Climate is Fate: Helen Hunt Jackson and the Promotion of New Mexico

Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Outdoor Industries in Southern California,” published in 1883, celebrates the climate of California with a lede stating: “Climate is to a country what temperament is to a man—Fate.” After... [ view full abstract ]

Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Outdoor Industries in Southern California,” published in 1883, celebrates the climate of California with a lede stating: “Climate is to a country what temperament is to a man—Fate.” After briefly engaging with the common 19C trope of climate-affiliated racism, Jackson describes California’s weather conditions,  physical geography, and irrigation practices in what is clearly an invitation for travel to and within the state and for deep-pocketed readers to establish agricultural enterprises.

Jackson’s use of climate for promotional purposes did not go unnoticed,  nor did her hand in helping the reputation of the West  travel and circulate amongst a particular readership with the means  themselves to travel. That she was denounced by Theodore Roosevelt as “thoroughly untrustworthy” and a “sentimentalist” didn’t seem to matter to politicians and legislators who invoked Jackson’s name long after her death as a means of encouraging further travel and development in the West. In his 1903 report to the Secretary of the Interior, Governor of New Mexico Miguel A. Otero depicted Jackson as gasping “Climate is Fate” while dying of consumption instead of publishing it as the lede to her article promoting California. The governor writes, somewhat bitterly for an official government report,“Had she sought the climate of New Mexico perhaps she might have lived another decade and given the world another Ramona.”

That Jackson’s name is repeatedly mentioned in official government reports and booster publications specifically in relation to New Mexico’s climate recognizes her influence over travel to and development of the US West while affirming the then territory’s relationship to 19C American literary history.