Francis Parkman

Francis Parkman wrote the great nineteenth-century narrative history of the struggle between France and Britain for North America, mostly while unable to read or write unaided. He was a Boston Brahmin who travelled the Oregon Trail in 1846 at twenty-three, living with a band of Oglala Lakota, and came back with dysentery and the ruined health that stayed with him: a nervous disorder he called the Enemy, near-blindness, and a knee that kept him from walking far. He wrote with a wire frame to guide his hand, in six-line stints, dictating when he could not manage that, and produced seven volumes of France and England in North America over forty years. He worked from manuscript archives in Paris and Quebec that nobody had used, and he walked the ground where he could. The Conspiracy of Pontiac, published in 1851, was the first of them and remains the fullest narrative of the rising of 1763. His reputation now is double-edged. The prose and the research are still admired; the framework is Anglo-Saxon triumphalism, with French absolutism and Native societies both cast as things that lost because they deserved to, and his portrait of Indigenous people is hostile in ways later historians have had to work around rather than build on. He also wrote a book on roses and was for a time professor of horticulture at Harvard. He was also a public opponent of woman suffrage and wrote against it, which sits with the rest. The Oregon Trail, published from his 1846 journey, is still read and is his most accessible book. He worked for forty years on a subject he chose at eighteen and finished it, which almost nobody does.

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