Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp.
Chapter XXVI Our Literati
"[p, 337] Literary savants are a trifle sniffy about the contributions of our poblardores to the cause of literature. They say we have never produced the proper saga of the land and the soil. That most of our California fiction might have happened anywhere; that it is California only because the title reads so. It lacks the flavor of a home crop. If this be true, it is because the authors all came from somewhere else and are writing for people who live somewhere else.
"The outstanding name in Southern California literature is Helen Hunt Jackson [1830-1885], author of Ramona. She was a Colorado school-teacher who came here on a government commission to investigate the wrongs done the California Indians.
"A great many versions have been given of the birth of that novel. The one I believe was told to me by the woman who told Mrs. Jackson the story upon which she based the [p. 338] book. She was a Mrs. Jordan who lived in the town of San Jacinto-the scene of the novel. Mrs. Jackson had been gathering data relating to the burning of the Indian town of Temecula and was a house guest of Mrs. Jordan's. One morning as they were washing the breakfast dishes, Mrs. Jordan told her about the murder of an Indian named Juan Diego.
"Juan Diego was a little crazy and was married to a woman named Ramona Lubo. He was a Soboba Indian; she a Cahuilla. One day by mistake he took from the town hitching-post a horse belonging to a man named Sam Temple. Sam trailed his horse to Juan Diego's little hut on the edge of the reservation and when the Indian came running out to explain, shot him dead in his tracks. Nothing was done to Temple; killing an Indian was only an incident.
"From that little tragedy, Mrs. Jackson built Ramona. With a novelist's license she changed the simple Indian woman into the adopted daughter of a Spanish family. To get the proper atmospheric background she made a trip to the Camulos Ranch which she described exactly and in detail-even to the thorn bushes upon which Ramona tore the altar cloth. The elopement of Allesandro and Ramona she based on an incident that had been a skeleton in the closet of another Spanish family. In the real story, the Indian lover was brought back and whipped. Many of the data about California customs were given to Helen Hunt Jackson by Don Antonio Coronel and his wife, who lived in an ancestral adobe house on East Adams Street.
"The author had no idea that Ramona was to be any great shakes. Quite the contrary, she expressed to her friends the fear that she had spoiled it as a story by putting in too much Indian propaganda.
"The Californians were not pleased with the book. The del Valles of the Camulos Ranch were furious because they [p. 339] thought her portrait of Senora Moreno was a reflection on their mother. Also they were scornful of her decision-for some unaccountable reason-to give her hero the Italian name Allesandro. The Spanish version of Alexander is Alejandro.
"[p. 339] Nevertheless, Ramona is still a best-seller after more than half- a- century. Her tragic, bitter-sweet love story has been filmed three times in the movies and she has become a legend in the land. There are as many houses where Ramona is supposed to have been married as there are houses where George Washington slept. For the entire period of his life George Washington must have got up about once an hour and moved to a new house and a new bed. Inference would make of Ramona a female Brigham Young who married nearly everybody at one time or another.
"The real Ramona lived to be a very old woman and never quite understood what her fame was all about. It was enough for her that white people were willing to pay her twenty-five cents a shot for photographing her. She had a son named Condido Hopkins who is still living and periodically demands that he be paid some kind of royalty by the movies because his mother gave Helen Hunt Jackson inspiration for a novel. By an odd coincidence Mrs. Jackson selected the name from two women. At the burned-down Indian town of Temecula was a trader name Wolff who had a daughter named Ramone Wolff. The Indian woman's name was also Ramona Wolff-Ramona Lubo-lubo being the Spanish for wolf.
"Sam Temple lived on at San Jacinto for several years after the killing of Juan Diego but as the book became popular, he became uncomfortable under the accusing eyes of the tourists and moved away. He died a few years ago. Ramona is also dead. So far as I know none of the persons from whom Mrs. Jackson took the characters of Ramona [p. 340] are now living. The last one was Mrs. Jordan, who was "Aunt Rye" in the book.
"[p. 340] Take it all in all, Ramona is still the best transcription of life on the ranches of early California."
[Ramona's Home, Camulos Ranch, showing Century Plant in Bloom, California Post Card, A-33852 Published by Western Publishing & Novelty Co., Los Angeles, Cal., Theo. Sohmer, Los Angeles, Unused, Undated, JT, Postcards Adrift, See Image
The Ramona Pageant 1993 Postcard Ramona Pageant Association, 27400 Ramona Bowl Road, Hemet, CA 92344 KR 1993, See Image