Author Jackson found new life in region

Helen Hunt Jackson -- author and champion of the American Indian -- is the most famous writer who ever lived in Colorado Springs.

But her life was marked by tragedy.

Born in Massachusetts in 1831, she married a military engineer who was killed in an explosion of his invention: a submarine gun. Their two sons died in childhood.

Afterward, she moved to Newport, R.I., and began writing articles and poems. Among her admirers was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called her ``the greatest poet in America.''

Plagued with bronchitis, she came to Manitou Springs in 1873 to take the mineral-springs cure. Falling in love with the area's mountains, streams and forests, she eagerly switched residences from the old Newport to the new one: Colorado Springs.

``The Peak greets the dawn of the day, and lifts a gilded finger of rock to salute the setting sun, and under the touch of the whirlwind makes sweet music on a granite harp,'' she wrote.

In 1875, she married one of Colorado Springs' most eligible bachelors: banker William S. Jackson. Since she was as vivacious and eccentric as Jackson was staid and stalwart, her friends described it as ``the wedding of a skylark to a turtle.''

But it was a happy union, even though the Colorado Springs elite -- envious of her ability to earn $3,000 a year -- accused her of being an atheist libertine who chanted over a witches' brew in Sanskrit.

Caring not a whit for high society, Jackson kept busy writing and enlarging her cottage at Weber and Kiowa streets, part of which has been preserved at the Pioneers Museum.

In 1879, she found a new cause: the plight of the American Indian. Two years later, at her own expense, she published ``A Century of Dishonor,'' an angry indictment of the U.S. government's Indian policies.

In 1884, she wrote the novel ``Ramona.'' This tragic account of a Mission Indian girl became an international sensation, doing for American Indians what Harriet Beecher Stowe's ``Uncle Tom's Cabin'' had done for slaves a few decades earlier.

During her last years, Jackson toured the United States as a government investigator. She died in San Francisco of cancer in 1885.

According to her wishes, she was buried above what is now Seven Falls. After the property owners began charging visitors 10 cents apiece to see her grave, her widower moved her remains to Evergreen Cemetery.

Her tombstone bears the simple inscription: ``Helen, wife of Wm. S. Jackson, died August 12, 1885.''