Francis
Parkman
Francis
Parkman, (b. Sept. 16, 1823, Boston,
Mass., U.S.—d. Nov. 8, 1893, Jamaica
Plain, Mass.), American historian noted
for his classic seven-volume history of
France and England in North America,
covering the colonial period from the
beginnings to 1763.
Early
years.
Parkman was the son of Francis Parkman,
a leading Unitarian minister of Boston.
As a boy, he met many of his father’s
literary friends and read widely in the
family library. He was taught Greek,
Latin, and mathematics at the Chauncy
Place School in Boston.
At
Harvard, Parkman, a talented linguist,
read almost as many books in foreign
languages as in English, including the
original texts of great historians of
antiquity. He also devoured the major
works of French literature and history.
In serious archival studies he was
encouraged by his teacher, the renowned
historian Jared Sparks. Sparks, a man
drawn to adventure and exploration,
exerted an enormous influence on
Parkman.
Though
teachers and books helped to shape
Parkman’s thinking in his formative
years, he gathered data, as indicated by
his letters and journals, through direct
observation. During his college years he
exhausted friends who struggled to keep
pace with him on woodland expeditions
through New England and southeastern
Canada. Yet he did not neglect to
participate in whiskey punch and Indian
war cries that sometimes followed
dormitory suppers. Pretty girls and
horses, he concluded, were “the
‘first-ratest’ things in nature.” After
a breakdown in health during his last
year in college, he made a grand tour of
Europe in 1844. His particular interest
in the Roman Catholic church prompted
him to observe it at close range, even
living for a short time in a monastery
in Rome. In the following year, he
toured historic sites in the northwest
of America and, to please his father,
completed requirements for a law degree
at Harvard. In the summer of 1846 he
embarked on a journey to the Great
Plains in which he traveled a portion of
the Oregon Trail to Fort Laramie.
Literary career.
Parkman’s literary career had its real
beginning after he returned from the
West. Despite temporary illness and
partial loss of sight, he managed to
write a series of Oregon Trail
recollections for the Knickerbocker
Magazine. Published in 1849 as The
California and Oregon Trail, the book’s
title was misleading because Parkman had
ventured nowhere near California. He
keenly regretted the “publisher’s trick”
of the mention of California as a
stimulus to better sales. The book, in
later editions called The Oregon Trail;
Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain
Life, became one of the best-selling
personal narratives of the 19th century.
The
Oregon Trail served notice that a new
writer, at home on the frontier as well
as in staid, provincial Boston, had
appeared. Parkman’s History of the
Conspiracy of Pontiac, completed just
before his marriage to Catherine Scollay
Bigelow in 1851, was his first
historical work, a comprehensive survey
of Anglo-French history and Indian
affairs in North America, culminating in
the great Ottawa chief’s “conspiracy”
and Indian war of 1763. In the “dark
years” of illness following the death of
his young son (1857) and his wife
(1858), Parkman entered a period of
depression and semi-infirmity. His
complaints of heart trouble, insomnia,
painful headaches, semiblindness, water
on the knee, and finally arthritis and
rheumatism, which fill his
correspondence, were probably the result
of an underlying neurosis. By
personalizing his illness and calling it
the “enemy,” Parkman seems to have
forced himself to play the role of a man
of action at the cost of great tension.
His struggle against the “enemy” enabled
him to maintain his self-respect and
appears to be at least partly
responsible for the powerful drive and
creative force behind his writings.
By the
time the American Civil War ended,
Parkman had at least partly overcome his
personal “enemy” of illness to complete
his Pioneers of France in the New World
(1865), a vivid account of French
penetration of the North American
wilderness that created a setting for
his later volumes. In the 27 years
following the Civil War, Parkman (who
had to content himself with writing
militant, patriotic letters to the press
during the conflict) completed his
elaborate series by writing six more
historical works in addition to the
Pioneers. The Jesuits in North America
in the Seventeenth Century (1867) is a
powerful narrative of the tragedy of the
Jesuit missionaries whose missions among
the Hurons were destroyed by persistent
Iroquois attacks, and his La Salle and
the Discovery of the Great West, first
published in 1869 as The Discovery of
the Great West but later revised after
French documents were made available, is
in many respects one of the best
one-volume biographies in the English
language. René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de
La Salle, a hardy, gallant figure who
overcame almost every obstacle in his
path, was a heroic figure almost made
for Parkman’s pen. Count Frontenac and
New France Under Louis XIV (1877) tells
the story of New France, the early
French settlement in Canada, under its
most formidable governor, a man of
vanity, courage, and audacity. Yet it
was in Montcalm and Wolfe (1884)—a true
biography of the French general Marquis
de Montcalm and the English general
James Wolfe, both of whom died at the
Battle of Quebec in 1759—that Parkman
not only reached his highest achievement
in character portrayal but also showed
how great biography can be used to
penetrate the spirit of an age. By
contrast, Parkman’s The Old Régime in
Canada, published in 1874, provides a
sweeping panorama of New France in her
infancy and youth, a pioneer work in
social history that holds the interest
of the reader no less than his narrative
volumes. Parkman’s literary artistry is
perhaps best studied in A Half-Century
of Conflict (1892), completed shortly
before his death. This final link in his
history France and England in North
America is a fascinating but complex
account of events leading up to the
French and Indian War.
