Francis Parkman

Francis Parkman was the greatest narrative historian of nineteenth-century America and perhaps the finest prose stylist among all American historians. His life’s work — the seven-volume France and England in North America (1865–1892), supplemented by The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851) and The Oregon Trail (1849) — tells the story of the French and British empires in North America from the earliest explorations to the fall of New France in 1763. It is a work of extraordinary literary power, based on exhaustive archival research and animated by a Romantic vision of the wilderness, of heroism, and of the clash between civilisation and savagery that gives the narrative the grandeur of epic.

The Brahmin in the Wilderness

Francis Parkman was born into the highest level of Boston Brahmin society — his father was a Unitarian minister, his maternal grandfather was a wealthy merchant, and he grew up in the intellectual atmosphere of Harvard and Beacon Hill. He graduated from Harvard College in 1844 and from Harvard Law School in 1846, never intending to practise law. From childhood, he had been consumed by a single ambition: to write the history of the French and British struggle for North America, and to experience for himself the wilderness in which that struggle took place.

In 1846, at the age of twenty-three, he undertook the journey that would become The Oregon Trail — travelling from St Louis along the Oregon and Santa Fe trails, living with a band of Oglala Sioux for several weeks, hunting buffalo, and experiencing the Great Plains at the last moment before the westward migration of settlers transformed them forever. The journey nearly killed him: he returned to Boston with his health permanently broken.

The Illness

For the remaining forty-seven years of his life, Parkman suffered from a constellation of ailments — severe damage to his eyesight (he could sometimes write only a few lines before his vision failed), a nervous condition that made sustained mental effort agonisingly painful, insomnia, and heart trouble. There were years when he could not read, could not write, and could barely function. He composed his histories by having documents read aloud to him and by dictating or writing with a guide frame that kept his hand on the line — sometimes producing only six lines a day.

That under these conditions he produced the finest historical prose in American literature is an achievement of will and courage that has few parallels.

France and England in North America

The seven volumes are:

1. Pioneers of France in the New World (1865) — the explorations of Champlain and the Huguenot colonies in Florida
2. The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867) — the Jesuit missions among the Huron and Iroquois
3. The Discovery of the Great West (1869) — La Salle’s exploration of the Mississippi
4. The Old Régime in Canada (1874) — the political and social structure of New France
5. Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV (1877) — the administration of the great governor
6. A Half-Century of Conflict (1892) — the colonial wars between 1700 and 1748
7. Montcalm and Wolfe (1884) — the Seven Years’ War and the fall of New France

The series is unified by Parkman’s grand theme: the contest between two conceptions of civilisation — the authoritarian, Catholic, feudal system of New France and the individualistic, Protestant, democratic culture of the British colonies — and his conviction (which modern historians would challenge) that British victory was both inevitable and desirable.

The Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail (1849) is Parkman’s most widely read book — a vivid, immediate account of his youthful journey through the Great Plains that captures the landscape, the indigenous peoples, and the atmosphere of the frontier with the precision of a painter. It has been continuously in print for over 170 years.

Critical Assessment

Parkman has been criticised by modern historians for his racial attitudes — his portrayal of Native Americans, though often sympathetic to individuals, is shaped by Victorian assumptions about “savagery” and “civilisation” — and for his aristocratic prejudices. His conviction that Anglo-Saxon Protestantism represented the highest form of civilisation, and that the defeat of Catholic France and the displacement of indigenous peoples were progressive developments, is a view that modern scholarship has thoroughly dismantled. The work of Richard White, Daniel Richter, and other ethnohistorians has shown that the peoples Parkman called “savages” had sophisticated political systems, diplomatic traditions, and cultures whose destruction was not an inevitable triumph of civilisation but a catastrophe.

Yet Parkman’s narrative power, his research (he mastered French and read tens of thousands of original documents), and his prose style remain unsurpassed among American historians. Henry Adams, who admired him, said that Parkman’s prose “made the forests seem to rustle and the war-paint to glisten.” The comparison with Adams is instructive: Adams was the more subtle thinker, but Parkman was the greater storyteller, and his best passages — La Salle on the Mississippi, Bréboeuf among the Hurons, Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham — have the power of the finest historical writing in any language.

Collecting Parkman

The Oregon Trail (George P. Putnam, 1849) in first edition is a key title of American Western literature. The seven volumes of France and England in North America (Little, Brown, 1865–1892) in first editions constitute one of the great American historical works. Montcalm and Wolfe (1884, 2 volumes) is the most admired single title.