It’s the birthday of poet and author Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885), best known for her novel Ramona (1884), a love story set in Old California that tells the tale of a half-Irish, half-Native American orphan girl and her lover, Alessandro, a full Native American, and the discrimination they endure. Jackson in fact was an early advocate for Native Americans and first wrote A Century of Dishonor (1881), “one of the first serious historical studies of federal Indian policy” (Kate Phillips, author of Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life, 2003).

Jackson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father, Nathan Fiske, was a professor at Amherst College. (Amherst? you say, with alacrity. Could Jackson have possibly been friends with Emily Dickinson? Why, yes. Yes she was.) Jackson knew a great deal of loss: she lost her mother at 14, her father several years later, and then her first husband and their two sons. Out of her sorrow, she began writing poetry; her first published poem, “The Key to the Casket,” appeared in the New York Post two months after her second son died of diphtheria.

Jackson herself contracted tuberculosis, and while seeking a cure in the Colorado Territory in 1875, she met her second husband, William Sharpless Jackson. (“Sharpless.” Think about that.) William was a banker and railroad executive and was rich. RICH, I say. They settled in Colorado but returned to New England several times, and Jackson visited Dickinson twice. (NB: Jackson urged Dickinson to publish more. We all know how that went.) In 1879, Jackson attended a lecture in Boston by Chief Standing Bear about the atrocities suffered by the Ponca Tribe after their forced removal from Nebraska to Oklahoma. Jackson began a heated correspondence with various federal officials on the subject and documented violations against various tribes and the corruption of government officials, ultimately publishing A Century of Dishonor.

Then Jackson wrote Ramona, hoping that a romantic novel would reach more people: “In my Century of Dishonor I tried to attack people’s consciences directly, and they would not listen. Now I have sugared my pill, and it remains to be seen if it will go down.” Jackson died of cancer the year after Ramona was published, but Ramona went on to sell 450,000 hardback copies and another 100,000 paperbacks. Sadly, people loved the novel chiefly for its romantic storyline and vivid depiction of California as a sort of paradise, and the novel ended up drawing many tourists to southern California, which led to further exploitation of the land and people there.

Ramona has been reissued 300 times, has never been out of print, and was named by the North American Review as one of the two most ethical novels of the 19th century, the other being Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Have a splendid autumn day full of fall colors and pumpkin spice, unless you hate that sort of thing, in which case have a good old reliable Java Chip, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.