Jackson

novelist, philanthropist, better known as Helen
Hunt Jackson, was born in Amherst, Mass., the
daughter of Nathan Welby and Deborah (Vinal)
Fiske. Her father, a graduate of Dartmouth,
taught Latin and Greek and later moral philoso-
phy and metaphysics at Amherst College. Her
mother, a Bostonian, died of consumption in
1844. There were four children, two sons who
died in infancy and two daughters, Helen and
Anne. Cared for by an aunt, Helen was given
a somewhat desultory education at Ipswich Fe-
male Academy, Mass., and at the school of the
Abbott brothers in New York City. She was an
early neighbor and schoolmate of Emily Dick-
inson, and the two remained lifelong friends.
She was married, Oct. 28, 1852, to Edward Bis-
sell Hunt, a brother of Washington Hunt [q.v.'],
and they led the roaming life of a military fam-
ily. Her husband was lieutenant, captain, final-
ly major of an army corps of engineers. He had
devised a submarine sea-projector called a "sea-
miner/' and in 1863 he was accidentally killed
by suffocation when experimenting with it.
Their first son, Murray, died, aged eleven
months, in 1854, and the remaining son, Warren
Horsford, known as "Rennie," died in April
1865. Her parents, husband, and sons dead, she
felt utterly bereft. The1 love affair between Emily
Dickinson and Edward Hunt, assumed in the
book on the poet by Josephine Pollitt, rests on
the slenderest of foundations. The tradition
among Mrs. Hunt's relatives is that Captain
Hunt rather disliked Emily, terming her "un-
canny/1

Hitherto Mrs. Hunt had exhibited few signs
of literary gift; her life had been domestic and
social. She returned in 1866 to Newport, R. I.,
where her husband had been stationed for a time.
Here she made the stimulating acquaintance of
T. W. Higginson. Her first well-known poem
was contributed to the newly established Nation,
1865, three months after Rennie's death. Her
first published prose sketch appeared in 1866 in
the New York Independent, for which she wrote
between three and four hundred articles and
book reviews, besides writing for Hearth and
Home and other publications. In 1868-70 she
traveled abroad, writing the papers afterward
published in Bits of Travel. Her first volume,
Verses, was published in 1870. During the sev-
enties and early eighties most of the leading
magazines published work from her versatile and
prolific pen. She wrote, testified Higginson,
theti her literary adviser, the rnuch-speculated-
about Saxe Holtn stories, published in early
numbers of Scribner's Monthly, though she
never admitted their authorship.

Jackson

In May 1872 she took a trip to California,
and then, for bronchial trouble, passed the winter
of 1873-74 at the Colorado Springs Hotel, in
Colorado. While there she met William Sharp-
less Jackson, a banker, financier, promoter, and
railway manager, whom she married on Oct. 22,

1875. Colorado Springs remained her home for
the last decade of her life. Her novel, Mercy
Philbrick's Choice, was printed in Boston in

1876, in the No-Name series, succeeded by Het-
ty's Strange History and Nelly's Silver Mine.
During her western life she began to feel an
interest in the Indians, which reached a climax
when she heard two Indians lecture in Boston in
1879 or 1880 on the wrongs of the Poncas. Af-
ter spending many months in the Astor library,
New York City, she made a report, A Century
of Dishonor (1881), a document of 457 pages
sketching the dealings of the government with
the Indian tribes. This she sent to each member
of Congress at her own expense. In 1882 she
was appointed by the government as a special
commissioner, with Abbot Kinney of Los An-
geles, to investigate the condition and needs of
the Mission Indians of California, and in 1883
she had a report ready. When she felt that her
efforts had brought no results, she turned to
fiction and set forth her indictment of the treach-
ery and cruelty of the government's treatment of
the Indians in Ramona (1884). The book went,
however, far beyond its intention, and has great-
er appeal as a romance of the passing of the old
Spanish patriarchal life in California than it has
as a "problem" story.

She continued to be a prolific writer of verse,
juvenile literature, travel sketches, moral essays,
household hints, and novels till her death. She
signed her name to little of her work save at the
last, though for a time she wrote over the initials
"H. H." Much of her prose work may never be
identified, for her aversion to publicity was an
obsession and she liked to mystify her readers.
After a prolonged illness she died at the age of
fifty-four. She was buried near the summit of
Cheyenne Mountain, in a place selected by her-
self. Later, to escape the commercialization of
the spot and the vandalism of relic-hunting tour-
ists, her body was removed to Evergreen Ceme-
tery at Colorado Springs, where it remains. She
is described by her contemporaries as brilliant,
impetuous, intensely conscious, always charm-
ingly dressed, and in many respects fascinating.
They add that she united business acumen to her
gifts of mind and personality. The following are
Mrs. Jackson's main publications: Verses (1870,
i874> 1879); Bits of Travel (1872); Saxe
Holm's Stories (1874-78); Bits of Talk about

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