Colorado Cairn

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After her first husband’s death in the Civil War, Helen Hunt Jackson married a mining engineer from Colorado Springs, Colorado, and for the rest of her life followed her husband around the West—a region she came to love. That love led her to write two enduring works: Ramona , a romantic novel, and A Century of Dishonor , a scathing indictment of our treatment of the American Indian and which was largely responsible for inspiring what little there was in the way of Indian reform in
the nineteenth century. When she died in 1885, she was laid to rest on Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado; she wanted no monument but requested that friends and relatives bring a stone to place on her grave when visiting it. And so they did—until so many tourists came to take stones away that her husband finally had her body re-interred. This photograph of her mountain grave was sent to us by Sherburne F. Barber of Stony Brook, New York, whose uncle brought it back from a visit to Denver in 1892.

We continue to ask our readers to send unusual and previously unpublished old photographs to Carla Davidson at American Heritage Publishing Co., 10 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020. Please send a copy of any irreplaceable material, and do not mail glass negatives. AMERICAN HERITAGE will pay $50.00 for each one that is run.