards to Colorado where she finally made her home, that the American Indian was in worse shape than the slave had been.¹ Mrs. Jackson became extremely conscious of the fact that, according to the surrounding white population, the Indian had no rights...