Story, author remain deeply rooted in city’s history
When Helen Hunt Jackson moved to Colorado Springs in 1873, the town was 3 years old.
According to Jackson’s travel journal, the two biggest buildings were the Deaf and Dumb Asylum and a stone schoolhouse. Manitou Springs had three large hotels and several boarding houses in poor condition. There were plenty of bakeries and a billiard hall.
Her travel journal, published in 1878 and titled “Bits of Travel at Home,” describes her first impressions of the town of 3,000.
“It was a grey day in November,” she wrote. “There stretched before me to the east, a . . . desolate plain. There rose behind me to the west a dark range of mountains. Between lay the town - small, straight, new, treeless. One might die of such a place. Death by disease would be more natural.”
But Jackson changed her outlook, soon referring to the area as the town west of the sun.
“Colorado Springs is not rich,” she wrote.
“There are no big houses; there is no fast living; its ways are country ways; showy clothes and ostentatious entertainment would be ridiculous.”
The East Coast widow had grown to love the West.
Jackson was born Helen Fiske in Amherst, Mass., on Oct. 15, 1830. In 1852, she married Edward Hunt, captain of the U.S. Corps of Engineers. They had two sons, neither of whom lived through childhood. Edward Hunt died in 1863 in a military accident with a submachine gun he invented.
Heartbroken, Helen turned to writing poetry and short editorials for such periodicals as the New York Evening Post before heading west to Colorado.
“Her coming here was an escape to get away from death,” says Matt Mayberry, Pioneers Museum public programs coordinator.
“She was surrounded by death, and that has lots of impact on her work.”
Like many people of the time, Jackson moved to the Springs under doctor’s instruction; she had bronchitis. Here, she fell in love with Col. William S. Jackson and the two were married in 1875. Together, they made their mark on the region.
William Jackson was an officer of the Denver and Rio Grande Railway and founder of the El Paso County Bank.
But Helen Hunt Jackson made an impression that has endured for decades.
“Lots of places in town have a connection to Helen Hunt Jackson,” Mayberry says. “She was an integral part of the Pikes Peak region.”
Jackson’s home, for example, was at the corner of Kiowa and Weber streets, at 230 E. Kiowa. It was torn down in 1961 to build the city police headquarters; the Municipal Court Building sits there now.
Jackson’s novel, “Ramona,” also is seen all over town. Ramona Avenue is in the Ivywild neighborhood. At the turn of the century, there was a Ramona Hotel on Ute Pass. In 1913, saloons opened north of 24th Street at the outskirts of present-day Old Colorado City. That small area was called Ramona.
“Ramona is everywhere,” Mayberry says. “The town Ramona started as a place to drink because Colorado Springs was dry. People wanted to drink and opened their own town.”
Today, the small town of Ramona has been incorporated into Colorado Springs.
Jackson’s favorite place in the region was Cheyenne Mountain.
“She went on carriage rides almost every day to Cheyenne Mountain when it wasn’t raining,” says Ginny Kiefer, curator of special collections and an archivist at Colorado College’s Tutt Library, home to many of the writer’s journals and manuscripts.
Jackson dedicated one chapter in “Bits of Travel at Home” to Cheyenne Canyon.
“There are nine places of divine worship in Colorado Springs,” she wrote. “Presbyterian, Cumberland Presbyterian, Methodist, Sineth, Episcopalian, Congregationalist, Baptist, Unitarian, and Cheyenne Canyon.”
Kiefer says Jackson never went to church, but on Sundays she would sit on Cheyenne Mountain and wave at worshipers leaving church.
“The people didn’t like that too much,” Kiefer says.
Jackson wrote several poems about Cheyenne Canyon and its scenery, so it’s appropriate that the waterfall there is named for her.
Before Jackson died of cancer in 1885, she asked to be buried in Cheyenne Canyon.
However, so many people flocked to her gravesite that in 1892, to prevent them from destroying the canyon’s natural beauty, her body was moved to Evergreen Cemetery.