McCracken wrote articles for
Harper Brothers and for the newspapers
Out West and
Western Field while traveling through New Mexico and lower California, and once in San Francisco, turned full-time to her love for
writing and literary pursuits. She joined the staff of the
Overland Monthly as secretary in 1867. She befriended poet
Ina Coolbrith, who she called one of the Golden Gate Trinity along with the other two pillars of the
Overland Monthly,
Bret Harte and
Charles Warren Stoddard. In 1882 in
Salinas, California, she met and married Jackson McCracken, a former
Arizona congressman. The couple settled into Josephine's house, then a literary gathering place. However, in 1899 a large
forest fire destroyed both the house and the surrounding
redwood trees. The disaster prompted Josephine's turn to
environmentalism to save the redwoods. In 1900,
Andrew P. Hill was commissioned to photograph the area after the fire. As McCracken was both a friend and a member of the Pacific Coast Press Association, Hill wrote a letter of concern to Josephine, which she published in the
Santa Cruz Sentinel along with an article urging people to rally around the cause. She continued to work with Hill, joining him in founding the
Sempervirens Club, and together they succeeded in having
legislation passed to protect the redwoods in
Big Basin Redwoods State Park. McCracken was then ushered up from her seat in the audience to join Coolbrith on stage. In 1919, at the age of 80, McCracken wrote to Coolbrith to complain to her dear friend of still having to work for a living: "The world has not used us well, Ina; California has been ungrateful to us. Of all the hundred thousands the state pays out in pensions of one kind and another, don't you think you should be at the head of the pensioners, and I somewhere down below?" == Work ==