Their Story Inspired ‘Ramona’

Ramona, the protagonist of Helen Hunt Jackson’s epic 1884 novel, still stands as California’s prototypal romantic heroine--unless, of course, you’ve heard of Los Angeles’ Hugo and Victoria Reid.

In fact, the lives of Hugo, a Cambridge University-educated Scotsman, and Victoria, a beautiful Native American at the San Gabriel Mission, inspired Jackson. Her fictional Ramona resembled the Reids’ daughter, Maria Ignacia, known as the “Flower of San Gabriel.”

Born in Britain in 1811, Reid, jilted at 18, impulsively set sail for South America and Mexico. Over the next several years, he learned Spanish and established a lucrative trading business. In 1832, as the Mission period drew to a close, he settled in Los Angeles.

With two partners, he opened a trading store in the Plaza, bartering imported goods from the East for cowhides while cultivating the friendship of prominent local families.

Handsome with sandy blond hair, blue eyes and a keen sense of humor, the sensitive Reid was considered a catch by the daughters of the local Spanish-speaking aristocracy. But the woman who captured his own affections was a married Native American, Victoria Bartolomea, the descendant of legendary Gabrieleno chieftains and the mother of three children.

Reid first glimpsed the woman he came to call his “rosa de Castilla” sitting in an oxcart outside his Plaza store while her adopted mother, Dona Eulalia Perez de Guillen, the housemother at the mission and heir to the Rincon de San Pasqual land grant, made some purchases inside.

Drawn by Victoria’s striking beauty, Reid could not take his eyes off her as he carried Perez’s packages to the cart. Perez encouraged the couple’s budding friendship and invited Reid to her home in San Gabriel, where Victoria lived with her husband and three children, dividing their time between Perez’s rancho and her San Gabriel adobe.

Reid soon began making weekly trips to the Perez adobe. There, he found peace and happiness talking with Victoria for hours about her people’s history, the Comicrabit village near the pueblo where she was born and her own marriage--at age 13--to another Gabrieleno named Pablo, a good man who was 28 years her senior.

Gossip concerning Reid’s visits soon made its way to the pueblo, where several single women had hoped to catch the handsome Scot for themselves.

Attempting to thwart his intense attachment to Victoria, well-meaning friends, Dr. William Keith and Abel Stearns, ushered Reid off to Mexico, where he held a teaching job for more than a year. Although he longed to see Victoria, he tried to convince himself that this cross-cultural love would bring them both unhappiness.

But when word reached him about the birth of Victoria’s fourth child and her husband’s death from smallpox, he was elated and immediately returned to Los Angeles.

Deeply in love, he became a Mexican citizen, converted to Roman Catholicism and adopted Victoria’s four children. In 1837, after he took the name “Perfecto Hugo Reid” (the accomplished one) in baptism, the couple were married with a weeklong wedding fiesta hosted by Perez. Reid was 27, his wife 29.

As a wedding gift, Reid built her a two-story adobe with 4-foot-thick walls that he called Via Espina (Gooseberry) near the San Gabriel Mission. But Victoria never climbed the stairs. At age 4, she had witnessed the collapse of the mission’s bell tower during the earthquake of 1812. The memory left her with a lifetime fear of heights so severe that she could not bear to mount a horse. So, the second floor of her own home remained off-limits.

When the missions were dissolved by the Mexican government, a handful of their Native American dependents obtained grants of land. Victoria was one of the fortunate who received title to 108 acres, La Huerta del Cuati Rancho (Twin Orchards), later known as Lake Vineyard, near present-day San Marino.

In 1839, the same year he was elected to the ayuntamiento, or City Council, Reid applied for the nearby 13,319-acre Rancho Santa Anita and was awarded ownership over several other applicants, in part because of his wife’s background as a Mission Indian. Near a natural lake, he built a three-room adobe with wickiups for their Native American servants.

Though she dressed in elegant gowns of silk and lace and was admired by all who knew her, including such leading locals as the Bandinis, the Stearns, Henry Dalton and Benjamin Wilson, Victoria could never overcome the general prejudice that labeled her a “civilized savage.”

Reid remained torn between wanderlust and family life. In 1842, he bought a ship and set sail for China and South America. Returning a few years later, he lavished upon Victoria expensive gifts from foreign lands, making other women in the village envious.

Deeply in debt and unable to keep up with the demands of Rancho Santa Anita, Reid ultimately sold it to his friend Dalton for 20 cents an acre, about $2,700. He was frequently absent from his family, living among the Gabrieleno bands, researching their beliefs and way of life. At one point he headed north in a fruitless search for gold, missing the funeral of the couple’s 21-year-old daughter, Maria Ignacia.

Victoria, who thought education was a waste of time, blamed her husband for their daughter’s death. The grief-stricken mother believed the girl’s love of books had kept her inside too much, depriving her of the sun and exercise that would have strengthened her body against the smallpox that killed her.

But when Reid returned home, weakened by tuberculosis, Victoria nursed him back to health so he could serve as a delegate to California’s 1849 Constitutional Convention, where he championed public schools and vocally opposed slavery.

In 1852, the Scottish paisano’s 22 essays on Gabrieleno customs, economy, language and government were published in the Los Angeles Star newspaper. He hoped it would help the Indians the way “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had the antislavery movement the year before.

Although Reid died later that same year, before a reservation system was organized, his writings helped inspire Benjamin Wilson to become the first Indian agent in Southern California and would later provide Jackson background for her novel.

Harder days were yet to come for the grieving Victoria. Her home collapsed in an earthquake and a trusted servant robbed her of a small fortune, forcing her to sell her Lake Vineyard property to Wilson.

Outliving two husbands and four children, Victoria remained a proud, gentle, kind and generous woman until her death in 1868.

A statue of the Reid family stands in Arcadia Park in gloomy disrepair. Their reconstructed adobe is in the Los Angeles County Arboretum.