LETTER: Autograph letter signed to General F.A. Walker.
Jackson, Helen Hunt. ALS “Helen Jackson” to General F.A. Walker. May 23, 1880; one leaf, folded to make four pages, writing on all sides.
Jackson (1830-1885), an American writer and activist, writes to General Francis Amasa Walker whist researching her book A Century of Dishonor (1881), a depiction of the plight of ill-treated Native Americans by the U.S. government. Walker, a former Civil War General, was one of the most prominent figures in the history of American economics and an acclaimed scholar of politics and economics. In 1771, he was appointed Indian Affairs Superintendent, a government position designated to address land distribution problems regarding displaced Native American tribes and the 1871 Congressional rejection to acknowledge “Indian nation or tribes within the territory of the United States [as]…an independent nation, tribe, or power, with whom the United States may contract by treaty” (Indian Appropriations Act of March 3, 1871).
In her letter, Jackson writes to Walker to first thank him for “the permission to use part of your chapter on the situation of the Indian tribes,” referring to a portion of A Century of Dishonor where she quotes statistics Walker gathered in his Commissioner’s reports on the number of Native Americans living in particular U.S. locations. Unlike Jackson, Walker “harbored no benevolence” for Native Americans, calling them “voluptuary,” “garrulous,” “lazy,” and “beggar-like” after meeting various chieftains on an expedition along the Platte River (Munroe, James P. A Life of Francis Amasa Walker. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1923. 131-135). Jackson angrily addresses this difference of opinion regarding the government’s treatment of Native Americans in her fiery letter. She writes, in part:
I wish very much I could meet you, and learn from your own lips, how it is that you think “our legislation has been honorable and even kindly.” I can see in it only dishonor and cruelty. It is by “legislation” that the Indians have been moved and moved and moved and moved again—each time, without fair equivalents for their lads: it is by “legislation” that they are imprisoned on their reservations, like convicts in jails; the only difference being in the size of the jail…The little that the government has [assisted] in way of food and clothing, over and above what it owed them for their lands, is small offset for what it has withheld from [them], of just and promised dues. I must confess that I am utterly at loss…
She ends her letter expressing a wish to “see you and hear your views at length,” suggesting, “when I return from Europe in Sept., I have hope I may have that pleasure.” She ends: “The Messrs. Harper will publish my book next autumn…in time I think to have some effect on the winter’s longness.”
A Century of Dishonor, and another, 1884’s Ramona (a fictional dramatization of Native American mistreatment in Southern California), would be published within the last five years of Jackson’s life. Ramona would go on to attract a considerable amount of attention to Jackson’s Native American cause, despite its popularity stemming from the novel’s plot and romanticized depiction of their lives.
Helen Hunt Jackson began her career writing poetry under the pen name “Marah,” writing fluently through the 1860s and 70s (She disliked the alliterative sound of “Helen Hunt”). After the publication of her 1970 poetry collection Verses, she “became the favorite of Emerson, who thought her the best woman poet in America” ([ed. James, Edward T.] Notable American Women 1607-1950. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. 260). In the mid-1970s, Hunt awakened to the activism plight, abandoning her fiction to “fight for the cause,” mailing copies of A Century of Dishonor to nearly every influential figure in the U.S. government on her dime. Her tour de force came with her 1883 government report, which she proposed to provide extensive relief for Native Americans through the purchasing of new lands for reservations and the establishment of Indian schools. A bill based on her report passed the U.S. Senate but died in the House of Representatives (Evelyn I. Banning, Helen Hunt Jackson. New York: Vanguard Press, 1973).
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