Down in the valley below Garner Valley lies Hemet, home of the Ramona Pageant — America's longest-running outdoor play, born of a novel meant to shame a nation into treating Native people justly.
Look down off the western edge of these mountains and, somewhere below in the haze, sits the town of Hemet — and Hemet holds a story that's been running, out loud, in the open air, for over a hundred years. Let me tell it to you.
It starts with a book. Back in 1884, a writer named Helen Hunt Jackson published a novel called "Ramona." Now, Jackson wasn't just spinning a yarn — she was furious. She had spent years documenting how badly the United States government had treated the Native people of this country, the broken treaties, the stolen land, and she'd written it all up in hard facts and nobody much listened. So she tried a different weapon: she wrote a love story. A sweeping, tragic romance about Ramona, a half-Native girl in old Spanish California, and her love for a young Native man named Alessandro, and all the heartbreak that the prejudice and the land-grabbing of the day brings down on them.
And the book was a sensation — an absolute blockbuster of its time, read all over America. Folks fell in love with the romance and the sunny picture of old California — though, to Jackson's sorrow, most of them missed the angry point she was trying to make about how Native people were being treated. Still, it made this whole region famous.
And here's where Hemet comes in. In 1923, down in a natural bowl in the hills above the town, folks decided to put the story of Ramona on as an outdoor play — a giant pageant, staged right on the hillside, with a cast of hundreds, horses, the works, the mountains themselves for a backdrop. And they've done it nearly every single spring since. Think about that: since 1923. It has become the longest-running outdoor play in the entire United States — the official state play of California — performed by generations of the same families, in that same hillside bowl, for over a hundred years now. Grandparents who acted in it as children now watch their grandchildren take the stage.
So down there below you, a novel written to prick a nation's conscience turned into a hillside pageant that has outlived nearly everything around it. More than a century, and the play goes on. There's a kind of stubborn mountain-country faithfulness in that I can't help but admire. Roll on.
Photo: Seauton · CC BY-SA 4.0
