Ramona Memories: Fiction, Tourist Practices, and Placing the Past in Southern California

Abstract

Though today it is mostly forgotten, scholars have long written of the impact of Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel Ramona, about how it saturated southern California's landscape with new, Ramona-related tourist attractions and ultimately inspired a romanticized false past for the region. In this article, I reevaluate the landscape, the novel, and those scholarly interpretations, discovering what I consider, not simply a false past, but rather a new social memory for the region, one that was felt and practiced by the tourists (and locals) who visited the many Ramona-related landmarks. In particular, I explore the creation of two Ramona sites, the “Home of Ramona” and “Ramona's Marriage Place,” and detail how tourism and boosterism here intertwined to create attractions that were both profitable as well as meaningful. Using tiny traces scavenged in archives and private collections—souvenirs, postcards, photographs, and scrapbooks—I demonstrate how fact and fiction blurred to become mutually constitutive as a new, Ramona-inspired social memory became inscribed on the landscape and in tourists' lives.

Key Words:

• landscape
• Ramona
• social memory
• southern California
• tourist practices

Notes

1. But see May (1996) who interviewed tourists at home.

2. Gilbert (1999) uses guidebooks, as do Atkinson and Cosgrove (1998); Mike Crang (1996) uses postcards and photographs.

3. Ramona has gone through numerous editions and is still in print today. The most recent edition was published in 2002, with an introduction by Native American Studies professor Michael Dorris and an afterword by historian and Jackson scholar Valerie Sherer Mathes.

4. Californio is the term used for those of Mexican or Spanish descent living in Alta (now American) California before the American conquest. Though many Californios were poor or working class, others were wealthy and commanded large estates. These Californios were what became a landed aristocracy: some had been granted vast tracts of land by the King of Spain, and many more received land grants from Mexican governors after Mexican independence. Because of these land holdings (ranchos), they are also called rancheros. (Mc Williams [1946] 1973; Pitt 1966; Haas 1995).

5. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger (1983) note that such times of rapid and profound transformation are precisely when one expects the emergence of invented traditions—such as the Ramona Myth.

6. Examples of such books include Vroman and Barnes (1899), Hufford (1900), James (1908), Allen (1914), and Davis and Alderson (1914). For references to numerous articles, as well as the broader context, see DeLyser (1996, forthcoming).

7. Portions of this quote are presented here out of their original sequence. The tone, as well as the details, however, remain the same. For ease of reference, I have cited page numbers from the most recent (1973) edition of McWilliams's book. In order to underscore its long influence on the region's history and historiography, however, I cite it here and elsewhere as ([1946] 1973).

8. Maps mentioning Ramona-identified street and tract names can be found in City Planning Commission (1952; for the Ramona and Alessandro freeways), Pamphlet Map Collection (UCLA Special Collections), Real Estate Business Scrap Book (UCLA Special Collections), Cadastral Map Collection (UCLA Special Collections), and Thomas Brothers Map Company (2002). Advertisements and other items can be found in the collections the author and at the Ramona Bowl Museum, Hemet, California. Current telephone directories in southern California towns still list numerous Ramona-identified business names, some of which, such as Ramona Drinking Water, are still named for Jackson's heroine.

9. These efforts included Jackson's book, A Century of Dishonor (Jackson [1881] 1888), documenting white mistreatment of Native Americans. At her own expense, she sent a copy to each member of Congress, but she lamented that her book had little effect (O'Dell 1939).

10. As is typical of regional fiction, Jackson's work was not written for the people she described (neither for the Indians nor for the Californios in this case); rather, she wrote for an educated eastern (and midwestern) audience (see Brodhead 1994).

11. For the convenience of contemporary readers, I have referenced all page numbers to the most current edition of the novel (Jackson [1884] 2002).

12. Fortunately, Jackson's message was not entirely lost: after her death, others did take up her cause, establishing (among other things) the reservations she had recommended for the California Mission Indians (see Mathes 1990, 2002).

13. While California had been part of the United States for more than twenty years before Jackson's first visit, southern California, not well connected by rail and largely overlooked by the Gold Rush to the north, still featured vibrant elements of its Mexican-ruled past. This was especially true of the particular kinds of visits Jackson made: with her commission to report on the status of the Mission Indians, she traveled in remote and sparsely settled country, and deliberately sought out those who had governed the region and the Indians in the past—people like former mayor Antonio Coronel, then still living on his isolated rancho near what is now downtown Los Angeles, who carefully and deliberately attempted to preserve the lifeways of old (McWilliams [1946] 1973; Mathes 1990, 1998).

14. While not climatologically accurate, the phrase “semitropical” was often used in tourist brochures (see, e.g., Southern Pacific 1893) and is part of what McWilliams ([1946] 1973,; 96–112) termed “the folklore of climatology,” used to promote the region.

15. On Ramona's popularity, see McWilliams ([1946] 1973), and Mathes (1998). Sales were not only brisk from the start, they were consistent, and eventually nearly twenty different editions and numerous different translations were published.

16. This has long been a point of some controversy among those interested in Ramona and the novel's aftermath. While such controversy began as early as 1886 with the references cited elsewhere in this article, and while some recent scholars (see, e.g., Brigandi and Robinson 1995; Engstrand and Ward 1996; Mathes 1998; Phillips 2003) have managed to remain meticulously careful in the attributions they make about Ramona landmarks, as recently as 1998 those less exacting (see, e.g., Sandos 1998) continued to levy claims for Ramona-landmark status based, in part, on the notions that when Jackson visited certain southern California locations, she did so with the explicit intention of writing a novel, and that she brought her illustrator with her for that purpose. Although Jackson's death precludes any definitive resolution to this matter, her surviving voluminous correspondence leaves no question that even the very idea for the novel did not occur to her until after she had left southern California (see Jackson's letter of 5 February 1884 in which she states that the plot “flashed into [her] mind” after her return to Colorado; quoted in Mathes 1998, 313). Further, painstaking research into Jackson's southern California travels has revealed that illustrator Henry Sandham was, for example, not with Jackson when she visited Rancho Camulos; his drawings of that place were made on later visits (probably even after the novel was published), when Jackson was not present, and hence cannot be used as evidence that Jackson explicitly intended to model Ramona's home on that place (Mathes 1998, 207). More importantly, those who continue to fan the 120-year-old flames of Ramona-landmark controversy by focusing on the supposed “real” landmark status of any particular location overlook the fact that all places associated with Ramona are tied, not to fact, but rather to a work of fiction. More interesting, surely is the fact that, regardless of Jackson's mostly unknowable intentions, places that appeared to be described in a work of fiction have had a profound influence on landscape and social memory in southern California.

17. “H.H.” was a pen name used by Helen Hunt Jackson in many of her published works. She wrote Ramona under her own name but because of its renown “H.H.” was appended as well.

18. “The strangers who come with curiosity for Ramona” (author's translation).

19. The “restored” route ran past Camulos and several other Ramona landmarks, despite the fact that these were built after the secularization of the missions and thus could not have been part of any original route (see Pohlman 1974).

20. The Native Sons is a fraternal organization dedicated to the “perpetuation of the romantic and patriotic past,” (Conmy, 10, quoted in Griswold del Castillo 1980, 8–9).

21. The del Valles did actively resist some connections to the novel. For example, they vehemently denied any connection between Ysabel del Valle, the family's matriarch, and the wicked Señora Moreno of the novel (James 1908; Smith 1977; Griswold del Castillo 1980).

22. The del Valles sold Camulos to Swiss immigrant August Rubel, whose family still owns the property today. Interestingly, after closing the property for many years themselves, the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which severely damaged the building (crumbling one wall of “Ramona's bedroom,” for example), caused the Rubels to restore it as a museum, dedicated partly to the memory of the Home of Ramona (Smith 1977; Rancho Camulos Interpretive Forum, meeting, 27 September, 1998, minutes in the possession of the author).

23. More accurately, it was the site where Ramona and Alessandro's names were entered into Father Gaspara's marriage records. The actual ceremony, not described in the novel, was performed in the chapel (Jackson [1884] 2002).

24. Details about Getz can be found in “La Suen” (1910, 369), Miller (1940, 225–26), and San Diego Union (2 August 1934).

25. The first Ramona was filmed in 1910, directed by D. W. Griffith and starring Mary Pickford as Ramona; the second, made by Clune's Studios, appeared in 1914. The third starred Dolores Del Rio and appeared in 1928. The fourth, featuring Don Ameche and Lorretta Young, was released in 1938. See DeLyser (1996, forthcoming.)

26. See James 1908 for discussions of Virginia Calhoun's epic 1905 play, the script for which used the name “Camulos” for the rancho home of the Morenos. See also early Ramona Pageant programs, which, despite the fact that the pageant itself was staged near a number of other Ramona landmarks, still named the settings for Ramona's home “Camulos” (Ramona Pageant Files, Romona Bowl Museum Library).

27. A copy of the film is available at the Library of Congress.

28. This practice, of course, is not confined to Ramona-related sites. Leaving objects at holy places and carving one's name at sites of significance have been important tourist practices for centuries, and they continue today at such varied places as the Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington, DC, and Elvis Presley's home at Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee (Sturken 1997; Richardson 2001; Alderman 2002).

29. See Brodhead (1994). Allen (1914) notes that tourists read Ramona in preparation for a visit; Los Angeles Times reporter Harry Carr and his family were among those tourists (see Carr 1935).