Set in Southern California after the Mexican–American War and annexation of the territory by the United States, Ramona explores the life of a mixed-race Scottish–Native American orphan girl.

Its sentimental portrayal of Mexican elite colonial life contributed to establishing a unique cultural identity for the region.

As its publication coincided with the arrival of railroad lines in the region, tourists used trains to visit sites thought to be associated with the novel.

Señora Moreno delays the sheep shearing, a major event on the rancho, awaiting the arrival of a group of Native Americans from Temecula, whom she always hires for that work.

The head of the Native American sheep shearers is Alessandro, son of Pablo Assís, chief of the tribe.

In the aftermath of war, Alessandro's tribe is driven off their land, marking a new wave of European-American settlement in California from the United States.

Jackson wrote Ramona three years after A Century of Dishonor, her non-fiction study of the mistreatment of Native Americans in the United States.

"[5] She wanted to arouse public opinion and concern for the betterment of their plight, much as Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin had done for enslaved African Americans.

The novel's political criticism was clear, but most readers were moved by its romantic vision of colonial California under Mexican rule.

The story's fictional vision of Franciscan churchmen, señoritas and caballeros permeated the novel and captured the imaginations of readers.

The new settlers from northern and midwestern states disparaged what they considered a decadent culture of leisure and recreation among the elite Latinos, who held huge tracts of land, lived in a region with prevailing mild weather and unusually fertile soil, and relied heavily on Native American laborers.

[8] Ramona was immensely popular almost immediately upon its publication in 1884, with more than 15,000 copies sold in the ten months before Jackson's death in 1885.

Errol Wayne Stevens, of the California Historical Society, notes several contemporary reviews of the novel in which writers dismissed the idea that Ramona could have been part Native American, a race which they characterized as "dull, heavy and unimpressionable," and "lazy, cruel, cowardly, and covetous.

"[11] Carobeth Laird, in her 1975 autobiography, Encounter with an Angry God (p. 176), describes the reaction of her Chemehuevi Indian husband to the novel: "... when I tried to read him Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, he grew restless, walked up and down, and finally said that the white woman knew nothing about Indians.

"[12] Jackson was disappointed that she was unable to raise public concerns about the struggles of Indians in California, as readers were attracted to the romantic vision of Californio society.

Historian Antoinette May argues in her book The Annotated Ramona (1989), that the popularity of the novel contributed to Congress passing the Dawes Act in 1887.

The government defined as "surplus land" any reservation territory remaining, and allowed its sale to non-Native persons.

Finally, the Del Valle family of Camulos welcomed tourists: they exploited the association in marketing their products, labeling their oranges and wine as "The Home of Ramona" brand.

In 1907, the new owner John D. Spreckels hired architect Hazel Wood Waterman to remodel the house to more closely match descriptions in the novel.

[2] Estudillo House's application for National Historic Landmark status was entitled "Casa Estudillo/Ramona's Marriage Place".

[2] As Carey McWilliams said in his book Southern California Country (1946): Because of the novel's extraordinary popularity, public perception merged fact and fiction.

Railroad lines to Southern California were just opening and, combined with the emotions stirred by the novel, the region suddenly gained national attention.