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Ramona is a novel written by Helen Hunt Jackson and published in 1884. It is the story of a part-Scottish and part-Indian orphan girl growing up and getting married in Southern California, suffering discrimination and hardship.

Jackson's novel is set in the Southern California of Spanish Californio society. It is about a part-Scottish and part-Indian orphan girl, Ramona, who is raised by Señora Gonzaga Moreno, sister of Ramona's deceased foster mother. Señora Moreno has raised Ramona as if she is part of the family, giving her every luxury, because her sister asked her to before her death. Señora Moreno, who still considers herself a Mexican, even though California is no longer a province of that country, and hates the Americans, who have cut up her huge rancho and taken away lands, adores her only child, Felipe Moreno, but does not love Ramona because she harbors ill feelings about her being part Indian.

Ramona's marriage place, Old Town, San Diego, California. Photograph by William Henry Jackson.

Señora Moreno holds up the sheep shearing that year so the band of Indians from Temecula that she always hires can arrive, as well as the priest, Father Salvierderra, from Santa Barbara, because she wants to make sure the lowly heathens have mass in her chapel and an opportunity to give confession. Ramona falls in love with a young Indian sheepherder, Alessandro, who is also the son of the Chief of the tribe, Pablo Assis. Señora Moreno is outraged. Ramona realizes that Señora Moreno has never loved her and, to the old woman's chagrin, she and Alessandro leave to be married.

Alessandro and Ramona have a daughter. They also have misery and hardship. They are run off of several of their places, due to the land greed of certain Americans, and cannot find a permanent home. They finally move up into the San Bernardino Mountains. Alessandro loses his mind. He is down in town one day and rides off on the horse of an American. The man follows him home and shoots him.

In the meantime, Señora Moreno has died. Felipe finds Ramona and they are married. They leave to live in Mexico.

• Ramona – part-Scottish and part-Indian orphan girl
• Señora Moreno – sister of Ramona's dead foster mother
• Felipe Moreno – Moreno's only child
• Alessandro – a young Indian sheepherder
• Father Salvierderra – the priest
• Pablo Assis – the chief

Jackson wrote Ramona three years after A Century of Dishonor, a report on the mistreatment of American Indian tribes in the United States. By following that commentary with a novel, she sought to depict the Indian experience "in a way to move people's hearts." She wanted to arouse public opinion and concern for the betterment of their plight much as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin had done for the slaves. Her success was limited, however.

Interior view of a chapel in the Old Town area of San Diego (San Diego County), California. Shows a tabernacle, statues, cross, stations of the cross, and the altar where Ramona was married. Photograph by William Henry Jackson.

Ramona was intended to appeal more directly to the emotions of the American public. The emotional appeal was successful, but it went by and large down the wrong path. The novel's policy criticism was clear, but it was not the most potent message. Jackson had become enamored of California's Mission Era, which she romanticized. This rosy, but almost entirely fictional, vision of Franciscan churchmen, señoritas and caballeros permeated the novel and captured the imaginations of readers.

A number of Americans had not always thought kindly of the Hispanic population who inhabited California at the time of their own arrival. They looked with a disparaging eye on what they saw as a decadent lifestyle of leisure and recreation among a people with enormous tracts of land, excessively mild weather and unusually fertile soil, who relied heavily on Indian labor. They cherished rather the American ideal of hard work. This view was not universal, however, and was swept away by Jackson's escapist fantasy. Readers accepted the sentimentalized Spanish Californio aristocracy that was portrayed and the Ramona myth was born.

Jackson's fiction used real locations in Southern California and dramatized various real events. Tourists soon started trooping in, eager to see the relics of where Ramona's story took place. They wanted to go to all the locations described in the book where Ramona had been, some believing it was a true story, and were made even more eager by entrepreneurs. All things Spanish acquired a powerful mystique, which led to the reconstruction of many missions and other historic sites. Mission Revival Style architecture was wildly popular from about 1890 to 1915, and survives in a reduced form today.

• Ramona Movies
• Ramona (telenovela)
• The Ramona Pageant
• Spanish Missions in California
• Rancho Camulos, "The Home of Ramona"

• Ramona, available at Project Gutenberg.