We all agree that part of California's natural wonder derives from the variety of its landscapes. But is it really true that each of our regions requires its own artistic interpreters?
In the 1880s, Helen Hunt Jackson traveled throughout California, studying its history and exulting in the beauty of its terrain. Here she describes the wild chaparral of a mountain canyon.
These oak-and-sycamore-filled cañons are the most beautiful of the South California cañons; though the soft, chaparral-walled cañons would, in some lights, press them hard for supremacy of place. Nobody will ever, by pencil or brush or pen, fairly render the beauty of the mysterious, undefined, undefinable chaparral. Matted, tangled, twisted, piled, tufted,—everything is chaparral. All botany may be exhausted in describing it in one place, and it will not avail you of another. But in all places, and made up of whatever shrubs it may be, it is the most exquisite carpet surface that Nature has to show for mountain fronts or cañon sides. . . . Some day . . . when South California is at leisure and has native artists she will have an artist of cañons, whose life and love and work will be spent in picturing them—the royal oak canopies; the Herculean sycamores; the chameleon, velvety chaparral; and the wild, throe-built, water-quarried rock gorges, with their myriad ferns and flowers.
James Marshall's golden discovery brought the world to California, but considering the eventual consequences, maybe everyone should have stayed home.
After her first visit to the Golden State, Helen Hunt Jackson also seemed to regret the arrival of the California Argonauts. In "Ballad of the Gold Country," she paints a dreary picture of the gold fields after they've played out and made men poorer for their greed.
The years ran fast. The seekers went All up, all down the golden lands;
The streams grew pale; the hills were spent; Slow ran the golden sands.
And men were beggars in a day, For swift to come was swift to go;
What chance had got, chance flung away On one more chance's throw.
And bleached and seamed and riven plains, And tossed and tortured rocks like ghosts,
And blackened lines and charred remains, And crumbling chimney-posts.
For leagues their ghastly records spread Of youth, and years, and forturnes gone,
Like graveyards whose sad living dead Had hopeless journeyed on.
"Ballad of the Gold Country" was included in Helen Hunt Jackson's collection Poems, published in 1892, seven years after her death.
The colors of California's native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees provide us with a varied pallet for the eye. Add to these wild hues colors from cultivated orchards, and the variety is just about overwhelming.
Helen Hunt Jackson described this complex, colorful blending of southern California's luscious mid-summer flora in her novel, Ramona.
The almonds had bloomed and the blossoms fallen; the apricots also, and the peaches and pears; on all the orchards of these fruits had come a filmy tint of green, so light it was hardly more than a shadow on the gray. The willows were vivid light green, and the orange groves dark and glossy like laurel. The billowy hills on either side of the valley were covered with verdure and bloom,—myriads of low blossoming plants, so close to the earth that their tints lapped and overlapped on each other, and on the green of the grass, as feathers in fine plumage overlap each other and blend into a changeful color.
Published in 1884, Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona was then hailed as "the best novel yet produced by an American woman."
Mustard, photographed by Rodney Friedrich, 2009. Larger.
Hillsides and fields covered with lovely yellow mustard have long been such familiar sights in California that it's hard to imagine the tenacious plant is not a California native.
It is said that mustard was introduced to California by missionaries and that the plants spread wild across the state. In her 1884 novel Ramona, a critique of American Indian policy disguised as a tragic tale of love, Helen Hunt Jackson offers a description of the emigrant plant, a metaphor for the human emigrants that would spread across the state.
The wild mustard in Southern California is like that spoken of in the New Testament, in the branches of which the birds of the air may rest. . . .
The stems are so infinitesimally small, and of so dark a green, that at a short distance they do not show, and the cloud of blossom seems floating in the air; at times it looks like golden dust. With a clear blue sky behind it, as it is often seen, it looks like a golden snow storm. The plant is a tyrant and a nuisance,—the terror of the farmer; it takes riotous possession of a whole field in a season; once in, never out; for one plant this year, a million the next; but it is impossible to wish that the land were freed from it. Its gold is as distinct a value to the eye as the nugget gold is in the pocket.
With Ramona Jackson sought to raise awareness of the poor treatment of California Indians by the American government. Unfortunately, Jackson's aims got lost in her love story. Even so, Ramona remains one of the most familiar of California novels and it has inspired an annual pageant in Hemet, near the novel's original southern California setting.
"Helen Hunt Jackson," photographer, date unknown. Larger.
Californians have long been used to natural forces that visit destruction here, fire, storm, and earthquake among them. But once in awhile it's soothing to remember that Nature also provides a balm for the afflicted spirit.
In her 1884 California romance, Ramona, Helen Hunt Jackson tells a story of doomed Indian lovers, a vehicle for conveying her serious theme of the ills that had been suffered by Indians because of flawed land policies. But in the midst of her tragedy, Jackson can't resist writing a narrative aside, reminding readers of the soothing powers of Nature.
Nothing is stronger proof of the original intent of Nature to do more for man than civilization in its arrogance will long permit her to do, than the quick and sure way in which she reclaims his affection, when by weariness, idle chance, or disaster, he is returned, for an interval, to her arms. How soon he rejects the miserable subterfuges of what he had called habits; sheds the still more miserable pretences of superiority, makeshifts of adornment, and the chains of custom! "Whom the gods love, die young," has been too long carelessly said. It is not true, in the sense that men use the words. Whom the gods love, dwell with nature; if they are ever lured away, return to her before they are old. Then, however long they lie before they die, they die young. Whom the gods love, live young—forever.
Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, while vastly popular, did not create the sympathy that Jackson intended. Nonetheless it is a staple of California literature, a fictional romance that despite its sentimentality continues to draw new readers.
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