Ramona's Baskets: Romance and Reality

Their baskets made out of split rushes are too well known to require description; but though waterproof, they were used only for dry purposes. The vessels in use for liquids were roughly made of rushes and plastered outside and in with bitumen or pitch, called by them sanot. -Hugo Reid I Despite Hugo Reid’s confident words, the baskets he described, coiled bowls and asphaltum-coated water bottles, find no place in Ramona‘s pages. Nor do the coiled trinket baskets so avidly sought by later collectors. Although seemingly atypical, Ramona’s baskets are worthy of serious study because of the otherwise scanty record we have of Southern California basketry during the thirty years between Reid’s 1852 account and the publication of Ramona in 1884. In this paper, I will review the descriptions of basketry in Ramona and discuss the literary accounts, basketry collections, and ethnographic experiences of Helen Hunt Jackson which may have inspired these passages. I will then analyze Ramona as an ethnohistorical record of Southern California basketry during the years in question. Finally, I will attempt to assess the influence that Ramona had on the “basket mania” which arose at the end of the century