The Eviction of Eighteen Seventy Five and Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona

In eighteen seventy five, the Luiseño community that had lived in the Temecula Valley for generations was forcibly removed from their land. The Rancho Temecula had passed through several owners since the Mexican land grant era, and its American owner had obtained a court order to evict the indigenous families still living there. United States marshals carried out the eviction.

Luiseño families were given little time and allowed to take few possessions. They were pushed off their agricultural fields, their orchards, and their village sites, and compelled to relocate to the Pechanga spring area several miles away, a place the tribe called Pecháa'a. It was a dispossession at gunpoint: people removed from land their ancestors had occupied for millennia.

Helen Hunt Jackson, a Massachusetts journalist who had become one of the most vocal critics of federal Indian policy, visited Southern California in eighteen eighty three and documented conditions in which the Luiseño lived. She wrote a report for the federal government and then turned her observations into a novel. Ramona, published in eighteen eighty four, follows Luiseño characters Alessandro and Ramona who are expelled from their Temecula village in a scene drawn directly from the events of eighteen seventy five.

Jackson intended the book as a protest novel, hoping to do for Native Americans what Harriet Beecher Stowe had done for African Americans with Uncle Tom's Cabin. The protest was largely lost. Ramona became a California romance, spawning festivals and tourism.

The injustice that inspired it faded from the story the book became.