Ramona Book

As many of you know, one of my hobbies is to read books that were once popular but have now fallen into obscurity, trying to understand the past through what excited people at the time.

Ramona, a book that has appeared in more than 300 editions since it was first published, was made into a movie four times, and inspired an entire tourist industry in the late 19th and early 20th century, is surely such a book. I've had a copy for years, one belonging to my father-in-law, and it's long been on my to-read list.

It's quite a lovely book - a romance of the old west, and a strong indictment of the treatment of the American Indian (and to a lesser extent, the Mexicans) by the conquering Americans, who brought a long period of California history to a close.

As I wrote in the book's description (see above), the book was written after the failure of Hunt's earlier non-fiction book, A Century of Dishonor to raise consciousness about the plight of the American Indian and their disgraceful treatment by the United States government. However, the charming romance (which turns darker as the story progresses) was what caught people's imagination.

Still, it's an eye-opening look at how the conquering Americans treated the Indian and Mexican inhabitants of California. We like to think we're better than the ethnic cleansers of today's world, but our country was built on ethnic cleansing. For all its storybook romance and idealization of the Franciscan missions and the life on the Mexican ranchos, this book is a great reminder of our own history.

P.S. People who enjoyed this book might also look for The Splendid Idle Forties by Gertrude Atherton, a collection of romantic stories about old California. Another, perhaps more realistic view of old California can be found in Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana. I love the descriptions in Dana's book of San Francisco in 1837 as a wooded peninsula populated by deer and bears, with a tiny fishing village and port, but it's also great to see him refer to this area as the northern part of Mexico, and to meditate on how the things we take for granted weren't always so, and won't always continue to be so.