PICTURING RAMONA
ILLUSTRATIONS TO HELEN HUNT JACKSON’S NOVEL OF CALIFORNIA
Michael K. Komanecky
The story may sound familiar. An experienced and successful author, raised in New England and whose father was a university professor, writes a novel that takes the country – and people in other places around the world – by storm, selling huge numbers of books requiring one printing after another. Reporters cannot seem to stop writing articles about the book, and it is soon made into a movie with major Hollywood stars. What’s more, readers all over the United States and even abroad are so taken by the story that they seek out the sites where the novel’s events took place, distant though they may be from their homes. Special tours are arranged to visit these places, with guides expounding on the sites’ histories and how they relate to the book. So many tourists flock to them that their owners are sometimes overwhelmed and restrict access. Controversies arise over what is fact and what is fiction, generating still more articles and books portending to set things straight. And whatever the foundation in reality for certain elements of the novel, some seem readers unable, or unwilling, to separate fact from fiction. The debate occasionally becomes heated, but it only seems to fuel interest in the book, bestowing upon its author a not entirely desired fame.
While today’s readers of popular fiction will probably recognize Dan Brown’s 2003 novel, The Da Vinci Code, as fitting this description, few if any would think of the book written more than a century earlier that generated a similar and, truth be told, far bigger response: Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel, Ramona: A Story. Her book about the tragic love affair between Ramona, the orphaned daughter of an Indian mother and Scottish father, and Alessandro, Luiseño son of the chief to a band of Indians at California’s Mission San Luis Rey, quickly proved to be an enormous popular success. Like many novels of its day, it first appeared as a series of magazine articles, in this case a chapter every week between May 15 and November 6, 1884 in The Christian Union.[1] In what seems to have been a conscious marketing decision on Jackson’s part, and probably her publishers, it was then released in book form by Roberts Brothers of Boston in November just as the magazine series came to a close (Fig. 1).[2] Within three months it sold seven thousand copies, and by the time of Jackson’s death just ten months after it was released, a total of fifteen thousand had been sold.[3] By 1893, Ramona was in sixty-eight percent of America’s public libraries.[4] It became so popular that even though the Los Angeles Public Library owned one hundred and five copies of the book in 1914, its readers still had to make a reservation to obtain one.[5] It is reported that the Library had to purchase a thousand additional copies to try to meet the demands of its borrowers.[6]
Fig. 1. Cover of 1884 edition of Ramona: A Story, Helen Hunt Jackson Collection, Charles L. Tutt Library, Colorado College
Just as quickly Ramona found an audience abroad, with Macmillan publishing it in London in 1884 to be followed by editions just before 1900, in 1911, and 1914.[7] In 1886 a German translation was published in Leipzig;[8] a French edition was published in Paris in 1887;[9] Spanish editions were published in New York in 1888, Mexico in 1889, Buenos Aires around 1900, and Havana and Madrid in 1915.[10] Its primary market, however, was in the United States, where Roberts Brothers and later other publishers sought to take advantage of the potential profit from Jackson’s story: twenty-one editions were published between 1884 and 1939.[11] This love affair with Ramona has continued unabated with more than three hundred printings of the novel,[12] recent editions appearing in 2002 and 2005, each containing not just one but two authoritative scholarly analyses.[13]
Ramona’s grip on the public was not limited, however, solely by the appeal of its text as fiction. Almost immediately after its initial publication, a seemingly irrepressible fascination arose for discovering the “real” characters and places that inspired its author. In 1887 Roberts Brothers released an edition that included an appendix by Edwards Roberts, “Ramona’s Home: A Visit to Camulos Ranch, and to the Scenes Described by ‘H.H.’” It acknowledged Jackson’s indebtedness to the California ranch that she used as the model for Ramona’s home, one of many real-life sources that had informed her novel. The public’s interest in knowing more about Jackson’s inspirations quickly grew into an obsession, aided by a series of books and articles that attempted to satisfy the curiosity of Ramona’s growing number of readers.[14] A January 1887 piece in the Los Angeles Times first identified Camulos Ranch as the site that Jackson used as the setting for her novel.[15] In 1888, Charles Fletcher Lummis, historian of the Southwest and no stranger to the benefits of clever promotion, published his own small pamphlet, Home of Ramona, in which his cyanotype photographs showed readers the very house Jackson visited.[16] One author after another sought to identify the places that figured in the novel, including where Ramona was born and where she was married. A controversy even arose as to whether Camulos or another site, Rancho Guajome, was the one that Jackson used as the model for her description of the Moreno ranch.[17] The people whom Jackson actually or purportedly met in the course of her travels in California from late 1881 to mid-1883 also became the targets of these professional and amateur sleuths. Efforts were made to identify who the “real” Ramona was, as well as the novel’s other main characters, including the killer of Ramona’s Indian husband. From 1900 on, and particularly in the 1910s, the momentum of stories and books gathered strength, leading to a virtual industry that brought thousands of visitors to California to visit every possible site related to the novel in search of what now seems to have been the Ramona holy grail. There was even a Ramona cookbook, published in 1929.[18]
Ramona quickly attracted interest in dramatic circles as well. In 1887, just three years after the novel was published, Ina Dillaye published the first script for a theatrical presentation of Ramona,[19] followed by Charles Albert Norcross’s sixty-eight page script in 1888,[20] and J. Jones’, with music by L.F. Gottschalk, in 1897.[21] In 1905 Virginia Calhoun, who had purchased the stage rights to the novel, presented a five-hour long production in Los Angeles which apparently tested the endurance of even the most fervent admirers of Ramona.[22] It appears, too, that visitors to Rancho Camulos were occasionally treated to abbreviated dramatic presentations of the novel.[23] Ramona’s ultimate stage potential was eventually seized by dramatist and pageant producer Garnet Holme, who adapted the novel to what has become one of the longest-running outdoor stage presentations in the United States. First presented in 1923 in a natural amphitheater outside the rural San Jacinto County village of Hemet, Holme’s production, with the exception of a hiatus in the depression year 1933 and again for four years during World War II and again during the Covid-19 pandemic, has been held annually ever since. In addition to reaching thousands each year, it provided opportunities for aspiring young actors to play the roles of Alessandro and Ramona, among them Victory Jory in 1932 and in 1959 Raquel Tejada, better known by her later stage name, Raquel Welch.[24]
California’s emerging film industry also took advantage of Ramona’s popularity. The young actor David Wark Griffith, who joined American Mutoscope & Biograph Company in 1908 as an actor and shortly thereafter began the directing career that made him famous, had played Alessandro in Calhoun’s 1905 stage production.[25] One of his early films was Ramona, which he made in 1910 with the seventeen-year-old Mary Pickford in the title role. Griffith, no doubt aware of the enormous public interest in the sites that inspired Jackson, shot his film at Rancho Camulos and cited it in the credits, the first such location credit in American film.[26] Clune Productions released its version of Ramona in 1916, which was followed by one in 1928 with famed star of American and Mexican cinema, Dolores del Rio, who introduced Mabel Wayne’s song “Ramona,” with lyrics by Wolfe Gilbert. In 1936 Twentieth Century Fox released another version, its first all Technicolor film, with Loretta Young as Ramona, Don Ameche as Alessandro, and John Carradine as the nefarious Jim Farrar, Alessandro’s killer. This one, too, included musical numbers, among them Wayne’s and Gilbert’s by now long-popular “Ramona.” The film was shot on location at Warner Hot Springs and the Mesa Grande Indian Reservation in San Diego County, and its Indian extras were said to have been descendants of the very Indians that featured so prominently in Jackson’s novel.[27] The first Spanish-language version appeared in 1946 when the Mexican film company Promex made Ramona, directed by Victor Urruchúa and starring Esther Fernández as Ramona and Antonio Badú as Alessandro.[28]
The enormous public appetite for all things Ramona was seemingly met at every turn by an entrepreneurial spirit to satisfy it. With it came other efforts to enrich Jackson’s novels by providing its readers with ways to visualize it, literally. In addition to their portrayal in theater and film, Ramona’s characters, settings, and locales were brought to life repeatedly as illustrations to her novel. The evolution of this imagery and its relation to her text, however, has not been studied in any meaningful way.[29] This article will explore the origins of these illustrations, their chronology, their creators, and, most importantly, how these illustrations were employed to amplify the novel’s narrative features and characters. It must be said from the outset that the existence of so many versions published here and abroad make a completely exhaustive review of all of them a herculean task,[30] yet key examples are well known and provide more than ample evidence to consider how text and image interacted in Jackson’s famed story, and how these images address, or ignore, issues of gender and colonization that are central to Jackson’s novel.
THE ORIGINS OF RAMONA: A STORY
Jackson’s concept for the novel evolved from a series of trips she made to California in the early 1880s. Her 1881 book, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes, had established her as a nationally important advocate for Indian rights and led to an invitation from the new Century Magazine, the successor to Scribner’s Monthly, to go to California and write a series of articles based on her experiences there. Although she had been in California in 1872 for New York Independent[31]and was an experienced travel writer, Jackson felt the need to familiarize herself with her new subject more deeply. Following the suggestion of her author friend Edward Everett Hale, she undertook research at New York’s Astor Library, reading, among other things, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jesuit histories of California as well as John Russell Bartlett’s report from his 1850-53 survey to establish the new boundary between the United States and Mexico.[32] Thus immersed in her subject, Jackson left for California on the Southern Pacific’s new direct line to Los Angeles, arriving there on December 18, 1881 and stayed in California until she departed for her Colorado Springs home in late July 1882.[33] Jackson’s experiences during her travels would have an enormous impact on her and the subsequent direction of her literary career, far beyond the articles she was commissioned to write for Century.
Through a series of introductions arranged by various friends and acquaintances, Jackson gained entry into Californio life, establishing relationships and visiting places that would provide the essential raw material for Ramona. Among the most important friends she made were Mexican-born Antonio Colonel and his wife Mariana. Colonel had held several positions in both the Mexican and subsequent American governments in California, including inspector of the missions under the former. His familiarity with southern California’s mission Indians, not unexpectedly, greatly interested Jackson and with his help she traveled to several Indian villages over the next few months. She went to the Luiseño villages of Pala, Temecula, Apeche, Pauma, Rincon, Pachanga, Potrero, and La Jolla; the Cupeño village of Agua Caliente (Kupa); the Ipai villages of Mesa Grande and Santa Ysabel; the Serrano village of Soboba; and a number of Cahula villages as well. Like so many visitors to California in the second half of the nineteenth century, she visited its Franciscan missions, including San Diego, San Gabriel, San Juan Capistrano, and San Luis Rey. Like nearly all of California’s twenty-one missions, they were in ruinous condition. The only exception was Santa Barbara, at that time a Franciscan college and prosperous in comparison to the other missions. There, Jackson did further research in the college’s library, one of the most important repositories of Franciscan-era documents relating to the history of California’s missions. These sojourns to the most visible reminders of the Franciscan missionary enterprise also introduced her to its legendary founder, Junípero Serra, whose painted portrait was at mission Santa Barbara.[34]
Returning to Colorado Springs in late summer of 1882, Jackson began work on her articles for Century. She wrote four in all, which appeared between May and October 1883. Their scope spanned California’s history from the arrival of the Franciscans, with particular emphasis on Serra, to modern agricultural industries in California to the current status of its Indians.[35] Her piece on this last subject, building as it did upon her contributions in A Century of Dishonor, further elevated her status an expert and advocate on the still hotly-debated Indian question. As a result, she was assigned by the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Hiram Price, to return to California to prepare a formal report on the condition of Indians in the state’s three southernmost counties.[36] Jackson arrived in Los Angeles on February 25, 1883, joined by her friend and partner on this assignment, Abbot Kinney, a wealthy young cigarette manufacturer and Spanish-speaking world traveler who had gone with her on her previous trip in May 1882.[37] From March to May they visited eighteen villages, some of which she had visited the year before, gathering information on the indignities and injustices regularly suffered by southern California’s native peoples, not the least of which were unrelenting and unscrupulous efforts to take their land. Returning to Colorado Springs in late May, she and Kinney worked on the report until June 4, when he went back to his home in California. By July, Jackson finished the thirty-five page Report on the Condition and Needs of the Mission Indians of California, which the Government Printing Office published in January 1884. Its main recommendation was that rather than placing Indians on reservations they should be allowed to retain their lands, which Jackson noted prophetically would require protection from white settlers, farmers, and speculators who, with little effective resistance by federal Indian agents, resorted to all sorts of schemes, theft, and even murder to get what they wanted.
After completing the report, Jackson once again turned to what had been a staple in her now nearly twenty-year long career, travel writing. She wrote articles for The New York Independent, Christian Union, and Atlantic Monthly, some of which delved further into the issues in California she wrote about in the Report.[38] Only in the fall did the idea of writing a novel based on these experiences take shape. As reported by Kate Phillips in her insightful account of the novel’s evolution, since the late 1870s, Jackson had been contemplating whether fiction could serve as a better vehicle for her to promote Indian causes. She was struck in particular by the impact of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Evangeline, and Albion Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand, all of which seemed to suggest how powerful fiction could be in voicing protest on behalf of the dispossessed. Jackson had been the laudatory reviewer in 1881, in fact, of William Justin Harsha’s 1880 novel, Ploughed Under, which dealt with Indian reform issues near and dear to her heart. After her trips to California in 1881-82 and 1883, she became more interested than ever in writing her “Indian story.”
Jackson’s actual writing of Ramona was a story in itself. After contemplating how she might approach her subject, the entire plot came to her as she awoke one October morning in 1883. She later told a friend – Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who published an 1884 article on how the famous novel came into being – that the story came to her “in less than five minutes, as if someone spoke it” and that in the next few days it became “more and more vivid.”[39] In late November she traveled to New York, took an apartment at the Berkeley Hotel, and began to write in earnest. On November 24 she wrote Higginson that “My story is all planned: in fact, it is so thought out it is practically written.” In a flurry of productivity, Jackson wrote Ramona between December 1, 1883 and March 9, 1884, sometimes writing as much as 3,000 words a day. As she told Thomas Bailey Aldrich, she wrote it “faster than I can write an ordinary letter…It was an extraordinary experience.”
By mid-May, the first installment appeared in The Christian Union, established in 1870 in New York and whose editors were Henry Ward Beecher and Lyman Abbott. The installment began with an entreaty by Abbott and Hamilton W. Mabie: “Readers of The Christian Union will find in the present issue the first chapter of Mrs. Jackson’s story, ‘Ramona,’ the publication of which will be continued during the summer. The deepening interest and cumulative power of this story will undoubtedly create, in the later stages of publication, a large demand for earlier numbers; all, therefore who wish to read this story from the beginning will do well to send in their subscriptions at once.”[40] Whether they had a premonition of the story’s potential appeal or their statement was simply an editor’s attempt to generate interest in it and hence revenue to the magazine’s publisher, is unfortunately not known. Jackson’s intent, however, is. Sacrificing a higher fee, she chose to release her novel in the magazine in an attempt to generate, as quickly as possible, wide public interest in her story of Indian mistreatment in California.[41]
CHARTING OUT THE TERRITORY: EARLY ILLUSTRATIONS TO RAMONA
That Roberts Brothers’ first edition of Ramona released in November 1884 consisted only of Jackson’s text – without illustrations – is in no ways surprising. Rarely were first editions of novels illustrated. On the most basic level, this was a sound business decision, a testing of the waters before committing to the added expense including illustrations would require.[42] In the late 1880s, however, as the novel’s popularity grew, articles began to appear in the press about the places that were described in it. The San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, New York Evening Post, San Diego Union, and Ventura Free Press, as well as the monthly magazines Rural Californian and Overland Monthly all ran articles on Ramona’s purported home, Camulos Ranch (or its rival, Guajome Ranch), her marriage place, the pilgrims to them, and even one on the potential of investing in real estate in Ramona country.[43] These investigations into the presumed factual bases of the novel were what spurred earlier efforts to illustrate Jackson’s novel.
It was not Ramona‘s publisher, however, who initiated these efforts. Rather, they were driven independently, and frequently took on a decidedly homespun character. In 1888 Charles Fletcher Lummis published his own pamphlet, The Home of Ramona, which contained his cyanotype photographs of the Camulos ranch and related sites. (Fig. 2).[44] These were among the very first images directly related to Jackson’s novel, and their purpose seems clearly to have been to cement in readers’ minds the “real” places associated with the life of the fictional Ramona. Lummis, an irrepressible booster of the American Southwest, was an accomplished photographer and author who had the vision, means, and recognition to produce what was a relatively professional looking publication.
Fig. 2. Charles Fletcher Lummis (American, 1859-1928), Title page to Charles Fletcher Lummis album, Home of Ramona, 1888, given to Susanita del Valle, with image of the South Veranda. Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, photCL 504. The Huntington Library
In this early rush to produce illustrated works connected to Jackson’s novel, however, they sometimes took the form of do-it-yourself efforts. In the same year as Lummis’ pamphlet, A. Frank Randall published an album of six photographs of scenes with figures posed to illustrate the novel and which included a portrait of Helen Hunt Jackson (Fig. 3).[45] Randall’s effort reflected the deep personal attachment readers felt for the novel, and he was not the only one to take matters in his own hands. In 1894, Mrs. C.B. Jones of Greenville, Texas glued a color image of Camulos’ famed south veranda on the inside front cover of her 1893 edition of Ramona.[46]
Fig. 3. A. Frank Randall (American, active 1880s), Cover from Lares de Ramona or Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson and Ramona (Los Angeles: A.F. Randall, 1888), Library of Congress, as Album of sentimental photographs of scenes with posed figures to illustrate Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, LOT 3119 (F)
Even after the first illustrated edition of the novel was subsequently released in 1900 by Little, Brown & Company, some Ramona aficionados continued to produce their own illustrated versions. In 1916, Jean Woolman Kirkbride acquired an edition of Ramona published that year that contained reproductions of photographs by Adam Clark Vroman. She removed all of them, however, and replaced them with her own hand colored photographs, each protected by a tissue guard sheet with a hand lettered title – 122 photographs in all.[47] Kirkbride was nothing if not thorough, including photographs of Rancho Camulos as well as the ranch at Guajome, previously misidentified as the site that inspired Jackson in her description of the ranch on which Ramona was raised. Kirkbride also included images of missions Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, San Gabriel, San Luis Rey, San Buenaventura, San Carlos Borromeo, San Fernando, San Antonio, Santa Ines, San Juan Bautista, San Diego, and Soledad, only some of which figured in the novel.
There were also images of real-life people who erroneously had been identified as the models for certain characters in the novel as well as scenic views of places in California, not all of which are connected with the story. Kirkbride, it seems, left no stone unturned in her effort to document all that was known about the novel and its many sources, and to give its readers a familiarity with California’s distinctive natural beauty.
California photographers, in fact, led the way in producing Ramona-related illustrated books. Following Lummis’ example, another photographic documentation of Ramona sites was assembled in 1890 by Taber Photographic Company of San Francisco, containing fifteen prints including some scenes of surrounding Los Angeles.[48] Isaiah West Taber’s photographs were also sold separately with texts from the related section of the novel printed below the image, and became popular items for tourists seeking mementos of their Ramona-inspired travels.
In 1899 Lummis’s friend and fellow photographer of the American Southwest, Adam Clark Vroman, published a much more ambitious book, The Genesis of the Story of Ramona: Why the Book Was Written, Explanatory Text of Points of Interest Mentioned in the Story, written with T.F. Barnes.[49] Vroman moved to California in 1892 and in 1897 and again in 1899 he accompanied expeditions of the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology to New Mexico where he photographed Indian ruins and Spanish missions. Vroman was fascinated by the missions, by then widespread romantic symbols of California’s Spanish past and between 1895 and 1905 he photographed all of the state’s missions.[50] His Ramona book contained thirty halftone reproductions made from his photographs and thus was the most luxurious and richly illustrated book yet produced for the growing Ramona market.[51] Vroman included various scenes of Rancho Camulos and its surroundings, many of which are known to have been sites that inspired those Jackson described in her novel. Some, like Vroman’s photograph of a chapel in San Diego’s Old Town, referred specifically to scenes in the novel, in this case the place where Ramona was married (Fig. 4). Vroman likely sold these photographs individually, as Taber had, to an audience of visitors and locals alike who were eager to have mementos of their encounters with the places featured in the novel.
Fig. 4. Adam Clark Vroman (American, 1856-1916), Chapel Where Ramona Was Married, Plate XXIII Interior of Chapel (Old Town), from A.C. Vroman and T.F. Barnes, The Genesis of the Story of Ramona. With Explanatory Text and Thirty Illustrations from Original Photographs, (Los Angeles: Press of Kinglsey-Barnes & Neuner Company, 1899), Courtesy of the HathiTrust
ILLUSTRATING RAMONA: THE PUBLISHER TAKES OVER
Although these first illustrated versions of the novel were produced by a small cadre of dedicated fans and entrepreneurs, including small scale publishers, it wasn’t long before Roberts Brothers recognized an opportunity to take advantage of Ramona‘s rapidly growing popularity. Its 1889 edition of the novel included an appendix by Edwards Roberts, “Ramona’s Home: A Visit to the Camulos Ranch, and to Scenes Described by ‘H.H.’.” The appendix simply reprinted Roberts’ 1886 San Francisco Chronicle article but also included four halftone illustrations of Rancho Camulos: The South Veranda, The Ranch-House, The Chapel, and The Old Bells.[52] Up to this point, the immense popularity of Jackson’s novel had led to repeated printings, in 1885, 1886, 1887, 1889, and again in 1899 by Little, Brown, & Co. of Boston, which had acquired the rights to publish it previous year.[53] The attempts on the part of Lummis, Vroman, and others to show the public the places that figured in Jackson’s story may well have influenced Little Brown in its decision to produce the first illustrated edition of Ramona in 1900, by which time 74,000 copies of the novel had been sold.[54]
The artist chosen for the task was Henry Sandham. He was born in Montreal in 1842, one of two sons to John and Elizabeth Tate Sandham.[55] Sandham’s father was a house painter, and both Henry and his brother worked in the family business. Eager to pursue an artistic career, however, he left home at the age of fourteen to work as an errand boy in the Montreal photography studio of William Notman. In 1860, when the studio added an art department, Sandham became an assistant in Notman’s studio to John Fraser. It was through Fraser and his acquaintances that Sandham began to study drawing, watercolor, and oil painting, one of the few practical ways of improving his skill in Montreal, which at that time did not have a formal art school. When Fraser left in 1868 to open a branch of the firm in Toronto, Sandham had progressed sufficiently to become head of the art department.
Sandham’s work began to receive official and public notice beginning in the 1860s. From 1865 on, his work was included in the annual shows of the Montreal Art Association, of the Society of Canadian Artists between 1868 and 1872, and in 1874 he began to show with the Ontario Society of Artists in Toronto. Four years later he won a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris for his large 1875 composite photograph, a specialty of the Notman firm.[56] By this time Sandham’s drawing skills brought him commissions from some of the more prominent literary magazines in the United States. He did illustrations for the August 1877 issue of Scribner’s Monthly as well as for his own article in the November 1878 issue. His career as an illustrator was boosted by being selected to do the drawings for Scribner’s four-part series by George Munro Grant, “The Dominion of Canada,” which appeared between May and August 1880. His reputation growing, Sandham was elected as a charter member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art that same year. In April Sandham traveled to England and France, familiarizing himself with those countries’ art treasures, and in December he was in Boston to undertake a commission for a patron there. Apparently intent on establishing a career independent of his work for Notman, and perhaps encouraged by his success in illustration work for American magazines, Sandham decided to settle there, eventually ending his partnership with the Notman firm in 1882.
His arrival in Boston coincided with the decision in 1882 by one of his magazine patrons, Century (the successor to Scribner’s), to commission Helen Hunt Jackson to do her series of articles on California. Sandham was assigned to accompany her. The magazine’s articles were typically illustrated, often to enhance its many travel articles on sites throughout the world. The Jackson-Sandham collaboration was apparently well received by Century: eleven of his drawings were reproduced as illustrations to “Father Junipero and His Work. I,” fourteen for “Father Juniper and His Work. II,” thirteen for “The Present Condition of the Mission Indians in Southern California,” and ten for “Outdoor Industries in Southern California,” a total of forty-eight in all. Their subjects ranged widely according to the diverse topics Jackson explored in her articles. They included images based on his observations at missions San Antonio, San Gabriel, San Carlos Borromeo, San Miguel, San Luis Rey, Santa Barbara, San Juan Bautista, La Purísima, San Juan Capistrano, and Pala. There were also scenes from Indian villages at Pachunga and Rincon, and in the article on California industries were depictions of irrigation systems, sheep ranches, vineyards, orchards, and groves of eucalyptus and live oaks. To the casual reader of Century, they helped convey a sense of California’s past and the realities of the present that, according to Jackson, shaped the state’s particular social and economic character. Jackson’s popularity was such that her articles, with Sandham’s illustrations, were reprinted in book form in 1886 as Glimpses of Three Coasts, reissued by Roberts Brothers in 1891 and again in 1902 as Glimpses of California and the Missions by Little, Brown, & Co.
When it came time for Little, Brown, & Co. to publish its illustrated version of Ramona in 1900, however, Sandham faced a different challenge. Jackson had died in 1885 and the close collaboration he enjoyed with her on their work together for the Century articles was obviously no longer possible. Acknowledging the nature of his challenge in his “notes on Ramona Illustrations” in the 1900 edition of the novel, Sandham discussed his involvement with Jackson and how the illustrations evolved. “I was fortunate enough to travel in company with Mrs. Jackson at the time that she was accumulating the material for what has since become the best-known of all her books, and it was originally the plan that we should work together on it. Seventeen years, however, passed before I was able to finish my share of the work that Mrs. Jackson so graciously designated as ‘our book.’ At the time of the California sojourn I knew neither the name nor the exact details of the proposed book; but I did know that the general plan was a defense of the Mission Indians, together with a plea for the preservation of the Mission buildings, and so on…I thus had sufficient knowledge of the spirit of the text to work with keener zest upon the sketches for the illustrations; sketches, which, it may be of interest to know, were always made on the spot with Mrs. Jackson close at hand, suggesting emphasis to this object or prominence to that.”[57]
Sandham’s statement, however, contradicts in part what Jackson herself said about how her book came to be. The idea of a novel only came to her in October 1883, months after she returned from her second and final trip to California to research the Century articles, and there is no evidence to indicate that she and Sandham discussed any future plans for illustrating her novel. Nonetheless, Sandham was able to reuse drawings from a sketchbook he made on his earlier trips with Jackson.[58] From both the artist’s and the publisher’s perspective, this must have seemed valid in that so much of Jackson’s story was based on her California experiences prior to preparing the articles, which is precisely what Sandham sought to capture in his sketches. “The illustrations may, then, have this claim to a share of the reader’s attention: they, at least, faithfully represent the scenes and objects as they were actually seen by Mrs. Jackson at the time of the inception of the book,” he stated. Sandham went on to say, “There was no need to employ ‘artistic license’ in working up the sketches for publication, fact, in this particular instance being so much richer than fiction; and in this shaping and assorting of material gathered so long ago, I have merely tried to follow the path laid out by the author herself; which was to handle all detail in such manner as would best conduce to the artistic unison of the whole. As for the characters themselves, I have now in my possession sketches and studies made from the life at the time of my meeting with the originals, – a meeting that was often as much fraught with meaning for me as it was for Mrs. Jackson. All the dramatic incidents of the story were familiar to me long before I saw the book, as they are either literal descriptions of events which took place in the course of our travels, or they are recollections of anecdotes told when I, as well as Mrs. Jackson, was among the group of listeners.”[59] Discrepancies between Sandham’s and Jackson’s accounts aside, Sandham’s illustrations set the standard for Ramona for years to come.
1900: THE MONTEREY AND MONTEREY DELUXE EDITIONS
Little, Brown’s first illustrated Ramona consisted of two separate versions, the Monterey Edition and the more luxurious and expensive Monterey DeLuxe Edition, the latter of which was done in a run of 1500 individually numbered copies. Identical in size and each consisting of two volumes with a total of forty-nine illustrations, the two editions included an introduction by Jackson’s friend Susan Coolidge as well as Sandham’s “Notes on Ramona Illustrations.”[60]
The publisher promoted the release of this “A New Illustrated Edition of Helen Jackson’s Famous Romance of California,” advertising the regular edition as having “cloth wrappers, cloth box, with cover designs by Amy Sacker” for six dollars.[61] Sacker was a Boston-born designer who worked for several publishers there, including Little, Brown, and Company and Houghton Mifflin.[62] In her cover for the Monterey edition (Fig. 5), Jackson’s name and the rectangular border are impressed in gold, and an art nouveau floral design of green stems rising upward to a full spray of golden flowers at the top. The two-volume set came with a linen dust jacket the same color as the cover on which the title and author’s name were stamped in gold and on the spine, in the same typeface on both. The DeLuxe edition’s cover, as described in the same advertisement, was “three-quarters crushed Levant, gilt top” and was sold for twelve dollars. It was bound in either brown or dark green leather in an even more elaborate gilded art nouveau floral design stamped onto the sueded portion of the cover (Fig. 6).[63] Moreover, Little Brown advertised promoted these new editions by promoting “the superb pictures of Henry Sandham,” who according to the Boston Journal “has shown remarkable sympathy or insight to the text.” “Pictures (were) created under the guiding hand of the author herself,” Sandham wrote, and “give the finishing touch of reality to her words.”[64]
Fig. 5. Amy Sacker (American, 1872-1965), Cover of 1900 Monterey Edition of Ramona: A Story, Private Collection
Fig. 6. Amy Sacker (American, 1872-1965), Cover of 1900 Monterey DeLuxe Edition of Ramona: A Story, Private Collection
In these editions Sandham employed two distinct types of illustrations, all of which he identified by title and page in a list at the beginning of each volume. The largest and most impressive were the twenty-four full-page halftone illustrations,[65] each measuring 5-3/4 x 3-5/16 inches. Each illustration is protected by a thin, tipped-in cover sheet over which is another thin yellowish tipped-in sheet that mimicked the color of vellum. On this faux vellum cover sheet the illustration’s title, sometimes taken directly from characters’ dialogue, is printed in italics in a reddish-orange ink (Fig. 7).[66] This design format calls the reader’s attention to the forthcoming illustration: first its title is given, sparking the reader to imagine how the scene will be depicted, and only after peeling back the two thin sheets of paper is the image itself revealed.
Fig. 7. Henry Sandham (Canadian, 1842-1910), Title page for Frontispiece to Volume I of the Monterey DeLuxe Edition, Ramona’s meeting with Father Salvierderra among the Mustard Blossoms, Private Collection
The key difference between the two Monterey editions is in how the full-page illustrations were printed. In the regular version, they were printed monochromatically in subtly different tints, alternating irregularly throughout the two volumes in pale shades of bluish-green, gray, sepia, brownish-orange sepia, and purplish grey. The subtle colorization of Sandham’s illustrations, then, provided a degree of luxury to the otherwise mundane world of black and white typically used for such reproductions.[67] In the DeLuxe edition most of the full-page illustrations were monochromatic, too, but the frontispiece in each volume was in full color as was one other illustration within the text (Fig. 8). Although the halftone process, first developed commercially in the 1880s, enabled the reproduction of a range of tones present in the painted original, full color reproduction for the large runs found in book and magazine publishing was still in its infancy, and relatively expensive.[68]
Fig. 8. Henry Sandham (Canadian, 1842-1910), “’Eyes of the sky,’ exclaimed Ysidro,” from Vol. II of the Monterey DeLuxe Edition, p.129, Private Collection
In both versions these full-page images typically show one or more of the characters from a key indoor or outdoor scene. This format is established at the very beginning in the book’s frontispiece, which shows the novel’s heroine meeting with her Franciscan missionary friend, Father Salvierderra (Fig. 9). They are surrounded on all sides by a thick growth of grasses and wild mustard flowers, Ramona’s face peering through them to look upon the venerable Franciscan. Sandham’s viewpoint is from slightly above the figures, enabling him to show the distant hills in the background and thus reinforcing the then-common view of southern California as an American paradise. This sentiment was frequently found in late-nineteenth-century popular literature in which this part of the state’s natural character was compared to Italy and even the Middle East.[69] Jackson herself emphasizes this notion, comparing the “wild mustard in Southern California” with “that spoken of in the New Testament.” This “yellow bloom” with “stems…so infinitesimally small, and of so dark a green,” in fact, is used in stylized form by Amy Sacker on the covers of both the Monterey and DeLuxe editions.
Fig. 9. Henry Sandham (Canadian, 1842-1910), Ramona’s meeting with Father Salvierderra among the Mustard Blossoms, Frontispiece to Volume I of the Monterey DeLuxe Edition, Private Collection
The fields of “wild mustard” must have appealed to Sandham – in June 1882, while on his trip with Jackson, he made a modest sized painting of the subject (Fig. 10). The foreground is dominated by the “yellow blooms” reaching more than halfway up into the composition, with the mountains in the background seen in shadows, further emphasizing the floral display. Pure landscapes are relatively rare among Sandham’s paintings, though his travels in his native Canada as well as Haiti and the Azores were the inspiration for them, in both oil and watercolor. It is doubtful he was planning to make oils on his trip with Jackson, as no others are known, and his choice of painting this work on a rough wood panel suggests it may have been a decision made on the spot, using whatever materials he could find. The subject’s precise location based on its 1882 is difficult to determine, as by that time Jackson had left for Monterey and San Francisco on her way to Oregon.[70] Between January and June, however, she and Sandham visited multiple Indian villages in the areas around the San Gabriel and San Jacinto Mountains, likely to have inspired Sandham’s oil painting. It seems to have had special meaning for both of them: it was among Jackson’s property at the time of her death and remains in her Colorado Springs home.[71] This romantic perception of California is reinforced by other Sandham illustrations that depict the state’s striking landscapes, one showing Salvierderra walking along the coast, another with Ramona and her companion Carmena standing on a pathway with gentle hills rising behind them, and one showing Ramona and her unsuccessful suitor Felipe meeting on the shore of a quiet lake (Fig. 11).[72]
Fig. 10. Henry Sandham (Canadian, 1842-1910), Field of Mustard, 1882, oil on board, Colorado Springs Pioneer Museum: Gift of William S. Jackson Family, 61.137
Fig. 11. Henry Sandham (Canadian, 1842-1910), Ramona my love! from Volume II, Chapter XXVI of the Monterey Edition, p.305, Collection of the author
Salvierderra plays an important role in the novel, both as Ramona’s spiritual advisor and as a symbol of the Franciscan order’s role in Spain’s missionary enterprise in California. In that sense it is no surprise that he was the subject of a full-page portrait by Sandham (Fig. 12). Sandham’s rendering of Father Salvierderra unwittingly raises the question of how the novel’s main characters are depicted. At its heart, Ramona is about the tragic love affair between her, an orphaned daughter of an Indian mother and Scottish father, and Alessandro, Luiseño son of the chief of a band of Indians at Mission San Luis Rey. Underlying this narrative are fundamental issues of both race and gender, central to which is Ramona’s and Alessandro’s desire to marry. In no uncertain terms does her stepmother, Señora Moreno express her revulsion at the very idea, her sentiments made apparent even when she was first asked to adopt the infant Ramona: “If the child were pure Indian, I would like it better…I like not these crosses. It is the worst, and not the best of each, that remains.”[73] That the child would later want to marry an Indian was to Ramona’s stepmother even more distasteful.
Fig. 12. Henry Sandham (Canadian, 1842-1910), Father Salvierderra, from Volume II, Chapter XXV of the Monterey Edition, p.245, Private Collection
Yet racial prejudice is not limited only to colonialist views –American, Mexican, and Spanish – of Indigenous peoples. Moreno, the sister of the woman who was the ex-fiancé of Ramona’s father, is of Spanish heritage. She is the elderly and wealthy descendant of Spanish settlers who came to what was Spain’s viceroyalty of New Spain, living a half century after it gained its independence from Spain in 1821 and renamed itself Mexico.[74] From the novel’s very first chapter, Moreno is frequently portrayed as seeing the world around her in terms of race. She is described as “a sad, spiritual-minded old lady, amiable and indolent, like her race, but sweeter and more thoughtful than their wont” though her voice “heightened this mistaken impression.”[75] She was not alone in her view of southern California’s Native peoples by the state’s colonizers; to do the work of shearing sheep on her ranch, one of her Mexican ranch hands notices, disapprovingly, that “the Señora was determined to have none but Indians,” wondering, “under his breath, God knows why.”[76]
There is clearly a hierarchy, too, of class in which the landholding descendants of Spanish and New Spanish settlers and those who worked the land for them occupied very different positions in status and power. Essential to the novel’s plot is that this state of affairs, a legacy of the widespread inequities of Spain’s colonial enterprise, was under assault by Americans who resorted to whatever means necessary, legal or not, to take lands owned by both Mexicans and Indians alike. Americans are thus perceived by both as evil trespassers whose actions threatened their ways of life and, in Ramona’s and Alessandros’ case, their very lives.
How, then, do these matters of race and class within the colonial structures of late nineteenth-century California make themselves seen, literally, in Sandham’s and later other illustrators’ renderings of the novel’s characters? Sandham wrote in his “Notes On Illustrations” that his portrait of the Franciscan was “illustrative to the author’s fidelity to truth in character,” based as it was on “the original of Father Salvierderra. This character is positively startling in its accurateness. I knew the original Father well.” He noted, too, that “Though the Franciscans usually wear a broad-brimmed hat when in the open air, I never saw the original of Father Salvierderra wear a hat except when riding.”[77] The artist shows the Franciscan wearing his hooded robe with a large crucifix hanging from his neck, while his large eyes look skyward, presumably to God above. However fully Sandham’s portrait was based on the Franciscan he met during his travels in California, it nonetheless is tinged with sentimentality, an attempt to portray the padre’s spirituality that so often refers to him in the novel as “a Franciscan of the same type as Francis of Assisi.”[78]
Salvierderra is one of many members of the Franciscan order who came from throughout Europe and were sent to California beginning in the late eighteenth century as an integral part of Spain’s conquest of California. In terms commonly used in Jackson’s time to describe these Franciscan founders of the California missions, he appears in Sandham’s portrait the very image of the devout and heroic missionary sent to the New World to convert its Indigenous peoples to Catholicism, and in the process save their souls and turn them into “civilized” Spanish citizens.
This view of Spain’s missionary enterprise was held deeply by Señora Moreno, though with more than skepticism about its eventual prospects for success. In a conversation with her son, Felipe, who saw in the Indians who worked with Alessandro the same kind of loyalty and pride as his fellow Mexicans showed to him, she scornfully replied, “Of what is it that these noble lords of villages are so proud? Their ancestors, – naked savages less than a hundred years ago? Naked savages they themselves, too, to-day, if we had not come here to teach and civilize them. The race was never meant for anything but servants. That was all the Fathers ever expected to make of them, – good, faithful Catholics, and contented laborers in the fields.”[79]
If Sandham’s portrayal of Father Salvierderra stands as a symbol of a heroic Franciscan missionary, his depictions of Alessandro and Ramona present something else. The novel’s text describes what Ramona looked like: “she had just enough of olive tint in her complexion to underlie and enrich her skin without it making it too swarthy…her hair was like her Indian mother’s, heavy and black, but her eyes were like her father’s, steel-blue. Only those who came very near to Ramona knew, however, that her eyes were blue, for the heavy black eyebrows and long black lashes so shaded and shadowed them that they looked black as night.”[80] Ramona’s features reveal the mixture of her Scottish father’s and her Indian mother’s lineages. Only her “steel-blue eyes” give away her whiteness, and only to those who come close to her. In fact, as Ramona scholar Jessy Randall notes, though she is able to pass as either Mexican or Indian, she cannot pass as white.[81] Sandham’s depiction (Fig. 13) is of a woman whose facial structure appears far more European than the then common stereotypes of Indians, and even acknowledging the limitations imposed by a monochromatic printing process, neither her hair nor her “heavy black eyebrows and long black lashes” are rendered as described in the text.[82]
Fig. 13. Henry Sandham (Canadian, 1842-1910), Ramona, from Vol. I, Chapter III of the Monterey Edition, p.42, Private Collection
Alessandro’s face is rendered in a way that even more minimizes if not erases his Luiseño heritage (Fig. 14). Insofar as Jackson’s text is concerned, only once is Alessandro’s physical appearance mentioned, by Ramona, and there only minimally. “For the first time, she looked at him with no thought of his being an Indian, – a thought there had surely been no need of her having, since his skin was not a shade darker than Felipe’s; but so strong was the race feeling, that never till that moment had she forgotten it.”[83] Ramona’s comparison of Alessandro’s skin color to that of Felipe, who himself was in love with Ramona, seems to express a kind of lessened racial difference, insofar as it is visible by their skin color. Felipe, of Spanish descent as was his mother, was likely born in Mexico, making any assumptions about his skin color from his lineage complicated at best given the wide racial diversity and mixture of peoples in New Spain.[84] The text seems to emphasize that Ramona had simply accepted Alessandro’s Indian features, less important to her than his kindness.
Fig. 14. Henry Sandham (Canadian, 1842-1910), Alessandro, from Volume I, Chapter XI of the Monterey Edition, p.224, Private Collection
Another depiction of Alessandro appears later in the first chapter, as he sings by the bedside of Felipe, seriously ill with fever (Fig. 15). Violin at his side, he is wearing a light-colored shirt, his tie tucked partially into it, and plain pants and shoes, looking upward as he sings to soothe the sickened Felipe. There is virtually nothing about his appearance – clothes, style of his hair, or facial features – that suggest he is an Indian.
Fig. 15. Henry Sandham (Canadian, 1842-1910), Alessandro Singing to Felipe, from Volume I, Chapter VIII of the Monterey Edition, p.148, Private Collection
Sandham’s depiction of Ramona and Alessandro with their newborn daughter is an even more striking example of these erasures of race that permeate the novel’s illustrations (see Fig. 8). Once again, both of them bear few if any features that would have identified them to the reader as Indian. In this illustration, Ramona sits with their daughter in her lap as Alessandro stands next to her, while a male figure, likely Alessandro’s father, leans forward to get a closer look at his grandchild. The inclusion of the child’s swaddling clothes draped over the wattle cradle next to Ramona brings to mind countless versions of the birth of Christ, albeit in much simplified fashion, as the near-supplicant male figure at the right taking the place of one of the wise men come to see the Christ child. Though Sandham may well not have intended to suggest this association, it nonetheless takes on its appearance. And in the course of the narrative, Ramona’s and Alessandro’s child dies prematurely because the white doctor the couple found would treat the child of an Indian, a tragedy by any measure to the couple who embraced Christian beliefs.
What then may have driven Sandham’s decisions to depict as he did the novel’s two main characters whose Indianness is central to the story? His depictions seem not to have concerned the critics; on the contrary, a Boston Journal reviewer stated, “His heads of Ramona and Alessandro are truly ideal,” confirming perhaps how well Sandham’s conceptions met the expectations of Ramona’s largely white audience.[85] To some extent, Sandham may simply have been employing artistic conventions developed in a career as a painter and draftsmen in which he sought acceptance in the conservative academic circles of Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa before coming to Boston. Yet he obviously encountered many Luiseños on his visits to several of their villages he and Jackson made during her research for her 1881 government report, A Century of Dishonor. He surely knew what they looked like, including whatever variations in their physical appearances they may have had.
A revealing comment easily overlooked in Susan Coolidge’s “Introduction” to the Monterey and Monterey DeLuxe editions of the novel suggests rather that it may have been Helen Hunt Jackson herself who influenced how Sandham depicted Ramona and Alessandro.[86] Coolidge’s introduction is essentially a succinct biography of the author, including the circumstances that led her to write the novel. When Jackson undertook her project in the winter of 1883-1884, Coolidge relates, “On her desk that winter stood an unframed photograph after Dante Rossetti, – two heads, a man’s and a woman’s set in a nimbus of cloud, with a strange, beautiful regard and meaning in their eyes. They were exactly her idea of what Ramona and Alessandro looked like, she said.” Though this photograph has not survived, we know that Jackson was an admirer of Rossetti’s poetry: Jackson owned four volumes of his work: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1870 Poems and his 1881 Ballads and Sonnets, his sister Christina Georgiana Rossetti’s 1876 Poems, which included illustrations by her brother, and a copy of his other sister Maria Francesca Rossetti’s 1872 A Shadow of Dante. All of these volumes were published by Roberts Brothers.[87] It is through these volumes that Jackson knew Rossetti’s poetry and art.
It is difficult to know, however, whether Jackson’s appreciation for Rossetti’s works played any part in how Sandham depicted Ramona and Alessandro. There is no evidence of any communication between Coolidge and Sandham, though it is possible he may have seen her introduction in the course of preparing his illustrations. If that were the case, and even if he explored Rossetti’s work in considering how to portray either Ramona or Alessandro, his treatment of the two characters resembles only distantly the English artist’s work. While Sandham’s renditions of Ramona indeed do recall the English artist’s paintings of young, dark-haired and wistful English women who featured so prominently in his and his contemporaries’ paintings of medieval maidens and romantic heroines, Rossetti did few paintings featuring these maidens’ and heroines’ with their male counterparts.[88] Whatever may have led to Sandham’s decisions to depict Ramona and Alessandro as he did, what resulted were romanticized and deracinated images of both. What is striking about Jackson’s expressed ideals of how Ramona and Alessandro should look is that they ironically seem to stand in contrast to her stated and sincere wish to encourage her audience to seek fair and just treatment of the nation’s Indigenous people, a wish that would call for them to be shown as they really were.[89]
The rest of Sandham’s illustrations to Ramona do not give rise to the same kind of scrutiny as to their fidelity to the main thrust of Jackson’s novel. Rather, they instead provide an accurate visual backdrop of the many sites and activities that take place. An early illustration in first chapter of Volume I, for example, shows one of the novel’s villains, Señora Moreno, walking on the porch of what some readers would surely have identified as the south veranda of Rancho Camulos (Fig. 16). Entitled “Prayers, Always Prayers,” it shows the Señora walking on the veranda reciting the Rosary while one of her most trusted Mexican servants, Juan Canito, attempts to calm his favorite collie. Sandham faithfully captured the details of the veranda’s structure as seen in the many photographs of Rancho Camulos such as its planked floors and roof, the adobe walls that abut it, and the lush shrubbery that comes up to its edge. His rendition, in fact, is almost photographic, an effect perhaps encouraged by the halftone reproductive method but in any event making it effective competition to photographs of the sites seen in the earlier books by Lummis and Vroman. A number of scenes take place on the veranda, and Sandham depicts it from varying vantage points in three other illustrations, all based on a drawing he made at Rancho Camulos in 1882.[90]
Fig. 16. Henry Sandham (Canadian, 1842-1910), Prayers, Always Prayers, from Volume I, Chapter I of the Monterey Edition, p.9, Private Collection
Just as important is how the illustrations function in relation to the text. This one faces the page whose text describes the scene, relating Señora Moreno’s concern about her son Felipe’s illness and Juan Canito’s discomfort at relying on what he felt was the shepherd Luigo’s laziness in getting the Señora’s sheep back to the ranch in time for shearing them.
…he is no more fit to take responsibility of a flock, than one of the very lambs themselves. He’ll drive them off their feet one day, and starve them the next; and I’ve known him to forget to give them water. When he’s in his dreams, the Virgin only knows what he won’t do.
During this brief and almost unprecedented outburst of Juan’s the Señora’s countenance had been slowly growing stern. Juan had not seen it. His eyes had been turned away from her, looking down into the upturned eager face of his favorite colley, who was leaping and gamboling and barking at his feet.
“Down, Capitan, down!” he said in a fond tone, gently repulsing him; “thou makest such a noise the Señora can hear nothing but thy voice.”
“I heard only too distinctly, Juan Canito,” said the Señora, in a sweet but icy tone. “It is not well for one servant to backbite another. It gives me great grief to hear such words; and I hope when Father Salvierderra comes, next month, you will not forget to confess this sin of which you have been guilty in thus seeking to injure a fellow-being. If Señor Felipe listens to you, the poor boy Luigo will be case out homeless on the world some day; and what sort of deed would that be, Juan Canito, for one Christian to do to another? I fear the father will give you penance, when he hears what you have said.”
This close correspondence between the text and the accompanying illustration is a hallmark of Sandham’s concept for his illustrations and is found consistently throughout the book. The narrative on the left-hand page is given visual form by the illustration on the facing right-hand page, continually encouraging the reader to anticipate and then engage Sandham’s depictions of the story.
Another feature of Sandham’s illustration in the Monterey edition were the twenty-six “Decorative Headings” that appear at the very beginning of each chapter. Measuring approximately 2-5/8 x 3-3/8 inches, these nearly half-page images are also halftone reproductions which appear to have been made from etchings based on Sandham’s originals, presumably drawings in either pen and ink or pencil. Surrounded by a black border on three or four sides, they include Sandham’s monogram, a crest with a stylized oak leaf above that acknowledges his Canadian heritage, and Sandham’s initials in capital letters. These headings are almost exclusively views of various outdoor settings and interiors that, for the viewer, establish the locales where the story takes place.
Among them are views of missions Santa Barbara (Fig. 17) (Chapters II and VIII), San Carlos Borromeo (Chapter III), San Gabriel (Chapter IV), San Luis Rey (Chapters VI and XVI), San Juan Bautista (Chapter XV), Pala (Chapter XVIII), San Diego (Chapter XIX), and San Juan Capistrano (XXV). Six of the first eight chapter headings in Volume I and the four of the first five in Volume II, in fact, depict missions. Sandham thus reinforced the prominent role the missions play in the novel, prominent in part because of the events that take place at them, but perhaps more so because the Franciscans’ mission enterprise in Alta California established a range of historical, religious, social, and cultural underpinnings for many of the main characters and their actions.[91]
Fig. 17. Henry Sandham (Canadian, 1842-1910), Santa Barbara, from Volume I, Chapter II of the Monterey Edition, p.21, with Sandham’s monogram at lower right corner, Private Collection
Salvierderra was assigned to Mission Santa Barbara and it was there that Felipe met with him in an important scene at the end of the novel. Ramona’s father, who figures in the story only briefly in the very beginning, is said to have lived at San Gabriel, and Alessandro was raised by his family at San Luis Rey until the missions’ secularization forced their move to Temecula. Throughout the novel, scenes these and other scenes that place at the missions remind the reader of California’s mission heritage. As a Los Angeles Sunday Times critic noted, “Glimpses of the mission churches are here, ancient gateways under the palms which seem like the spiritual language of the crosses they overshadow.”[92]
The novel’s second chapter, in fact, contains a brief history of the missions and their subsequent decline following secularization by Mexico in 1834.[93] Señora Moreno’s ranch, for example, is described as being on lands formerly part of missions San Fernando and Buenaventura (Volume I, 23). Secularization resulted in the rapid deterioration of most of the missions, and faithful parishioners sometimes appropriated religious objects to protect them from sale or theft in hopes of their being put to use in the missions’ churches at some point in the future. In the novel, the chairs and bench on the Señora Moreno’s veranda “had been brought to the Señora for safe keeping by the faithful old sacristan of San Luis Rey.” (Vol. I, 30). Similarly, “it had come about that no bedroom in the Señora’s house was without a picture or a statue of a saint or of the Madonna; and some had two; and in the little chapel in the garden the altar was surrounded by a really imposing row of holy and apostolic figures, which had looked down on the splendid ceremonies of the San Luis Rey Mission, in Father Peryi’s time.” (Vol. I, 30-31).[94] The importance of these multiple connections between the novel’s characters in the context of post-secularization mission history in the still young state of California are introduced early on in Sandham’s illustrations. The frontispiece to Volume I shows a meeting between Ramona and the Franciscan Father Salvierderra from Mission Santa Barbara, and the first Decorative Heading depicts the chapel at Camulos with all of its religious statuary (Fig. 18). The chapel, like the porch at the ranch, became one of the iconic images readers associated with the novel.
Fig. 18. Henry Sandham (Canadian, 1842-1910), Interior of Camulos Chapel, from Volume I, Chapter I of the Monterey Edition, p.3, Private Collection
For the most part, the missions are shown as uninhabited and in poor condition, reflecting the sad circumstances in which most of California’s missions had found themselves by 1900. Indeed, their dilapidated state was not only recognized but deplored by Jackson in her May and June 1883 Century articles, “Father Junipero and His Works.” There she commented on virtually all of the missions she and Sandham saw. “Many of them are still in operation as curacies; others are in ruins; of some not a trace is left, -- not even a stone.” San Diego had only its crumbling walls standing, at San Luis Rey “Piles of dirt and rubbish fill the space in front of the altar, and grass and weeds are growing in the corners’ great flocks of wild doves live in the roof, and have made the whole place unclean and foul-aired,” while “The most desolate ruin of all is that of La Purissima Mission…Nothing is left there but one long, low adobe building.”[95]
Jackson reserved her most searing condemnation for the condition of San Carlos Borromeo, which was Serra’s home church: “The roof of the church long ago fell in; its doors have stood open for years; and the fierce sea-gales have been sweeping in, piling sands until a great part of the floor is covered with solid earth on which every summer grasses and weeds grow high enough to be cut by sickles… It is a disgrace to both the Catholic Church and the State of California that this grand old ruin, with its sacred sepulchers, should be left to crumble away. If nothing is done to protect and save it, one short hundred years more will see it a shapeless, wind-swept mound of sand. It is not in our power to confer honor or bring dishonor on the illustrious dead. We ourselves, alone, are dishonored when we fail in reverence to them. The grave of Junipero Serra may be buried centuries deep, and its very place forgotten; yet his name will not perish, nor his fame suffer. But for the men of the country whose civilization he founded, and of the Church whose faith he so glorified, to permit his burial-place to sink into oblivion, is a shame indeed!”(Fig. 19).[96]
Fig. 19. Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916), Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo, Monterey County, c.1883, silver print (15 1/4 x 21 3/8 inches), J. Paul Getty Museum: Gift in memory of Leona Naef Merrill and in honor of her sister, Gladys Porterfield, 94.XA.113.33
Señora Moreno, too, advocated for the missions’ restoration, and felt duty bound to return items from the missions placed in her trust “whenever the Missions should be restored, of which at that time all Catholics had good hope.” (Vol. I, 30). Sandham’s comment in his “Notes on Ramona Illustrations” at the beginning of the 1900 edition noted Jackson’s interest in preserving the missions and what the passage of time between his and Jackson’s trip and the publication of this edition had done to the missions. “The restorations of late years have materially altered the appearance of many places referred to in the story, a good example of such alteration being found in the heading of Chapter XIII (Fig. 20). Readers familiar with this Mission (Santa Clara) of late years only will remember the inside pillars of the corridor as neat and trim in a nice coat of plaster, one way doubtless of aiding in their preservation, but at the unhappy cost of utterly destroying that the feeling of picturesque ruin and age, the very quality that appealed most strongly to the poetic nature of the gifted author, and which really formed the basis of the inspiration of her work. The illustrations may, then, have this claim to a share of the reader’s attention: they, at least, faithfully represent the scenes and objects as they were actually seen by Mrs. Jackson at the time of the inception of the book, and before the hand of the preserver had destroyed their poetic value.”[97]
Fig. 20. Henry Sandham (Canadian, 1842-1910), Decorative heading with Our Lady Angels, Los Angeles (Mission Santa Clara) from Volume I, Chapter XIII of the Monterey Edition, p.260, Private Collection
Sandham’s comment reflects the growing concern about the missions’ condition. When he made it in 1900, there was already an organized effort underway to preserve the missions. In 1888, Reginald del Valle, then owner of Rancho Camulos, founded the Association for the Preservation of the Missions.[98] Four years later Tessa Kelso, the Los Angeles’ city librarian, formed a group to raise funds to save the state’s missions. When Kelso accepted a job back east in late 1893, she asked Charles Fletcher Lummis, who had helped del Valle found the earlier group, to take over the organization. Lummis enthusiastically agreed and by 1895, after securing the support of San Francisco Chronicle publisher Harrison Gray Otis and engineer Richard Egan, a director of the Santa Fe Railroad, Lummis incorporated the Landmarks Club. Using his magazine, Out West, to publicize this effort, making speeches, and even publishing a cookbook to help raise funds, over the next twenty years Lummis and the Landmarks Club eventually organized the restoration of San Juan Capistrano, San Diego, San Fernando, and Pala.[99] Sandham’s lament, then, seems to minimize the success of these various efforts to preserve and restore these relics of the Spanish missionary enterprise. Their perceived picturesque character and “poetic value” to which he refers had been noted by travelers to California since the 1820s, but it was evident by the end of the nineteenth century that their very survival was threatened, as Jackson herself had written in her Century articles.[100]
Sandham’s preference to show the missions in their “poetic” ruinous state, however, had a purpose in the story beyond simply being historically accurate to both the period in which the novel is set and the time of Jackson’s visits. With the exception of his illustration of Santa Clara in Chapter XIII, his images of the missions and even of Alessandro’s village at Temecula are almost entirely devoid of signs of human life. The loneliness Sandham depicts, which very likely was the conditions he and Jackson encountered on their visits, was also suggestive of the degree to which Ramona and Alessandro were themselves alone, striving and ultimately failing to find a way to live their lives together peacefully as husband and wife when their communities and cultures were under assault.
Sandham also included close-up views of various objects symbolic of key events in the story, such as a torn altar cloth that Ramona accidently tore and then secretly repaired so as not to sustain Señora Moreno’s wrath (Fig. 21). Another was the chest containing jewels and mementoes from Ramona’s father’s fiancé which the Señora kept hidden from her, as well as Indian-made baskets and lace. In each instance, these decorative headings typically set the stage for the events that take place in that chapter, predictive of the future rather than relating to actions in the present in contrast to those seen in the full-page illustrations. For Sandham, each type of illustration had its specific and consistent role to augment the text.
Fig. 21. Henry Sandham (Canadian, 1842-1910), Torn Altar Cloth, Camulus, from Volume I, Chapter V of the Monterey Edition, p.82, Private Collection
Despite the large number of subsequent editions and printings after the two Monterey editions of 1900, it would be more than thirty years before Ramona would again be so richly illustrated.[101] Nonetheless, there were other important visualizations of the novel in the 1910s. One of the most significant was the so-called “Tourist Edition” of 1913, also published by Little, Brown & Co. The version was nearly as elaborate in concept as the earlier Monterey editions. It included an introduction by Adam Clark Vroman, who in 1899 had published one of the earliest Ramona-related illustrated books, The Genesis of the Story of Ramona. The 1913 Tourist Edition of Ramona, however, was a new variation on previous models.[102] Copying the format of the 1900 Monterey edition, it included Sandham’s Decorative Headings at the beginning of each chapter, but to these Vroman added twenty-four full-page reproductions of photographs used in his 1899 Genesis book, focusing, of course, on the sites that Jackson visited that served as an inspiration for her narrative. Among them were eleven scenes of Camulos Ranch, five of Guajome, views of missions Santa Barbara, San Gabriel, and San Luis Rey, and one of the Indian village at Temecula. This reliance on images of the places associated with Ramona gave the edition a sense of authenticity no doubt appreciated by its readers.[103] In doing so this aptly named Tourist Edition could better compete with the many existing Ramona-related publications designed to appeal to the growing number of Ramona pilgrims to southern California. Even its cover (Fig. 22), based on Vroman’s frontispiece illustration for Volume I of the Moreno house at Camulos, was selected to compete for this audience.[104]
Fig. 22. Unknown designer, cover from 1913 Tourist Edition depicting Rancho Camulos, Private Collection
The strength of Vroman’s illustrations, of course, lay in their photographic fidelity to the well-known Ramona sites. One of the most intriguing is “Indian Houses at Temecula” (Fig. 23). It shows a small group of Indians from the village, standing or on horseback, before three typical tule-roofed dwellings. The ground around them is barren, and the scene’s emptiness a palpable reminder of the tragic situation in which Alessandro and his villagers found themselves as American settlers appropriated Indian lands in southern California.
Fig. 23. Adam Clark Vroman (American, 1856-1916), Indian House of Temecula, Plate XIX from 1913 Tourist Edition, p.238, Courtesy of HathiTrust
In terms of how the image serves to complement the novel’s text, however, its context differs significantly from that in the 1900 Monterey edition. Like all the halftone reproductions of Vroman’s photographs that appear in the Tourist Edition, each image was covered with a tipped-in sheet bearing a printed title, text or texts relating to the scene depicted, and the page and volume number for the text(s). This format is much the same as found in the 1900 edition: the reader would first come upon the tipped-in sheet with title and text on the left-hand page and then lift it up to reveal the illustration located on the adjacent right-hand page.[105]
In contrast to the 1900 edition, however, where the full-page illustrations are directly related to events described on the pages directly adjacent, Vroman’s are not so closely aligned with the relevant text. His thirteen plates in Volume I, twenty-six pages apart from each other, begin on page four,[106] and are accompanied by eighteen selections from Jackson’s text.[107] Twelve of these selections, however, refer to passages on pages twenty-two to thirty. This concentration of text references within these early pages of the novel is understandable, as it is in these early chapters that Jackson describes the Moreno ranch that is the subject of so many of Vroman’s illustrations to Volume I. This disjuncture between text and image, however, is even more exaggerated in Volume II. There, of the nineteen quotes on its eleven plates, eleven refer to texts in Volume I. The quotes for Volume II are even more distant from the corresponding parts of the narrative; the text accompanying Vroman’s image of Temecula actually appears more than one hundred and eighty pages earlier than the plate.[108]
This disjuncture was made unavoidable by the decision to employ Vroman’s photographs of Ramona sites for the novel’s main illustrations. They depict real places rather than an illustrator’s creative interpretations of dramatic events in the novel. Their value was due to photographs’ implied verisimilitude, rendering fact rather than fiction, thus resulting in a fundamentally different relationship between image and text in this otherwise strikingly and richly illustrated version of Ramona.
BRINGING RAMONA TO THE BIG SCREEN
At the same time these variations upon the 1900 Sandham-illustrated editions of Ramona were released, the novel found expression in another, arguably more dynamic medium that would alter the public’s visual conception of Jackson’s novel for decades. In 1910 D.W. Griffith made the first Ramona film. He was already familiar with Jackson’s novel, having played the role of Alessandro – twice – in Virginia Calhoun’s 1905 theatrical version of the novel.[109] As he prepared to take his company to California for the first time in 1910, he pressed the American Biograph Company to acquire the rights to the novel from Little, Brown, and Company.[110] Just two years before, a U.S. Supreme Court decision required filmmakers to pay authors for the rights to make movies from their novels, and Biograph thus paid Little, Brown & Co. $100 to do so, the highest price yet paid for such rights.[111] Seeing the film’s potential, Biograph issued a special handbill to promote its production.
For Griffith, it was the most ambitious of his films to date cinematically by including forty-five scenes photographed from twenty-two camera positions. In addition, there were eighteen subtitles, more than in any of his previous films, necessary in that these subtitles, which immediately preceded the scenes, helped explain the narrative. Jackson’s book, after all, was more than four hundred pages long with twenty-six chapters and reducing it to the 1000-foot film length limit imposed by Biograph presented a significant challenge. Perhaps for that reason, the film was given a more explanatory title, Ramona: A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian.
Griffith sought to make the film adhere as closely as possible to what was, after all, a story well-known to his likely audience. The credit noted not only that it was “Adapted from the novel of Helen Jackson by arrangement with Little, Brown & Company,” but that “This production was taken at Camulos, Ventura Country, California, the actual scenes where Mrs. Jackson placed her characters in the story.” In this regard, he was surely seeking to take advantage of the degree to which places associated with Ramona in Jackson’s novel had become pilgrimage sites for the devoted, and he did not disappoint. His shots at Rancho Camulos of the veranda, chapel, and mission bells and trellis would have been immediately recognizable to those familiar with either the illustrated versions of Ramona or Vroman’s 1899 book, as well as to those thousands who actually visited the site.
Insofar as the narrative is concerned, however, Griffith took a few liberties. In the film Alessandro plays a lute, for example, rather than a violin. Griffith, however, included shots of scenes not found in the novel, such as Alessandro standing in agony on the mountainside overlooking his tribe’s village in the valley far below. Ramona and Felipe over Alessandro’s grave after his murder by one of the American settlers who had already evicted Ramona and him from their home and set fire to his tribe’s village in the valley below. The shot’s novelty can be credited in large part to Griffith’s master cameraman Billy Bitzer, and was noted by contemporary critics. A reviewer for The New York Dramatic Mirror wrote, “The burning huts, the hurrying people and the wagons of the whites are clearly visible, though they appear but as mere specks in the distance.”[112] Griffith later described the compositional device, which he also used in a scene with Felipe comforting Ramona over Alessandro’s grave (Fig. 24), as one of his important cinematic discoveries.[113] Griffith’s and Bitzer’s collaboration consequently resulted in what are some of the most distinctive and emotionally powerful scenes found in any of the visualizations of Ramona.
Fig. 24. Alessandro witnessing the destruction of his village, still from D.W. Griffith’s American Biograph Company 1910 production of Ramona, Mary Pickford Foundations, Los Angeles
In 1916 another cinematic version of Ramona was made by Clune Film Producing Co. William H. Clune’s first film, it premiered in Los Angeles on February 7 and opened in New York on April 5.[114] At its premiere at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles, Clune created an unusual setting for the film. On the Auditorium’s stage was a set depicting a mission where a padre was seen blessing men and women, and another showing a group of Indians around a campfire in the mountains. Moving picture and stage set were hence combined, forming yet another variation on the ways in which Jackson’s novel was visualized for a mass audience.[115] Directed by Donald Crisp (who appeared in the film as Jim Farrar, Alessandro’s killer) and starring Adda Gleason as Ramona and Monroe Salisbury as Alessandro, it was shot in part at various locations in California to suggest the time and place in which the novel is set.
In 1915, the year before the film’s release, Clune published a twenty-page illustrated “Souvenir Program” filmgoers received as a guide to what they were about to see which they could take with them after it was over, both a Ramona memento and as a means of encouraging others to see the film.[116] The program consists of illustrated front and back covers; a page of information about the film and its production; a five-page “Synopsis” of the novel by Robert H. Poole interspersed with seven pages each showing two stills showing scenes from the movie; a two-page map of southern California identifying sites mentioned in the novel; and a page of photographs of each of the “Principals in Clune’s Production of Ramona.”
The first page of text contains the essentials about the movie: its title, the name of the film company that produced it and its key creators: Donald Crisp, the director, Enrico Vallejo, cinematographer; and the people who selected and arranged the music, Lloyd Brown and Emil Berman, as well as many of the actors who appear (Fig. 25).[117] Surprisingly, this page reveals that Crisp’s presentation diverts from the sequence of events in the novel. It begins with a Prologue covering the period from 1845 to 1864 with scenes at Missions Santa Barbara, Mission San Gabriel, and Monterey. This time period actually precedes the narrative found in Jackson’s novel, though what takes place in the prologue are things that she later describes: Ramona’s father’s dashed hopes to marry Ramona Gonzaga, his subsequent marriage to an Indian woman who gives birth to the novel’s Ramona, and how her care falls to Señora Moreno. In Jackson’s novel, all of this is important background for understanding what happens in the present. Rather than resort to a flashback later in the film, however, Crisp chose to insert the Prologue which includes scenes described as “Padres – Spanish Ladies – Spanish Dons – Dancing Girls – Indians.”.[118]
Fig. 25. Title page from Souvenir Program for Clune’s Production of Ramona Adapted from Helen Hunt Jackson’s Story of Early California and the Mission Indians. A Cinema-Theatrical Entertainment (Los Angeles: Schmidt Litho. Co., 1905), Courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine
The film’s subsequent two acts follow the novel’s narrative. The first act takes place in 1879 in Camulos, Temecula, and San Diego, where there are “Sheep Shearers – Mexicans – Indians.” The second act takes place from 1879 to 1881 in San Pasquale, Soboba, Cahuilla, and San Bernadino. There is no text here, however, to describe the act’s scenes, perhaps out of a desire not to spoil the ending, though it seems reasonable to assume many if not most of the audience already knew from having read Jackson’s novel what would transpire. Although none of these dates from either the Prologue or the two acts that follow are found in the novel, they correspond to the time period in which the novel is set, just prior to Jackson’s 1881-1882 visit to California with Henry Sandham.
The program’s illustrations represent another variation on how Ramona was presented to a wide public audience. Full-page color illustrations on the front and back covers feature the movie’s two main characters. Alessandro is on the front (Fig. 26) shown standing against an adobe brick wall with a terracotta tile roof above, presumably the Moreno ranch. Wearing a leather vest and boots, hat in one hand and his violin in the other, he looks downward, perhaps lost in thought. Ramona is on the back cover (Fig. 27), looking out from behind a window with vertical wooden rods in what appears to be the same adobe building seen behind Alessandro. By placing the program flat, Ramona is on the left and Alessandro is on the right, appearing as if they are part of the same scene as she looks toward her beloved, who has not yet noticed that she’s trying to get his attention. Seen in this way, these two cover illustrations together depict a moment well into the novel when Señora Moreno has virtually imprisoned Ramona at the ranch to prevent her from marrying Alessandro, perhaps the reason for his forlorn expression.
Fig. 26. Front cover from Souvenir Program for Clune’s Production of Ramona Adapted from Helen Hunt Jackson’s Story of Early California and the Mission Indians. A Cinema-Theatrical Entertainment (Los Angeles: Schmidt Litho. Co., 1905), Courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine
Fig. 27. Back cover from Souvenir Program for Clune’s Production of Ramona Adapted from Helen Hunt Jackson’s Story of Early California and the Mission Indians. A Cinema-Theatrical Entertainment (Los Angeles: Schmidt Litho. Co., 1905), Courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine
Illustrations within the program create a visual synopsis of the movie itself. On one of the pages interspersed throughout the program, Ramona and Alessandro couple are shown together in a clip from the film, holding a sheep, while in another clip on the page Indians from Alessandro’s village shear sheep (Fig. 28), a scene from place early in the novel. Both clips are seen through irregular breaks in the illustrator’s rendition of adobe brick walls identical to those in the two cover illustrations. This collage-like format is used repeatedly in the program that contains a total of fourteen stills from the movie. They show Indians gathered around Mission Santa Barbara shearing sheep, Father Salvierderra marrying Ramona and Alessandro, white raiders destroying the Indian village of Temecula, the couple seeking refuge in the mountains, and Jim Farrar killing Alessandro.
Fig. 28. Still showing Ramona and Alessandro from Souvenir Program for Clune’s Production of Ramona Adapted from Helen Hunt Jackson’s Story of Early California and the Mission Indians. A Cinema-Theatrical Entertainment (Los Angeles: Schmidt Litho. Co., 1905), Courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine
Jackson’s novel, of course, centers around issues of race that permeate the world in which her characters live. As noted previously, Henry Sandham’s deracinated depictions of both Ramona and Alessandro were perhaps influenced by Jackson’s admitted preference for showing Ramona as female type she admired in a photograph of the English Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. When the novel came to film, a different but just as pervasive racism is present by virtue of the actors chosen to play the various parts, almost all of whom are white, beginning with Mary Pickford as Ramona in D.W. Griffith’s 1910 film. Virtually all of the actors in Clune’s film are white, including those who played Ramona, Alessandro, Señora Moreno, Felipe Moreno, and Father Salvierderra, leaving it up to the costume designers and makeup artists to suggest their racial and cultural origins, at least according to the stereotypes expected by the film’s audience.
Among the few exceptions to the nearly all-white cast is a character that appears in the Prologue, Ramona’s mother, the Indian wife of her father Angus Phail. Though not named in the novel, she has been given the name “Soft Wind” – no doubt made up without any attempt to select a name that bears some resemblance to the women belonging to the various southern California bands mentioned in the novel. The actor who played Soft Wind was “Princess Red Wing,” born Lilian Margaret St. Cyr on the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska, and one of the first Native Americans to appear in American film. She and her husband, James Young Deer, a Nanticoke Indian from Delaware, appeared in numerous Westerns from 1908 to the 1920s.[119]
Another exception is the actor who appears in the first act, Alessandro’s father, “Chief Pablo Assis,” a Luiseño chief, in a scene at their village in Temecula played by the actor known as “Chief Standing Bear.” Luther Standing Bear, born Plenty Kill, was an Oglala Lakota actor and writer who began his performing career with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and from the 1910s to the 1930s starred in several Western films.[120] To be sure, the roles for actors such as Red Wing and Luther Standing Bear were limited and rarely if at all were roles in which they played Indigenous people from their own tribes, much less in narratives that reflected their lived experiences. This remained a staple in Hollywood for decades, one of the best-known examples being John Ford’s 1956 film, The Searchers, in which Navajos he had gotten to know from films he shot at Monument Valley, a dramatic site on the Navajo Reservation, played Comanches. In addition, the Clune production also featured Joe de la Cruz, who played the young Felipe Moreno in the Prologue. José de la Cruz was born in Sonora, Mexico and began his film career around the time of Clune’s Ramona and continued to perform into the 1940s.[121]
Though these efforts to hire actors who came from the cultures of the characters they were to play were exceedingly rare, they nonetheless represent efforts to adorn Jackson’s novel with an element of authenticity for its audience, even if only one rather than accurate. The Clune production even had an impact on how the novel itself was perceived rather than accurate. The Clune production even had an impact on how the novel itself was promoted: the frontispiece to a 1924 Little, Brown & Co. edition was a still from this 1916 film (Fig. 29) accompanied by the caption, “The place had become to Ramona so like a friendly home, that she dreaded to leave its shelter.”[122]
Fig. 29. Frontispiece in 1924 edition of Ramona with still from Clune Film Producing Company’s 1916 production of Ramona, University of Pennsylvania, Van Pelt-Dietrich Center
In 1928, United Artists released the third Ramona film, directed by Edwin Carewe, a Texas-born member of Chickasaw tribe. Like D.W. Griffith, Carewe began his career in the silent era first as an actor, arriving in Los Angeles by train as a hobo, and eventually became a director of more than fifty films. He selected the Mexican film star Dolores del Rio for the role of Ramona, whom he discovered.[123] Del Rio was born to an aristocratic family in Victoria de Durango, Mexico, and came to the United States during the Mexican revolution in 1916. She met Carewe shortly after her marriage and they became friends as she made the transition to talkies soon after her first film in 1925.
The eight-reel, nearly hour-long movie was described by New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall as “an extraordinarily beautiful production, intelligently directed by Edwin Carewe and, with the exception of a few instances, splendidly acted. The scenic effects are charming and there is for the most part an admirable restraint throughout this drama of Southern California…” Characterized by Hall as an “Indian Love Lyric,” he praises Carewe’s camera work and the performances of del Rio as well as Warner Baxter as Alessandro, John Prince as Salvierderra, and Roland Drew as Felipe.[124] Reflecting the increasingly internationalization of the American film industry, and probably the hoped for popularity of this new screen version of Jackson’s novel, it was released in Los Angeles on March 28, in Japan on April 17, New York on May 14, Berlin on September 17, Finland on January 21, 1929, and France on May 31, another demonstration of the novel’s continued popularity.
To some degree, a poster for the film featuring del Rio as Ramona and Baxter as Alessandro, depicts the couple more accurately than Sandham’s illustrations had, at least in terms of how they are described in the novel (Fig. 30). Del Rio’s long dark hair and dark eyebrows were, in fact, features Jackson gave to Ramona, though in the poster her eyes are not blue, but as dark as her hair. The waving figure in the background of Alessandro on his horse has black hair and his skin is brown, another nod to the features Jackson described in her novel. Ironically, del Rio herself was the descendant of one of the state of Durango’s richest families who could trace their lineage back to Mexico’s viceregal past, thus making her far more representative of Señora Moreno’s heritage than Ramona’s. Just as ironically, Warner Baxter, who played Alessandro, was an Ohio-born actor who, the same year as Ramona came out, also played the role of the Cisco Kid in the movie In Old Arizona in which the character originally created was transformed into a caricature of a Mexican caballero. Carewe’s own Indian lineage notwithstanding, authenticity went only so far in how the novel’s Indian story was to be presented to a mass audience.
Fig. 30. Poster for 1928 United Artist film version of Ramona, Ramona Bowl Amphitheater, Hemet, California
A lesser known but nonetheless interesting edition of the novel appeared in 1929, published in New York with an introduction by Cuban patriot and revolutionary José Martí.[125] Long committed to Cuba’s independence from Spain, Martí, born in Havana, spent from 1880 to 1895 in New York where he also worked assiduously as a translator.[126] Among the works he translated was Ramona, first published in Spanish in New York in 1888 with Martí’s introduction and again in 1929 in Madrid as part of a multi-volume set of Martí’s complete works.[127]
Neither of these two editions was illustrated, but the later edition’s cover offers yet another example of how the novel’s two main characters were presented (Fig. 31). Its unknown designer shows Ramona facing the reader, an Indian-style blanket draped over her shoulder and sombrero hanging from her other arm, accoutrements which stand for her Indian and Mexican identities. Alessandro is in the foreground, naked from the waist up, his darker skin and long braids identifying him as more purely Indian. Both of these images correspond with how the two characters were described in the story, insofar as they are dark-skinned and dark-haired. In the background, however, stand two tall saguaros, a cactus found in the Sonoran desert of the American Southwest and northern Mexico – but not in the southern California locales in Jackson’s novel. Though this infidelity to the late nineteenth mission setting of California in Jackson’s novel, they conveyed to its Spanish-speaking audience in Cuba iconic about their image of American West.
Fig. 31. Cover of 1929 Havana edition of Ramona translated by José Martí, Private Collection
The 1930s saw still more additions to Ramona’s illustration history in the form of the fourth and last American film version and two printed editions of the novel.[128] Each in their own way signaled a shift in how text and image were related. The first of these was the 1932 edition of the novel illustrated by Herbert Morton Stoops. Born on an Idaho ranch in 1888, Stoops established his career as an illustrator of western stories. After graduating from Utah State College in 1905 at the age of eighteen, he worked on various newspapers. His career flourished in the 1920s and early 1930s as he did illustrations for Colliers, The American Magazine, Liberty Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, The American Legion Magazine, and Blue Book.[129] In 1931 he illustrated Frank B. Linderman’s popular Old Man Coyote, a series of tales taken from Crow mythology. Unlike Sandham, who had little familiarity with depicting subjects from the American West, Stoops was far more familiar with the world he was commissioned to illustrate.
His work on Ramona reveals a certain measure of ambition. Its seventy-nine illustrations Stoops’ easily surpassed the 1900 Monterey Edition’s fifty, thus making it the most richly illustrated of the many editions of the novel. Why, one might ask, would this new edition be published with so many illustrations? The answer lies in part with what appears to have been a new marketing strategy on the part of the publisher. While the novel continued to appeal to adult audiences, its romantic and sentimental nature may well have begun to seem dated. Moreover, its historical foundation in early American California, originally seen from the perspective of Jackson’s time in the 1880s, was now even more distant and may also have seemed less appealing to an audience during the Great Depression. John Steinbeck’s 1939 The Grapes of Wrath would soon become the new novel of California, speaking more directly to the times in which it was published.
With the 1932 edition Ramona’s publishers seem to have been trying to establish a new market made up of younger readers. It was released that year by the Junior Literary Guild, a 1929 offshoot of The Literary Guild that was created to promote books to children. It offered books directly to its members, gave them pins to denote their membership in the Guild, and published a monthly magazine, Young Wings, which contained poems, essays, and articles on its books and authors. Ramona’s presumed attraction to the Guild was that it was, after all, a love story filled with drama and intrigue, an evil stepmother, the murder of a handsome and upright leading character, and, ultimately, a happy ending for the heroine. It is not hard to imagine that young teens would be seen as a new audience for Jackson’s novel and hence a potential source of new income for the publisher.
The large number of illustrations for this 1932 Junior Literary Guild edition were created in part with this market in mind. They help flesh out the story’s narrative, leaving less to the imagination of the younger reader who, in all likelihood, would have been far less familiar with the story’s historical references than their parents or grandparents. Stoops had a clearly defined structure in mind in which the organization of his illustrations mimicked Sandham’s. The ten full-page images depicted various critical scenes in the novel, as did many of the fifty half-page ones which, like Sandham’s, appeared regularly throughout the book. Many of them were at the beginning of chapters, just as Sandham’s Decorative Headings were.
The novel’s frontispiece, its only color image, is richly detailed yet at the same time immediately readable (Fig. 32). It shows a scene from the latter part of the story at the end of Chapter XX when Alessandro and Ramona are about to depart from their home, having just sold it to a white farmer, and head to the San Jacinto Mountains to get still further from encroaching American settlers. The illustration is filled with things that have powerful meaning for the story. Their adobe and tile-roofed home recalls California’s Spanish past, an architectural style which coincidentally in the 1930s was still widely popular in southern California. The crucifix and bell on the ground were symbols both Alessandro’s and Ramona’s Catholic faith as well as of the Franciscan missionaries’ perceived heroic efforts at conversion. The trunk contained jewels and other mementoes left for Ramona by her mother, intended to provide for her future, and in the background, the snow-capped mountains offer a route that the couple hope will take them to a safe refuge. Stoops’ frontispiece is graphically clear, rendered with simple outlines, almost no shading, and large blocks of color distantly reminiscent of Japanese color woodblock prints. As a result his illustration possesses a combination of both antiquity and modernity, which is readable enough to reach a younger audience but sophisticated enough to appeal to adults as well.
Fig. 32. Herbert Morton Stoops (American, 1888-1948), “Where are we going? I know not, Majella! Into the mountains, where the white men come not!” Frontispiece from 1932 edition of Ramona published by The Junior Literary Guild, New York, Private Collection
Making the novel’s illustrations stylistically current, in fact, seems to have been a part of Stoops’ and presumably the publisher’s strategy to engage a new audience. His images employ a language of forms then fairly common among American book illustrators and printmakers such as Rockwell Kent and Louis Lozowick that rely on simple contrasts of relatively large blocks of black and white to define figures and landscape as well as to create mood. The full-page image in Chapter XIV, for example, shows an Indian couple and their two children standing outside near the Luiseño village of Temecula (Fig. 33). They are placed close to the picture plane and set off to the right with their belongings stuffed into cloth sacks on the ground in front of them. The space then recedes rapidly to the adobe buildings of the village, smoke rising up into the sky against the hills in the background. There is virtually no middle ground here, its absence exaggerated by the viewer’s low vantage point. The composition is divided into horizontal bands of black and white, leading the eye from the immediate foreground to the distant background of mountains and sky. Only in the sky does Stoops employ linear marks: cursory, curved and sometimes jagged strokes define the smoke rising from the buildings below and nearly parallel vertical lines of varying length at the very top suggest the darkening sky at the top border of the illustration.
Fig. 33. Herbert Morton Stoops (American, 1888-1948), Luiseño Indian family outside Temecula, from Chapter XIV, p.221 of the 1932 Junior Literary Guild edition, Collection of the author
The apparent calm of the scene belies the tragedy that Jackson’s narrative describes. The chapter tells of Ramona’s long wait for Alessandro to return from his village and finally of his arrival near the Moreno ranch. Alessandro then tells Ramona, “Dearest Señorita! I feel as if I should die when I tell you, – I have no home; my father is dead; my people are driven out of their village. I am only a beggar now, Señorita; like those you used to feed and pity in Los Angeles convent!” He goes on to tell her how a group of eight or ten Americans filed suit in a San Francisco court and thus took control of his tribe’s land, even its sacred graveyard where Alessandro buried his father and the baby of a friend.[130] Afterward, Ramona reveals to Alessandro that she is part Indian, and asks him to take her with him, without either knowing where they will go. The illustration carries only the slightest hint of the tragedy that befell Temecula, as the Indian family stands alone a distance away from their homes and their bags with their belongings on the ground in front of them. Stoops’ rendering emphasizes their noble and stoic response to the white man’s injustice, by then a long-standing trope of Indians in American popular culture.
The fifty half-page illustrations, found at the beginning of and within chapters, perform the same duties as their larger counterparts, namely to convey the sense of action and drama described in text either directly adjacent or nearby.[131] One of the most striking is at the beginning of Chapter IX (Fig. 34), a nocturnal scene showing Alessandro seated on the steps of the veranda. It does not correspond precisely to anything described in the text, but simply shows Alessandro next to a large ceramic pot near the bushes, likely taking a break from his vigil watching over the ailing Felipe. Alessandro’s expression is one of concern for his friend, and the somber mood is enhanced by the abundance of black used to depict the foliage behind Alessandro and the approaching darkness. Again, Stoops employs an economy of means to achieve sufficient descriptive detail and his desired emotional effect.
Fig. 34. Herbert Morton Stoops (American, 1888-1948), Alessandro seated on the steps of the veranda from Chapter IX, p.127 of the 1932 Junior Literary Guild edition, Private Collection
The innovative twist in Stoops’ overall illustration plan was his insertion of small, approximately 1 x 1-inch images at the end of nineteen of the twenty-six chapters (Fig. 35). The first few relate to raising sheep on the Moreno ranch (sheep, a collie, wool cutting shears), and another group to different animals typically found on a California ranch (cows, horses, mules). Others refer to the Luiseño Indians of Alessandro’s tribe (baskets, pots, individual Indians), some to locales (missions San Luis Rey and Santa Barbara), and only a few to characters in the story (Alessandro, Ramona, Father Salvierderra). Including these small-scale illustrations allowed Stoops to expand the range of images related to the story, but also functioned to encourage a gentle pause at the end of each chapter before going on to the next. Their sweet simplicity also had the benefit of appealing to the edition’s sought-after adolescent audience.
Fig. 35. Herbert Morton Stoops (American, 1888-1948), seated collie at the end of Chapter IV, p.60, Private Collection
By the time of Stoop’s illustrated edition of 1932, the popularity of Ramona-related books, articles, and tourist artifacts so abundant in the 1900s, 1910s, and 1920s had diminished somewhat, though efforts continued to profit from Jackson’s still popular novel. By the 1920s these efforts had shifted to other media besides print, including the inaugural performance in 1923 of Garnet Holme’s outdoor theatrical production of Ramona took place in a natural amphitheater in Hemet, California. Of greater impact in terms of audience size was the return of Jackson’s novel to film. The release of the third Ramona movie in 1928 marked yet another step in the broad popularization of Helen Hunt Jackson’s then forty-year-old story. Though a silent film, it inspired a recording by del Rio singing Wayne and Gilbert’s song, “Ramona,” the first theme song made for an America film.[132] The song enjoyed popularity on its own: soon after it was published in 1928, it was translated and performed in French, Italian, and Spanish, and gained renewed popularity when Louis Armstrong recorded it in 1956.[133]
Cinema continued to be a medium that kept Jackson’s story of Ramona alive. In 1936 the by far most elaborate Ramona film was released by Twentieth Century Fox-Film Corporation. Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck this first sound version of the film was eighty-four minutes long and cost somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000 to make.[134] It was shot at Warner Hot Springs and the Mesa Grande Indian Reservation in San Diego County, seeking through these locales a degree of authenticity, even if not as convincingly as Griffith’s film had more than a quarter century earlier. Fox purchased the rights from Edwin Carewe in 1934, apparently believing Jackson’s story still had the power to appeal to mass audiences.[135] Early on, in fact, it was reported that Fox intended to produce a Spanish version as well, although none was made.[136]
Fox clearly intended to make its production a grand one. By Hollywood standards, its cast was stellar: Loretta Young as Ramona, Don Ameche as Alessandro, Kent Taylor as Felipe, Pauline Frederick as Señora Moreno, Katherine de Mille as Margarita, Victor Kilian as Father Gaspara, John Carradine as Jim Farrar, J. Carroll Nash as Juan Canito, Jane Darwell as Aunt Ri Hyar and William Benedict as Joseph Hyar.[137] The cast was much larger than in previous films, numbering close to one hundred with Hispanics and Indians among the actors who played minor parts. Directed by Henry King, it was Twentieth Century-Fox’s first film shot entirely in Technicolor[138]and included not only Wayne and Gilbert’s already well-known song but also five new ones by William Kernell.[139] This movie marked the last and perhaps the most visually rich rendition of Jackson’s remarkably long-lived novel – albeit that its key roles were played by white stars, hardly an anomaly for Hollywood films of the period, and plainly visible in posters made to promote the movie (Fig. 36).
Fig. 36. Poster for 1936 Twentieth Century Fox version of Ramona, Ramona Bowl Amphitheater, Hemet, California
Just three years later, in 1939, one of America’s most well-known illustrators, N.C. Wyeth was selected to illustrate another edition of Ramona which, it must be said, was more noteworthy for the fame of its illustrator than the number and impact of its illustrations. Published by Little, Brown and Company, this version boasted on its title page illustrations by Newell Convers Wyeth, and a new introduction by May Lamberton Becker. The New York-born Becker was then a critic and the editor of the “Reader’s Guide” in The New York Herald Tribune. She began her career there as an advice columnist before becoming a specialist in and advocate for children’s literature. It may well be that this edition, too, was intended for a combination of adult and children audiences. It was particularly long-lived; it was reprinted until at least 1970 with Wyeth’s cover illustration on its dust jacket.[140]
The choice of Wyeth as illustrator seems clearly to have been made to give the edition a certain caché and thus to increase its potential sales. Wyeth, of course, was one of the country’s most prolific and important magazine and book illustrators of the early twentieth century. His credits included illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1911), Kidnapped (1913), The Black Arrow (1916), James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1919) and The Deerslayer (1925), all published as part of Scribner’s Classics series. His work for other publishers included Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger (1916), Paul Creswick’s Robin Hood (1917), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish (1920), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1920), Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1921), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company (1922), and Henry David Thoreau’s Men of Concord (1936).[141]
His work for Ramona consisted of only four illustrations, all in color and reproduced in halftone from his oil sketches, which in turn were based on initial pencil drawings.[142] They include a frontispiece showing Señora Romeno meeting with Ramona and showing her the contents of the chest left to her by her mother, from Chapter XI; Ramona meeting with Father Salvierderra among the mustard blossoms, from Chapter IV; Alessandro on foot leading Ramona on her horse through a perilous trail in the San Jacinto Mountains, from Chapter XVI; and Ramona witnessing Alessandro’s murder, from Chapter XXIV.[143]
In each case, Wyeth’s illustration on the right-hand page refers to events described on the left hand page, a hallmark of Wyeth’s work. By placing his illustration directly adjacent to which they refer, it allowed the reader to immediately view his interpretation of the drama taking place. The text for the illustration in Chapter XVI (Fig. 37), for example, reads, “It was from sheer terror, soon, that Ramona shut her eyes. A path, it seemed to her only a hand’s-breath wide, – a stony, crumbling path, – on the side of a precipice, down which the stones rolled and fell. Only the yucca-plants, with their sharp bayonet-leaves, had made a shift to keep foothold on this precipice. Of these there were thousands; and their tall flower-stalks, fifteen, twenty feet high, set thick with the shining, smooth seed-cups, glistened like satin chalices in the sun. Below – hundreds of feet below – lay the canon bottom, a solid bed of chaparral, looking soft and even as a bed of moss. Giant sycamore-trees lifted their heads, at intervals, above this; and far out in the plain glistened the loops of the river, whose sources, unknown to the world, seen of but few human eyes, were to be waters of comfort to these fugitives to this day.”
Fig. 37. N.C. Wyeth (American, 1882-1945), illustration from Chapter XVI, page of 1939 edition of Ramona, Private Collection
Wyeth placed the figures of Ramona and Alessandro close to the picture plane, the latter looking toward the chasm below and Ramona with her eyes nearly closed and turning away from the precipice. In comparison, Herbert Morton Stoops opted instead for a higher and more distant vantage point in which the smaller scale of the figures in relation to their surroundings creates a sense of drama (Fig. 38). And although Wyeth’s use of color inherently suggests a greater realism, Stoops’ large contrasting areas of black and white convey a perhaps more compelling sense of drama. Moreover, Stoops’ depiction of the rounded hills bears greater resemblance to the novel’s southern California landscape than do Wyeth’s block-shaped forms. The romantic realism Wyeth had long practiced and which placed him at the forefront of American book illustration earlier in the century, was no longer its dominant visual language, and Stoops’ modernist conventions, though hardly avant-garde, presented a more current formal vocabulary that in his hands effectively conveyed the dramatic tensions and emotions so much a part of Jackson’s narrative.
Fig. 38. Herbert Morton Stoops (American, 1888-1948), illustration in Chapter XVI, p.249 of the 1932 Junior Literary Guild edition of Ramona, Private Collection
Nonetheless, Wyeth’s exalted position in the world of American illustration very likely accorded him significant fees for his work, which may explain why there are only four illustrations in this 1939 edition. This marks a precipitous decline from the seventy-nine illustrations in Stoops’ edition of only seven years before. There may be other reasons for this decline, not the least of which was the cost of commissioning and printing numerous color illustrations. The fact that the most recent Ramona film was made in 1936, only three years before the Wyeth edition, was produced in Technicolor may also have had an impact. It is conceivable that the publisher believed the public’s visualization of the novel was likely to have been shaped significantly by the 1936 film, thus requiring color to make the edition appealing. Whatever the actual impact Herbert Morton Stoops’ otherwise compelling black and white illustrations may well have had on projected sales of the Wyeth-illustrated edition, Wyeth’s fame was clearly assumed to have been an effective marketing tool.
Grosset & Dunlap produced several editions of the novel in the 1930s that added yet another footnote to its illustration history. Beginning in 1897, the company began to buy large stocks of books by other publishers and rebinding each with a new hard cover. Because Grosset & Dunlap’s newly bound versions retained the original title pages they were not violating copyright restrictions. Other publishers soon began to work with them to reprint their titles in hardcover, generating additional revenue to both companies.[144] In the case of Ramona, Grosset and Dunlap obviously could not add illustrations to the already produced book, but they attempted to make the book’s design more current and potentially more appealing by adding illustrated endpapers. In one of several variations dating from the 1930s (Fig. 39),[145] the endpapers (which as in other Grosset and Dunlap editions from the period are identical on front and back) are a bold yellow-gold against a white ground in which Indians on horseback and on foot with their flocks of sheep dejectedly retreat from Temecula as ominous thunderheads release gentle sheets of rain in the distance. This novel addition by a yet unidentified designer augments an unusually diversely illustrated edition, whose color dustjacket illustration is one of Herbert Morton Stoops’ designs for the 1932 edition (Fig. 40). In addition, chapter reproduces Henry Sandham’s Decorative Headings from the 1900 Little, Brown & Co. edition.
Fig. 39. Unknown designer, endpapers from 1930s Grosset and Dunlap edition of Ramona, Private Collection
Fig. 40. Herbert Morton Stoops (American, 1888-1948), Dustjacket illustration from 1932 Junior Literary Guild edition of Ramona in a late 1930s Grosset and Dunlap edition of the novel, Private Collection
The 1930s was in some respects a golden moment for Ramona. The decade had seen not only the Stoops, Wyeth, and Grosset and Dunlap illustrated versions of the novel but also Hollywood’s most elaborate film version. And although the Wyeth Ramona was not the last, it marked the last significant effort to enliven the novel through illustrations.[146] Nonetheless, Ramona continued to find outlets in other markets, notably in the Spanish-speaking world. In 1938, a dramatic radio adaptation of Ramona was prepared in Caracas,[147] and in 1946 a film version was produced in Mexico directed by Victor Urruchúa and starring Esther Fernández as Ramona and Antonio Badú as Alessandro.[148]
The 1950s saw still another attempt to successfully market the now three-century-old novel, this time to a younger audience. In 1959 The Limited Edition Club published a newly illustrated edition of Ramona, taking advantage of an innovative sales program it actually developed three decades earlier. Members of the Club were able to acquire the relatively small number of its publications produced each year at a price set in advance. Founded in 1929 by George Macy, the Limited Edition Club published finely designed and printed books, often historical or modern classics, illustrated occasionally by well-known artists such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Reginald Marsh, Thomas Hart Benton, and Steuart Curry, as well as photographers Edward Steichen and Edward Weston.[149]
In its April 1959 “Monthly Letter of The Limited Editions Club” to promote Ramona, the publisher informed club members about Helen Hunt Jackson’s life and career, noting her hope the book would arouse its readers to the plight of California’s Indians and take advantage of Jackson’s once more well-known popularity, citing the novel’s “romantic setting and its equally romantic story.” This new edition of Jackson’s story also contained an introduction by author and teacher J. Frank Dobie. Dobie was born on a ranch in Texas who attended the Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas then received his M.A. from Columbia, returning to his native state after service in WWI to teach English at the University of Texas in Austin. The author of several novels set in the Southwest, he became secretary and editor of the Texas Folklore Society, forming the background from with which he discussed Jackson’s novel.[150]
In the newsletter he recounts the salient details of Jackson’s life, the origins of the novel, and the historical context of the period in which the story was set, repeatedly commented on Jackson’s “moral indignation,” establishing at the same time the potential meaning of the story for his own time. “It is something to be capable of and to express deep moral indignation. This age of executive ambition and of religiosity-pays-in-business has allowed the fires of moral indignation to sink almost into the ashes. Helen Hunt Jackson’s outcries of moral indignation against America’s shifty and cruel treatment of Indians still lift human spirits – even though comparatively few people are moved to lift hands against ambitious patriots still trying to get hold of Indian property.”[151] In the wake of the McCarthy hearings and in the time of a growing and increasingly vocal Civil Rights movement, Dobie’s arguments can be seen as recognizing the current relevance of Jackson’s novel, warning its readers, even if obliquely, of the danger of its government’s long-standing inaction toward society’s and as well as its own oppression against its citizens.
The Limited Edition Club’s hallmark was high quality design, printing and illustration. As noted in a 5 by 7-inch sheet entitled Number Seven accompanying each book, this edition of Ramona (the seventh of twenty-seven books from the Club in 1959) was designed by Saul Marks, printed in thirteen-point Bembo type, on a special rag sheet made for the book by the Curtis Paper Company, and was printed at The Plantin Press in Los Angeles, the famed press which Marks and his wife Lilian founded.[152] In addition, it had a fabric binding “of Indian-inspired design” (Fig. 41) and fit into a specially designed slipcase. As indicated on the book’s colophon, 1500 copies were made and each was numbered and signed by its illustrator.
Fig. 41. Unknown designer, cover for 1959 The Limited Editions Club edition of Ramona, Private Collection
For Ramona the Club chose Everett Gee Jackson to illustrate it. Jackson, born in 1900 in Mexia, Texas, established himself primarily as a painter but also did book illustration especially after World War II when he taught at San Diego State University.[153] For Ramona project he did a total of sixty-three illustrations: twelve full page, twenty-six chapter headings, and fifteen others, all in color produced from four-color acetate separations made by Gee after his black and white drawings. Thus, it contained more images than in Sandham’s 1900 Monterey editions, but although fewer than those by Stoops’ 1932 edition, it was nonetheless one of the most richly illustrated of all.
In two specific respects, Jackson’s work on this project emulated that done by Sandham. In preparing for his task, Gee reported that “going to Ramona places, reading related material, making sketches, etc. Also interviewing some very old people who knew the author.” And, unwittingly bringing to life again the old and by then long settled controversy about which ranch – Camulos or Guajome – was the model for the Moreno ranch depicted in the novel, stated he “was up to the Guajome ranch last week, the place where Ramona was written, where Helen Hunt Jackson lived until she had a fuss with the señora…The old ranch house, built about 1850, is the same as it was except for being rather run down. When one enters the patio he is definitely in another period of history. The lady who owns the place now permits me to go there and make drawings only because I have a friend whom she has known for fifty years or more who vouches for me.” Though Ramona was, of course, a fictional character, Jackson was taken like many before with the imagined reality of her existence, having “been to the site of Ramona’s home in the San Pasquale Valley” and seeing “artifacts associated with her hand.”[154] Like Sandham before him, the illustrator felt obliged to establish his bona fides by becoming familiar with the sites that inspired the novel.
The second and more important way in which Everett Gee Jackson emulated Sandham was the character of his program for the book’s illustration. Like Sandham, Jackson introduced each chapter with an illustration and did full-page portraits of Father Salvierderra and Felipe. His Salvierderra (Fig. 42), in fact, is a conceptual cousin to Sandham’s depiction of the Franciscan with Ramona in a flower-filled meadow on the frontispiece of the Monterey Edition’s Volume I (see Fig. 8). Jackson further enriches the story for the reader by inserting additional illustrations throughout the book, ranging in size from quarter- to three-quarter page in size. Among the largest are portraits of Alessandro and Ramona, thus essentially completing the cycle of full-page illustrations done by Sandham of each of the novel’s main characters. Thus, in one of the last illustrated editions of Ramona, the format and arrangement of illustrations acknowledge their debt to the artist who travelled with Helen Hunt Jackson and his vision for how the novel’s illustrations should serve the story. One key difference, however, is that unlike Sandham’s, Everett Gee Jackson’s illustrations do not always appear directly opposite the text whose scene they depict. As a result, the close correspondence between image and text that Sandham so effectively exploited is lost.
Fig. 42. Everett Gee Jackson (American, 1900-1995), Father Salvierderra, from Chapter IV, p.44 of the 1959 Limited Editions Club edition of Ramona, Private Collection
EPILOGUE
The 1959 edition of Ramona was the last American one that incorporated a significant number of new illustrations, done seventy-five years after the novel first appeared, nearly sixty after the first illustrated edition, and nearly twenty after the previous newly illustrated version. Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel continues to be reprinted, and Sandham’s illustrations have still appeared in the pages of some of the more recent ones. However faithful they may or may not be in depicting the main characters in the novel, their reuse may well rely on the fact that they resulted from their maker’s travels and friendship with Jackson prior to the publication of Ramona, giving them a perceived authenticity other illustrations could not claim to have. That they were made long ago, though not so long after the novel was first published, may have added an allure of antiquity that may also make them appealing to the reader. As has often been noted in a continuing and evolving scholarship on Ramona, Jackson would surely have been stunned to learn that her novel, written with the hope of inspiring action on behalf of California’s beleaguered mission Indians, had instead evolved into such an all-encompassing phenomenon of American popular culture, failed though it did to realize her hope that it would do what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did as a force to help bring an end slavery.
To many her prose now seems dated, overly sentimental in a way that perhaps detracts from what remains a powerful tale of love and social injustice, set against the romantic – and often romanticized -- background of California during its early decades of statehood. The novel’s continued popularity, it seems, stems in part from these essential elements of the story that are interwoven with issues of race and gender, with its narrative built around the complex history of Spanish, Mexican, and American colonialism that are sometimes confusingly presented within it. To be sure, these issues today take on a meaning far different than they did in Jackson’s time.
But how could these issues be seen by what today’s reader of Ramona would likely find in such sentimental story-telling? As Lisa Mullenneaux has recently noted in her 2019 article, “Doing Good and Making Trouble: A Look at Helen Hunt Jackson,” she and other scholars have sought to reframe how Jackson’s novel might be viewed.[155] Mullenneaux relates that in 1941 historian Allan Nevins posited that Jackson’s novel, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Up from Slavery, How the Other Half Lives, or The Jungle was as sentimental as any of these, noting that “America owes much to our long list of sentimental books.”[156] And even though Jackson’s novel failed to force a national reckoning regarding the treatment and condition of America’s Indigenous people, it sometimes had an unexpected effect on other seekers of moral justice. Mullenneaux cites political scientist Norman Finkelstein’s acknowledgement of Jackson’s novel in his own work on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: “The book was largely ignored, then forgotten, and finally rediscovered by later generations ready to hear and bear the truth.” For him, Jackson’s novel was a “searing requiem” that gave him encouragement to continue his own work.[157]
According to Jackson biographer Kate Phillips, the import of Jackson’s novel was that she “created the first figures in the long line of disappointed, deracinated heroes who populate the later southern California fiction writers as diverse as Nathaniel West, Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Pynchon, and Joan Didion.”[158] This, Mullenneaux states, is “Jackson’s true legacy.” It is this pervasive racism in a culturally diverse society that is central to Ramona that renders the novel relevant today. “One of the strongest arguments for rereading her work is that racism is still with us and multiculturalism a prominent theme in LA novels, like N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, Dorothy Hughes’ In a Lonely Place, Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love, Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls, Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People, and T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain.”[159]
Though the many illustrators and filmmakers—whose images informed the millions of Ramona’s fans—struggled and repeatedly failed over decades to show Ramona and Alessandro as who they were, there is a new and growing understanding that even with these flaws and the failure of Jackson’s novel to attain what she sought to achieve, her novel may yet serve a greater purpose in still other ways she would not have imagined.
1884 edition of Ramona: A Story, with endpaper design on the left, and cover on the right
Research for this study was supported in part by a grant from the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University. There are in addition several colleagues who deserve thanks for their generous assistance and encouragement: Phil Brigandi, Orange County Archivist and Curator of the Ramona Pageant Museum; Dydia DeLyser, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University; the late David J. Weber, Dedman Professor of History and Director, William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University; Andrea Boardman, Executive Director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University; Marianne Hansen, Special Collections Librarian, Bryn Mawr College; Hugh Munroe Neely, Film Curator, Mary Pickford Institute; Charles Silver, Film Study Center, Museum of Modern Art; Gail Stanislow, Librarian, Brandywine River Museum; Betsy Fahlman, Professor of Art History, Arizona State University; and Suzan Campbell, Gund Curator of Western Art and History, Eiteljorg Museum.
[1] “Ramona: A Story,” The Christian Union, May 15 to November 6, 1884. Jackson signed the articles “H.H.,” referring to the same pseudonym she used in earlier works.
[2] Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona: A Story (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884). Dydia DeLyser, Ramona Memories: Tourism and The Shaping of Southern California (Minneapolis: University of IMinnesota Press, 2005), 10, reports that “In a calculated effort to draw the most publicity and the widest audience in the shortest amount of time, Jackson sacrificed a larger fee in order to publish her novel first as a serial.” The book’s precise publication date is also reported in Valerie Sherer Mathes, Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 81. According to Chrisopher Camuto in his history of the firm in Peter Dzwonkoski, ed., American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638-1899. Part 2: N-Z (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1981), 393-398, Roberts Brothers, which operated in Boston from 1861 to 1898, began as a publisher of “standard juvenile literature” before turning to more serious works. Their lists included books by the English Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Christina Rosetti, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne; translations of Goethe; and American authors Louisa May Alcott (Little Women), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Ellery Channing, who wrote the first biography of Henry David Thoreau. In 1884, the same year Roberts Brothers released Ramona, they also published Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
[3] Mathes, 81.
[4] Jessy Randall, “But What Did She Really Look Like? Cover Art for Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona,” in Rethinking Regionalism 20[th] Century America Art and Visual Culture, edited by Rebecca Tucker with Julianne Gavino (Colorado Springs: Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, 2021), 68-84. Randall examines the evolution of cover designs for Jackson’s novel from its first edition in 1884 up through the 2008 Broadview Press edition and a limited number of more recent digital editions, with particular focus on how depictions of Ramona and, to a lesser degree, Alessandro are rendered with respect to their racial identities as described in the novel.
[5] Carlyle Channing Davis and William A. Alderson, The True Story of “Ramona” Its Facts and Fictions, Inspiration and Purpose (New York: Dodge Publishing Company, 1914), 18.
[6] Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 3.
[7] Macmillan and Company, 1884; S. Low, Marston & Co., before 1900; and Samspon Low & Co., 1911 and 1914. Editions of Ramona are listed in Dydia DeLyser, Ramona Memories: Tourism and The Shaping of Southern California (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 225-226.
[8] The German translation, which is not listed in DeLyser, is Ramona: eine Erzählung aus dem amerikanische Leben. Autorisierte deutsche Bearbeitung von Elizabeth H. Denio (Ramona: A Story from American Life. Authorized German Edition by Elizabeth H. Denio) (Leipzig: G. Böhme, 1886). A copy of this version can be found at in the Special Collections Department of UCLA’s Charles E. Young Library.
[9] Ramona, la conquête américaine de Mexique, roman anglais [Texte imprimé] par Hélène Jackson. Traduit part Mme. Henriette de Witt, née Guizot (Paris: Hachete, 1887).
[10] All of these Spanish language editions are printings of José Martís 1888 translation of the novel, first published in New York in 1888 as Ramona. Novela americana por Helen Hunt Jackson. Traducida del ingles por José Martí. According to Carlos M. Trelles, Bibliografía Cuban a del Siglo XIX. Tomo Septimo (1886-1893) (Matanzas: Imprenta de Quirós y Estrada, 1914; reprint Vaduz: Kraus Reprint Ltd., 1965), 106, the 1888 publication is “Segunda edición,” and includes Martí’s “Encantadora novella de la vida californiana,” and Max Henriques’ “Versión hecha con amor y esmerado cello.” A copy of this edition can be found in the Rare Books Division of the José Martí Library in Havana. The 1915 version (Havana: Imp. de Rabla, Bouza y Ca.), was edited by Gonzalo de Quesada; and is referred by Trelles, Bibliografía Cuban a del Siglo XX. Tomo Primero 1900-1916), 295, as “Tercera edición” and bears the description “La Sr.a Jackson á pesar de ser yanqui, fué la gran defensora de los indios de California, ye en su libro pinta el chocque de las dos razas, cuanda la invasion de los hombres del Norte en el 48.” A copy of this 1915 edition can be found at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. The Buenos Aires edition was published by the still extant newspaper La Nación as number 208 from its series Biblioteca de La Nación, and the art nouveau floral design on its cloth cover suggests a date around 1900; the edition does not contain a publication or printing date. It contains a preface by José Martí dated New York, September 1887 and is a reprint of Martí’s 1888 edition. I am grateful to Roberto Werner of Miami, who owns a copy of the Buenos Aires edition, for providing information about it.
[11] In addition to the first 1884 edition, these include those in 1885, 1886, 1887, 1899, 1900, 1903, 1905, 1907, 1912, 1913, 1915, 1916, 1922, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1928, 1932, 1935, and 1939.
[12] Mathes, 81
[13] The first with an Introduction by Michael Dorris, Afterword by Valerie Sherer Mathes (New York: Signet Classic, 2002); and the latter with an Introduction by Denise Chávez and notes by Andre Tinnemeyer (New York: Modern Library, 2005)
[14] The subject has recently been explored in depth by DeLyser, Ramona and The Shaping of Southern California, which includes in its excellent bibliography a lengthy section on “Published Materials Specifically Related to Ramona,” 229-244. The vast majority of the more than 300 items listed were published within the first fifty years following Ramona’s release, and of them more than 100 by 1920.
[15] “Camulos: The Real Home of Helen Hunt Jackson’s ‘Ramona,’” Los Angeles Times 13 January 1887.
[16] Charles Fletcher Lummis, Home of Ramona (Los Angeles: C.F. Lummis and Co., 1888).
[17] Elizabeth Baker Bohan, “Rancho Guajome: The Real Home of Ramona,” Rural Californian (November 1894): 585-592. The controversy is fully explored by DeLyser in chapters three, “Rancho Camulos: Symbolic Heart of the Ramona Myth” and four, “A Close Second: Rancho Guajome.”
[18] Pauleen Wiley-Kleeman, Ramona’s Spanish-Mexican Cookery: The First Complete and Authentic Spanish-Mexican Cookbook in English (Los Angeles: West Coast Pub. Co., 1929). Edited and modernized by Pauline Wiley-Kleeman.
[19] Ina Dillaye, Ramona, A Play in five Acts, adapted from Helen Hunt Jackson’s Indian Novel (Syracuse: F.LeC. Dillaye, 1887)
[20] Charles Albert Norcross, Ramona: A Drama in Six Acts (Reno: 1888). A copy of this rare text is in the Library of Congress.
[21] Noted by DeLyser, n. 39 on 207, as cited in U.S. Library of Congress, Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States.
[22] See DeLyser, Ramona Memories, Chapter Eight, “The Staging of a Novel.”
[23] Richard Griswold del Castillo, “The del Valle Family and the Fantasy Heritage,” California History Vol. LIX, No. 1 (Spring 1980), in which his caption on page 9 to a photograph reproduced on the preceding page reads, “A re-enactment of the first meeting of Ramona and Alessandro on the Camulos Rancho. The parts were played by residents of Camulos for the benefit of tourists.”
[24] The Ramona Pageant: A Pictorial History, 1923-1998 (Hemet: Heritage House Publishing, 1998). Jory played Alessandro from 1932 through 1939 and later directed the play in the 1940s.
[25] Kemp R. Niver, D.W. Griffith: His Biograph Films in Perspective (Los Angeles: Kemp R. Niver, 1974), iii-v.
[26] DeLyser, Ramona Memories, xxii. The credit reads “Adapted from the novel of Helen Jackson by arrangement with Little, Brown & Company – This production was taken at Camulos, Ventura County, California, the actual scenes where Mrs. Jackson placed her characters in the story.” My thanks to Hugh Munroe Neely and Keith Lawrence, both formerly at the Mary Pickford Institute (now the Mary Pickford Foundation), Los Angeles, for providing access to the Ramona film.
[27] These films are discussed in Alan Gevinson, ed., Within Our Gates: Ethnicity in American Feature Films, 1911-1960. American Film Institute Catalog (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 813-815.
[28] Emilio García Riera, ed., Historia documental del cine mexicano. Época sonora Tomo III: 1945/1948 (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1971), 104-105.
[29] Sandham’s participation is discussed briefly in James A. Sandos, “Historic Preservation and Historical Facts: Helen Hunt Jackson, Rancho Camulos, and Ramonana,” California History, vol. LXXVII, No. 3 (Fall 1998), 169-185.
[30] DeLyser’s otherwise dependable list of Ramona editions and printings is not complete: there was, for example, a two-volume edition published in Leipzig by Bernhard Tauchnitz as early as 1885 (Library of Congress); editions by Little, Brown and Company, Boston with illustrations from original photographs by A.C. Vroman published in 1913, as noted by DeLyser, and in 1915 (New York Public Library), 1916 (UCLA Library Special Collections), and 1925 by Little, Brown and Company, Boston (UCLA Clark Library); and the 1915 Spanish edition published in Havana.
[31] Mathes, 38.
[32] Phillips, 236. Bartlett’s report was Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua, Connected with the United States and Mexican Boundary Commission, during the years 1850, 51, 52, and 53, 2 vols., (New York and London: D. Appleton & Co., 1854).
[33] This chronology of events leading up to the publication of Ramona is based on Phillips’ chapter, “Indian Reform Work, Late Travel, Writing, and Ramona,” especially 236-254.
[34] For a recent study of Serra’s life and work, see Steven W. Hackel, Junípero Serra: Californai’s Founding Father (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013). Serra’s role in the founding of California’s Franciscan missions was romanticized in California in the late nineteenth century in a narrative that ignored the devastating effects of Spain’s mission enterprise on the state’s Indigenous people and culture. He remains a highly controversial figure, a controversy rekindled with his beatification by Pope John Paul II in 1988.
[35] Helen Hunt Jackson, “Father Junipero and His Work: A Sketch of the Foundation, Prosperity, and Ruin of the Franciscan Missions in California, I,” The Century Magazine Vol. XXVI, No. 1 (May 1883); the same title, part II, in Vol. XXVI, No. 2 (June 1883); “The Present Conditions of The Mission Indians in California,” Vol. XXVI , No. 4 (August 1883); “Outdoor Industries in California,” Vol. XXVI , No.6 (October 1883); and “Echoes of the City of Angels,” Vol. XXVI, No. 2 (December 1883) These essays are discussed in Phillips, 240-245.
[36] This episode in Jackson’s life is related in Mathes’ chapter, “Helen Hunt Jackson’s First Visit to the Mission Indians,” particularly 50-52.
[37] Jackson met Kinney on her first trip to California in 1881 and not wanting to travel alone and knowing he shared her concerns for the state’s mission Indians, asked Secretary Teller that Kinney be named co-commissioner. DeLyser, 7 and note 29.
[38] A full listing Jackson’s published books, articles, and poems; unpublished letters and manuscripts; and a bibliography of books and articles on her work is found in Phillips, 329-345.
[39] Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “How Ramona was Written,” Atlantic (November 1900).
[40] Christian Union, Vol. 29, No. 20 (May 15, 1884), 457, the magazine’s front page just below the Contents section; Jackson’s first chapter of Ramona begins on 462.
[41] DeLyser, 10.
[42] Roberts Brothers published numerous illustrated books, among them Christina Rosetti’s Poems with designs by Dante Gabriel Rosetti in 1866; and a two-volume illustrated edition of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy in 1869.
[43] All cited in DeLyser’s “Published Materials Specifically Related to Ramona,” these include Edward Roberts, “Ramona’s Home: A Visit to Camulos Ranch, and to Scenes Described by ‘H.H.’,” San Francisco Chronicle, 9 May 1886; Roberts, “The Home of ‘Ramona.” Scenes and Characters of Mrs. Jackson’s Novel – the Journal from Santa Paula – The Ranch and its Occupants – A Study in Identification,” New York Evening Post, 19 June 1886; “Ramona: The Greatest Attraction Yet Offered in the Way of Desirable Real Estate Investment,” Los Angeles Times, 16 November 1886; “Camulos: The Real Home of Helen Hunt Jackson’s ‘Ramona,’” Los Angeles Times, 13 January 1887; Charles Dudley Warner, “’H.H.’ in Southern California,” The Critic, 14 May 1887; Warner, ”Camulos: Charles Dudley Warner on ‘Ramona’s’ Home,” Los Angeles Times, 24 May 1887; “Unity Club. Basis of Fact in the Story of ‘Ramona, Discussed,” Riverside Press and Horticulturalist, 30 July 1887; an untitled announcement that many “pilgrims” visit Camulos, Ventura Free Press, 19 August 1887; “Old Town San Diego’s Suburb That Has Existed A Century: The Marriage Place of ‘Ramona,’” San Diego Union, 28 August 1887; Ninetta Eames, “Autumn Days in Ventura,” Overland Monthly, vol. 14, no. 84 (December 1889), 561-580. As for the popularity of Camulos Ranch, A.C. Vroman reports in his “Introduction” to the 1913 edition of Ramona (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, page xv), that the owners of the ranch were overrun with visitors: “We marvel at the patience of these good people when we are told that within nine months, by actual count, more than eight hundred meals were served to strangers, much against their desires.”
[44] Described in DeLyser, 72-74, with an illustration of the cover of this rare, rather homespun book by Lummis, who was a friend of the del Valle family that had owned the ranch on the former lands of Mission San Fernando since 1839. See DeLyser’s Chapter Three, “Rancho Camulos: Symbolic Heart of the Ramona Myth.”
[45] This rare if not unique album is in the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LOT 3119 (F). Randall, based for a period in Wilcox in what was then Arizona Territory, is known to have been a correspondent for Leslie’s Magazine from 1883 to 1887, and is associated (although not conclusively) with a number of photographs of Apaches, including one of Geronimo. Ramona lovers seem to have already taken matters into their own hands: The Huntington Library (Call # 318239) has an 1899 Little, Brown, and Company edition of the novel which “bound in throughout the text are leaves of Vroman’s The Genesis of the Story of Ramona.” Vroman’s book was published in 1899, the earliest date when this Ramona volume could have been made, but it obviously also could have been done later; precisely when cannot be determined.
[46] DeLyser, 84 and note 61; the copy is in DeLyser’s collection
[47] This unique two-volume illustrated version of the novel, bound in red morocco, is in the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA.
[48] A copy is in the Huntington Library, San Marino. Isaiah West Taber (1830-1912), was one of the most prominent studio photographers in San Francisco, beginning his work there in the 1860s and in 1876 acquiring numerous negatives of landscapes by the then bankrupt Carleton Watkins. For a brief biographical sketch and a reproduction of Taber’s c. 1880 photograph of Mission San Luis Rey, see Drew Heath Johnson, ed., Masterpieces of California Photography, 1850 to the Present (Oakland: Oakland Museum of California in association with W.W. Norton & Company, New York and London, 2001). An 1884 photograph by Taber of Mission San Carlos Borromeo is in a bound album entitled California Scenery & Industries. Published by Taber Photographer San Francisco, Cal. in the Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA.
[49] Published in Los Angeles by the Press of Kingsley-Barnes Neuner Co. A copy may be found in the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University. My thanks to the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU for a grant to support my research at the DeGolyer.
[50] The main studies of Vroman’s works are Ruth I. Mahood, ed., Photographer of the Southwest: Adam Clark Vroman, 1856-1916 (Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie Press, 1961); William Webb and Robert A. Weinstein, Dwellers at the Source: Southwestern Indian Photographs of A.C. Vroman, 1895-1904 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973); and Robert A. Weinstein, Craig Klyver, Suzanne G. Kenagy, and Jonathan Batkin, A.C. Vroman: Photographer and Collector (Los Angeles: Southwest Museum, 1989).
[51] This phenomena continued into the 1900s and 1910s, most notably with such publications as John Stevens McGroarty, San Gabriel Mission: The Birthplace of Ramona and the Fifth Station on El Camino Real (Los Angeles: E. Hutton, 1905); Edwin H. Clough, Ramona’s Marriage Place: The House of Estudillo (Chula Vista: Denrich Press, 1910); Margaret V. Allen, Ramona’s Homeland (1914); Carlyle Channing Davis and William A. Alderson, The True Story of “Ramona,”Its Facts and Fictions, Inspirations and Purpose (New York: Dodge Publishing, 1914). McGroarty was the author of The Mission Play, the popular outdoor pageant based on the life of Franciscan missionary to Alta California, Junípero Serra, which was held annually at Mission San Gabriel beginning in 1912. For information on McGroarty’s play, see Clyde Cook, “The Mission Play,” Sunset Magazine (September 1926), 34-35; Davis and Alderson, The True Story of “Ramona,” 105; and William Deverell, “Privileging the Mission over the Mexican: The Rise of Regional Identity in Southern California,” in David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner, eds., Many Wests: Place, Culture, & Regional Identity (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997), especially 248-253.
[52] They also appeared in Roberts’ 1886 book, Santa Barbara and Around There, for which Roberts Brothers was also the publisher. They are also reproduced and discussed in Sandos, “Historic Preservation and Historical Facts: Helen Hunt Jackson, Rancho Camulos, and Ramonana.” In his caption to these Camulos scenes, Sandos indicates that “Edward Roberts commissioned southern California artist Henry Chapman Ford to illustrate the second Roberts Brothers edition of Ramona in 1886,” 170. The illustrations, however, are found only in Roberts’ article, and cannot be considered illustrations to the novel itself. Moreover, the illustrations do not appear to be by Ford. Ford was indeed the illustrator of Roberts’ Santa Barbara and Around There, in which twenty-one of the book’s twenty-six illustrations include his signature in the plate; another bears the nearly illegible signature of another artist (Elmore D.G. Garrath?). The Camulos illustrations are unsigned and in any event are crude in comparison to Ford’s work in the book and elsewhere. Ford was a skilled draftsman who, among other things, in 1883 completed a series of etchings of all of California’s missions .
[53] Camuto, 398; and Bill Oliver, “Little, Brown, and Company,” in Dzwonkoski, ed., American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638-1899: Part 1: A-M, 270.
[54] The 74,000 figure is cited by Randall, 69.
[55] This biography is based on the entry “Henry Sandham” by Pierre Landry in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Vol XIII (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 923-924.
[56] These composites consisted of large numbers of individually posed albumen print photographs mounted together on a background painted with watercolor and gouache, the overall effect being a fusing together of the individual images. Sandham’s composites (40.4 x 66.1 cm) shows the members of the Terra Nova Snow Shoe Club in Montreal, and is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (no. 38435).
[57] Henry Sandham, “Notes on Ramona Illustrations,” in Ramona: A Story (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1900), Monterey Edition, xxxi.
[58] Four of Sandham’s sketchbooks have survived, all in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. One of the clothbound sketchbooks (number 28074) consists of fifty leaves containing some seventy drawings, almost all in pencil on the sketchbook’s buff colored paper, but with a few in either pastel, ink, or charcoal. Thirty leaves contain drawings from Sandham’s and Jackson’s California trip, several of which were models for either Jackson’s Century articles or her novel, and in some cases both. See Michael K. Komanecky, “Henry Sandham’s Illustrations to Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, National Gallery of Canada Review/Revue, Vol. VI, Winter 2008.
[59] Sandham, xxxii.
[60] Susan Chauncey Woolsey (1835-1905), who wrote under the name of Susan Coolidge, was a prolific writer of children’s stories. From the 1860s until her death she lived in her family’s Newport, Rhode Island home.
[61] The advertisement appeared in The Dial, Vol. XXIX, No. 342 (September 16, 1900), 161; and in the December 8, 1900 issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune.. My thanks to Anne Stewart O’Donnell, freelance writer and specialist on Ramona, for this reference.
[62] Sacker (1872/73 – 1965) was a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1889, and then taught bookbinding, book illustration, and cover design at the Cowles School of Design, where she remained until the mid-1940s. She designed book covers for Estes & Lauriat and its successor, L.C. Page & Co., as well as Little, Brown, and Company and Houghton Mifflin. Prior to her cover for Ramona, she designed covers for Balzac’s Comedie Humaine (Little, Brown, and Company, 1899), Théophile Gautier’s Captain Fracasse (L.C. Page & Co., 1897), and Edward Everett Hale’s The Man without a Country (Estes & Lauriat, 1899). Hale was a friend of Helen Hunt Jackson who guided some of her research before her trip to California for Century. Sacker’s monogram appears on the bottom of the Monterey Edition Ramona cover. My thanks to Richard Minsky for confirming the cover design to Sacker; he is the author of American Decorated Publisher’s Bindings, 1872-1929. Information on Sacker’s life and work has been published by Mark Schumacher, Reference Librarian at the University of North Carolina Greensboro on its website (http://library.uncg.edu/depts/ref/staff/mark/documents/sacker.htm).
[63] Another advertisement in the December 8, 1900 edition of The New York Times¸ page 41, describes the edition (incorrectly) as “300 copies printed on hand-made paper, with four water colors…gilt tops, ooze calf sides, $15.00 net.” If accurate, the ad indicates the price for the DeLuxe edition had risen three dollars since September. There were, however, 500 copies and the “watercolors” were color halftones; see note 58. The example illustrated here is from the Special Collections Department of the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA. A copy of the Monterey DeLuxe version may be found at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. What appears to have been a salesman’s dummy of the DeLuxe edition, consisting of the decorative cover, a sample of illustrations, and thirty-four pages of text was located at the Collector’s Cabinet of Teaneck, New Jersey.
[64] Cited in Little, Brown, & Company’s advertisement in the December 8, 1900 edition of The New York Times. My thanks to Anne Stewart O’Donnell for this reference.
[65] The halftone process began to be used commercially in the 1880s, quickly replacing line engraving as the means for reproducing artists’ works in magazines and newspapers. The process involved photographing the original through a fine screen, which separated the image into thousands of dots, larger dots for the dark areas and smaller for the light. Screens generally varied from 120 to 210 dots per square inch. The negative was affixed to a sensitized printing plate and etched, leaving only the dots. Depending on the density of the original screen (they generally varied from 120 to 210 dots per square inch), the resulting halftone print could be remarkably faithful to the tonal variations present in the original artwork. See Henry C. Pitz, 200 Years of American Illustration (New York: Random House, Inc., 1977), 41-42; and Luis Nadeau, Encyclopedia of Printing, Photographic, and Photomechanical processes: A Comprehensive Reference to Reproduction Technologies (New Brunswick: Atelier Luis Nadeau, 1989), vol. 1, 121-123.
[66] This same color ink is used for text on the title page
[67] The 1905 edition (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company) of Ramona was based on the 1900 edition, also done in two volumes and using the same basic cover design. It was smaller in size, however, lacked the embossed gold border and author’s name on the cover, and used only sixteen of Sandham’s twenty-four full-page illustrations, all of which were in black and white on a moderately glossy paper and without either of the cover sheets found in the Monterey edition . A copy of this edition is in the Haverford College Library, Haverford, Pennsylvania.
[68] See, for example, Jim Hughes, The Birth of a Century: Early Color Photographs of America. Photographs by William Henry Jackson and the Detroit Photographic Company (London and New York: Tauris Parke Books, 1994).
[69] Two such examples are the unsigned article, “The Golden State,” Harper’s Weekly, Supplement, Vol. XXII, No. 1116 (18 May 1878), 401-403; and Charles Dudley Warner, “Our Italy,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vol. LXXXI, No. CCCCLXXXVI (November 1890), 813-829.
[70] Jackson then settled in Los Angeles where she conducted research at the Bancroft Library for her Century articles. Subsequently commissioned by Secretary of the Interior to write a report on the condition of the Mission Indians in southern California, in July she and Abbot Kinney set out to visit eighteen Indian villages, returning in May 1883 to Los Angeles.
[71] My thanks to Caitlin Sharpe, Registrar, Colorado Springs Pioneer Museum for information on the painting, which was given to the museum in 1961 by the family of William S. Jackson.
[72] “Flowers were always dear to the Franciscans,” Vol. I, 63; “Clasping Carmena’s hand,” Vol. II, 56; “Ramona, my love!,” Vol. II, 305.
[73] Ramona, 40-41.
[74] See Ramona¸ 15-23. It is reasonable to assume from Senorita Moreno’s comments in the novel that her lineage includes descendants from Spain, New Spain, and Mexico. The exact time of the period of the novel is somewhat uncertain, though certainly decades after Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821. Texts in the novel refer to the period following the U.S.’s annexation of California and other lands as a result of the 1848 Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidlago following the Mexican-American War, as well as after the 1851 formation of the United States Land Commission and the 1862 Homestead Act – all of which affected disputes of ownership of lands in California and their resolution, a central theme of the novel. There is good reason to believe that Hunt set the novel in the period somewhere between 1870 and the time of her first travels to California.
[75] Ramona, 2
[76] Ramona, 3
[77] Henry Sandham, “Notes on Illustratoins,” in Ramona, xxxiv-xxxv
[78] Ramona, Vol. I, 61.
[79] Ramona, 119
[80] Ramona, 52. The study is
[81] Randall, 72
[82] The Ramona portraits in both the Monterey and Monterey DeLuxe editions are monochromatic, the former in shades of gray and the latter in sepia tones.
[83] Ramona, 101
[84] This diversity in New Spain was given pictorial form from the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries in works known as casta paintings. Made by some of the most important artists in New Spain, they were intended to reveal the different racial mixes that existed there, relegating each in a hierarchy according to how much Spanish blood each casta, or caste, possessed. This phenomenon has been explored by Iilona Katzew in Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005).
[85] December 8, 1900 edition of The New York Times, 41.
[86] Susan Chauncey Woolsey (1835-1905), who wrote under the name of Susan Coolidge, was a prolific writer of children’s stories. From the 1860s until her death she lived in her family’s Newport, Rhode Island home.
[87] My thanks to Hillary C. Mannion, Archivist of the Colorado Springs Pioneer Museum for confirming these volumes were owned by Jackson, which remain in the collection of materials from her house that is part of the museum as gifts in 1961 from the William S. Jackson Family Collection.
[88] Sandham could only have known such works from reproductions, as neither Rossetti’s paintings or those of his contemporaries and later followers were yet to be found in American art museums in 1900.
[89] The photograph Coolidge describes appears not to have survived, and there is no evidence that Coolidge conveyed Jackson’s comment regarding the photograph to Sandham, though it is possible they communicated during the production of the 1900 Monterey Edition.
[90] Other views of the veranda are found in “Margarita and Ramona,” Vol. I, 129; “When he played he sat on the upper step,” Vol. I, 178; and “Felipe, do you think Alessandro is dead?,” Vol. II, 285. The pencil drawing, on folio 33r of Sandham’s California sketchbook, shows a head-on view of the veranda and is labeled above it in pencil, “Camulos home of Ramona.” Since Jackson’s plan for the novel evolved only after this trip, Sandham must have added this notation either when he was preparing his illustrations for the 1900 edition, or even later.
[91] See Michael K. Komanecky and Clara Bargellini, et al., The Art of the Missions of Northern New Spain, 1600-1821 (Mexico City: Antiguo Colegio De San Ildefonso, 2009) for an examination the artistic legacy of Spain’s mission enterprise in what is today northern Mexico and the American Southwest.
[92] December 8, 1900 edition of The New York Times, 41. The notion of “glimpses” in this context seems to have had an unexpectedly long life, as Jackson’s series of 1882 Century articles were republished in first in 1886 as Glimpses of Three Coast (along with other travel articles by the author), and again in 1902 by Little, Brown as California and its Missions.
[93] Secularization was the term used to describe the newly formed Mexican government’s efforts to diminish the power of the Catholic Church, in part by transferring the missions’ operation from the Franciscans to diocesan control. Diocesan priests eventually supplanted the Franciscans, greatly minimizing efforts to continue efforts at conversion and socialization that took place at the missions. Subsequent seizure and redistribution of vast mission lands, along with it their agricultural and livestock economies, further impacted the Indian communities that had grown up around the missions. Secularization essentially became another tragic episode in the destruction of Indigenous people and their culture, even as they existed during the mission period.
[94] Antonio Peyri (1769-1840) was a Franciscan friar assigned to Mission San Luis Rey from its founding in 1798 until his departure in 1832.
[95] Jackson, “Father Junipero Serra and his Work,” in Glimpses of California and the Missions, 88, 92-94. Carleton Watkins did a series of large-scale photographs and stereographs of California’s missions from approximately 1875 to 1886 that clearly depict the dilapidated state of nearly all of its twenty-one missions. For the large, so-called mammoth plate photographs, see Christina A. Hult-Lewis and Weston Naef, Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011).
[96] Jackson, “Father Junipero Serra and his Work,” in Glimpses of California and the Missions, 47.
[97] Sandham, “Notes on the Ramona Illustrations,” xxxi-xxxii. The illustration shows the church in Los Angeles, which was built to serve the Spanish Catholic settlers of the city, and hence was not strictly speaking a mission church.
[98] DeLyser, 69.
[99] See Patricia A. Butz, “The Landmarks Club,” in Daniela P. Moneta, ed., Chas. F. Lummis – The Centennial Exhibition Commemorating His Tramp Across the Continent (Los Angeles: The Southwest Museum, 1985), 68-73; and Mark Thompson, American Character: The Curious Life of Charles Fletcher Lummis and the Rediscovery of the Southwest (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001), 185-186, 230-231, 246, 247, and 291-292. Lummis’ contemporary, fellow Southwest enthusiast, and sometimes rival, George Wharton James, also spoke out for the missions’ preservation; for a discussion of James, see Sherry Lynn Smith, “Out of Arizona: George Wharton James,” Chapter Seven in her Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), particularly 157-158.
[100] The evolution of mission imagery in California is discussed in Michael K. Komanecky, “New Spanish Missions in the American Imagination,” in The Art of the Missions of Northern New Spain (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007).
[101] Sandham’s illustrations were used repeatedly, for example in the 1907 “Pasasena Edition” by Little, Brown, and Company; and 1912, 1913, 1916, 1928, and 1935 editions by Grosset & Dunlap
[102] Subsequent printings of the Vroman edition include those in 1915 (New York Public Library and The Huntington Library, San Marino), 1916 (Special Collections Department, Charles E. Young Library, UCLA), 1925 (Clark Library, UCLA), and 1928 (Private Collection, Portland, Oregon).
[103] Vroman’s admitted purpose was to verify those sites, and to put at rest the ongoing controversy over which, for example was Jackson’s source for Moreno ranch, the competitors being Camulos Ranch, Guajome Ranch, and an “old adobe house at Old Town, San Diego.” He also identified the location of the sheep sheds as near Gaujome, as was the washing place; and “the old adobe house at Old Town is the Father Gaspara’s house, and not, as some call it a ‘Ramona Home.’” See Vroman’s “Introduction,” v and x.
[104] The 1913 Tourist Edition was published in a single volume, although it is divided into two sections called “Volume I” and “Volume II.” The book’s fifty illustrations could well have justified a two-volume version, as was the case in the 1900 Monterey Edition, but it is likely for reasons of cost and portability that it was condensed into one.
[105] All of Vroman’s plates are located on the right-hand page with two exceptions, the frontispiece from Volume I and the frontispiece from Volume II. Each has a tipped-in title and text sheet that covers it.
[106] Plate I is the frontispiece; Plate II appears on page 4, and each subsequent Plate 26 pages later. The same format is followed in Volume II, where following the frontispiece, Plate XV appears on page 30 and the subsequent Plates 26 pages apart.
[107] Only two, Plate XIII of “The Chapel Bells” and Plate XIX, “The South Veranda at Guajome,” are accompanied by text not taken from the novel.
[108] The text referred to is on pages 51 and 57 of Volume II, whereas this Plate XXIII appears on page 238.
[109] Robert M. Henderson, D.W. Griffith: The Years at Biograph (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1970), 28.
[110] Mrs. D.W. Griffith (Linda Arvidson), When The Movies Were Young (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1925; reprint by Dover Publications, Inc., 1969), 170.
[111] This synopsis of the history and importance of Griffith’s film is based on Kemp R. Niver’s D.W. Griffith: His Biograph Films in Perspective (Los Angeles: Kemp R. Niver, 1974), 130-132.
[112] Quoted in the entry on Ramona by Yuri Tsivian in Paolo Cherchi Usai, gen. ed., The Griffith Project, vol. 4 (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), 275.
[113] Pratt, 105.
[114] According to Gevinson, 813, “Ramona was the first film of the Clune Film Producing Co., formed by W.H. Clune after the success of The Birth of a Nation, which had its premiere in Clune’s Auditorium.”
[115] Gevinson, 813.
[116] Given that it was published a year before the film opened, it is possible the piece could also have been used to promote the film prior to its release, and afterwards. Such printed programs were common during the silent film era.
[117] Like other silent films of the era, music was written for them and played live by an orchestra in the theater during their showings.
[118] Flashbacks were rare in this period and even in the beginning of the sound era; one of the earliest is in . D.W. Griffith’s 1918 film, Hearts of the World.
[119] See “Red Wing,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Wing_(actress), accessed April 6, 2023. Red Wing was born February 13, 1873 or 1884 on the Winnebago Reservation and died on March 13, 1974 in New York City. She attended the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania founded in1879 as a boarding school to remove Indigenous children from their homes and families to force their assimilation into Euro-American culture.
[120] Marc Wanamaker, “Luther Standing Bear,,” in https://wwww.imdb.come/name/nm0822052/bio?ref =nm ov bio sm,
accessed March 4, 2023. Luther Standing Bear was born December 1, 1868 in Fort Robinson, Nebraska, and died Febrary 2, 1939 in Huntington Park, California. According to Wanamaker, Luther Standing Bear was one of the first students to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
[121] See “Joe de la Cruz,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe De La Cruz (actor), accessed April 6, 2023
[122] A copy of this edition is in the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library. Copies of the 1916 Clune production of Ramona are apparently very rare, and according to Phil Brigandi, may exist only in a single reel of its original ten to fourteen. Gevinson, 813, reports that it was released in varying lengths. Copies do not exist at UCLA’s Film & Television Archive, the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Study Center, or the American Film Institute.
[123] Carewe is also credited with having discovered Wallace Beery and Gary Cooper. The 1928 Ramona film is currently available on Amazon Prime.
[124] Mordaunt Hall, ”An Indian Love Lyric,” in his May 15, 1928 column, “The Screen,” reprinted in The New York Times Film Reviews, 1913-1968, Vol. 1 / 1913-1931 (New York: The New York Times & Arno Press, 1970), 445.
[125] Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona Traducida del Inglés por José Martí. Obras completas de José Martí, ordenadas y prologadas por Alberto Ghiraldo (Madrid: Compañia Ibero Americana de Publicaciones, 1929). A contemporary edition of Martí’s translation is Helen Hunt Jackson : Ramona. Novela Americana. Traducida del Inglés Por José Martí, New York, 1888, edición crítica . Jonathan Alcántar y Anne Fountain ( Doral, Florida : Sockcero, 2018). Marti’s translation has been the subject of recent scholarly study, including Robert McKee Irwin, ”Ramona and Postnationalist American Studies : On ‘Our America’ and the Mexican Borderlands, American Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 4 (December 2003), pp. 539-576 ; and more generally in Anne Fountain, José Martí, the United States, and Race (Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2014).
[126] See Leonel Antonio de la Cuesta, Martí Traductor (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1996).
[127] Helen Hunt Jackson: Ramona (Novela Americana). Traducida del inglés por José Martí. Obras Completas de José Martí ordenadas y prologadas por Alberto Ghiraldo. Volumen VIII (Madrid: Imprenta ARGIS, 1929)
[128] There apparently was also a Spanish-language radio broadcast in Caracas, indicated by the publication Ramona: Drama-Adapatación Radio-Teatral. Prólog por Alfredo Cortina (Caracas: Ediciones La Torre, 1938).
[129] See Colonel Charles Waterhouse, The Blue Book Illustrations of Charles Morton Stoops (Art Direction Book Company, 1999)
[130] The decision would have been based on the terms of the 1851 California Land Act, which empowered a three-person federal commission to determine the validity of Spanish and Mexican land grants in the state. The Commission’s decisions often not only prevented holders of these grants from retaining their lands, including those formerly part of missions and Indian lands. See William Wilcox, Land in California, the Story of Mission Land, Ranches, Squatters, Mining Claims, Land Scrip, Homesteads (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948).
[131] These illustrations range from a little less than half-page to nearly three-quarter page in size.
[132] “L. Wolfe Gilbert, Composer, Dead,” The New York Times. July 13, 1970.
[133] Copies of these French, Italian, and Spanish versions can be found in the UCLA Performing Arts Special Collections.
[134] Gevinson, 815.
[135] Gevinson, 814.
[136] Gevinson, 814.
[137] Gevinson, 814. As was typically the case for pictures produced by the major studios in this period, there was some shifting in the selection of actors and actresses for key parts. Rita Hayworth (then known as Rita Cansino) was chosen first to play Ramona, but Zanuck settled on Young.
[138] Jay Robert Nash and Stanley Ralph Ross, The Motion Picture Guide. N-R, 1927-1983 (Chicago: Cinebooks Inc., 1986), 2536.
[139] Gevinson, 814. The songs include “Senorita,” “Under the Redwood Tree,” and “Blessed by the Dawning (Sunrise Hymn)” and may be found in Song Gems from Ramona (New York: Movietown Music Corp., Sam Fox Publishing Co., 1936), a copy of which is in the UCLA Performing Arts Special Collections. As was typically the case for pictures produced by the major studios in this period, there was some shifting in the selection of actors and actresses for key parts. Rita Hayworth (then known as Rita Cansino) was chosen first to play Ramona, but Zanuck settled on Young.
[140] An edition examined in the Special Collections of West Chester University Library, West Chester, Pennsylvania. The dustcover on this copy bears an ISBN number, which did not come into use until 1969.
[141] See Christine Podmanizky, N.C. Wyeth: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania: Brandywine River Museum, 2010), Volume Two, nos. 1265-1268. The painting for the dust jacket design, with Ramona on horseback accompanied by Alessandro on foot, is the only one that has survived and is in the collection of Little, Brown and Company.
[142] According to Christine B. Podmaniczky, recently retired curator Curator of the N.C. Wyeth Collections at the Brandywine River Museum, the four illustrations “were probably done on Renaissance panels, a prepared hardboard panel manufactured by the F. Weber Company of Philadelphia. Wyeth used these panels for most of his illustration commissions at this time in his career. There is no mention of this commission in Wyeth’s correspondence; the paintings are dated 1939 based on his notes for his income tax return that year. Two of the paintings are missing; one, and possibly the fourth, are in a private collection. At this point in his career, Wyeth worked from detailed charcoal composition drawings which he transferred to panels by means of lantern slides. The Brandywine River Museum holds lantern slides made from the charcoal drawings for all four images; one of the charcoal drawings (Ramona and Alessandro on the narrow trail) has been located in a private collection.” My thanks to Podmaniczky for providing this information.
[143] Following the frontispiece illustration, the remainder is located facing pages 44, 234, and 371, respectively.
[144] Timothy D. Murray, “Grosset and Dunlap,” in American Literary Houses, 1638-1899. Part I: A-M, Peter Dzwonkoski, ed. (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1981), 186-188.
[145] Because Grosset and Dunlap simply added a cover to existing copies, the actual publication dates of their editions are not included in the book. The dating of two examples in the author’s collection is based primarily on stylistic analysis of the endpaper designs.
[146] Everett Gee Jackson illustrated a 1959 edition published in Los Angeles by Plantin Press for the Limited Editions Club.
[147] Pedro Pumar, Ramona: Drama-Adaptación Radio-Teatral. Prólogo por Alfredo Cortina (Caracas: Ediciones La Torre, 1938), a copy of which is in the Library of Congress.
[148] Emilio García Riera, ed., Historia Documenta del Cine Méxicano (Mexico City, Ediciónes Era, 1969-72), vol. 3, 104-105. My thanks to Phil Brigandi, curator of the Ramona Pageant Museum, for this reference and other useful suggestions regarding my research.
[149] See Margaret W. Fleming, “Limited Editions Club,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 46: American Literary Publishing Houses, 1900-1980 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1986).
[150] Information on this Limited Editions Club production, including on Frank Dobie and Everett Gee Jackson are from “The Monthly Letter of the Limited Editions Club,” 595 Madison Avenue, New York, April 1959, Number 305.
[151] J. Frank Dobie, “Introduction,” in Ramona: A Story by Helen Hunt Jackson (Los Angeles: Printed for the Members of The Limited Editions Club at The Plantin Press, 1959), xv.
[152] See Lilian Marks, Saul Marks: The Life and Work of a Singular Man (Los Angeles: Plantin Press, 1980)
[153] Two years before his Ramona project, Jackson illustrated another book whose subject dealt with Mexico: William H. Prescott’s Peru’s Conquest of Peru, originally published in 1845. Jackson traveled frequently in Mexico in the 1920s, and was a great admirer of the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Siquieros.
[154] Quoted from The Monthly Newsletter of The Limited Editions Club (April 1959, Number 305), 4.
[155] Lisa Mullenneaux, “Doing Good and Making Trouble: A Look at Helen Hunt Jackson,” Ploughshares (Spring 2019), Vol 45, No. 1, pages 188-196. Mullenneaux is an author and editor who teaches advanced research writing at the University of Maryland Global Campus,
[156] Mullenneaux,192, quoting Nevins from his 1941 essay, “Sentimentalist vs. Realist.”
[157] Mullenneaux, 193, citing Finkelstein’s Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015)
[158] Mullenneaux, 194, from Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.
[159] Mullenneaux, 195
