Helen Hunt Jackson and the Century of Dishonor

She came to Colorado Springs in eighteen seventy-three as Helen Hunt, a widow and one of the most admired poets in America. She married William Jackson, a local businessman, and became Helen Hunt Jackson, and for a while her connection to the mountains where she settled seemed entirely personal. Then, in the autumn of eighteen seventy-nine, she attended a lecture in Boston and everything changed.

The speaker was Standing Bear, a Ponca chief who had just walked out of a federal detention order in what is now Nebraska, walking through winter to return his son's body to the ancestral burial ground. His case had drawn national attention and eventually a federal court ruling, the first to hold that a Native American person was legally a person under the law. Jackson sat in the audience and was, by her own account, transformed.

She spent the next two years in the Astor Library in New York reading treaty documents, War Department reports, and records of federal dealings with the Delaware, Cheyenne, Sioux, Nez Perce, Ponca, Winnebago, and Cherokee nations. In eighteen eighty-one she published the results as A Century of Dishonor, a precise and systematic accounting of broken promises, forced removals, and legal violence. She sent a copy, bound in red to signify the blood it described, to every member of Congress.

The book helped create the Indian Rights Association within a year of publication and contributed to passage of the Dawes Act of eighteen eighty-seven, though historians debate whether that act's outcomes were as humane as Jackson intended. Her papers are held at Colorado College. She died in San Francisco in eighteen eighty-five, at fifty-four, and her remains were returned to Colorado Springs, to Evergreen Cemetery, as she had requested.