Francis Parkman's France and England in North America, opinionated

I have finished Francis Parkman’s seven volume France and England in North America (1865-92), the “history of the American forest,” as the author called it.  The history of French Canada, really, from early exploration to English conquest, written by America’s greatest historian, or 19th century historian, at least.  I took about a decade to read it all, maybe 2,800 pages, plus I should add The Oregon Trail (1847, not a history but an exciting travel book) and The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War (1851, a warmup to the big series), which brings the total to 3,500 pages.

I am writing this post not so much because I have anything to say about the books, but rather to apply for my merit badge.  Parkman’s books are not as good as Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), but my feeling of accomplishment was similar.

Parkman’s greatness was at least twofold.  First, with Gibbon as a model, he picked an ambitious subject early on – in college – and then stuck with it, even in the face of severe ill health, and was lucky to live long enough to complete a fifty-year project.  Second, he is not the prose writer that Gibbon was – in this way he resembles almost everyone who has ever written anything – he had the advantage of having not just Gibbon as a model but also Walter Scott.  No one would mistake Parkman for a novelist, but he absorbed Scott’s innovations in narrative history.  He is good with scenes, novelistic detail, characters, that sort of thing.

Third, he set a new evidentiary standard for historians, which is part of why he needed so much time.  Part of that new standard is described, incidentally, in The Oregon Trail, Parkman’s account of a youthful trip to the Rocky Mountains which he took partly for health, partly for fun, but largely so he could meet, interact, and even live with Native Americans.  He was acting as an early anthropologist, studying living native peoples in the hopes of understanding those of earlier centuries.

The Oregon Trail is a terrific adventure, as is La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869).  Anyone who enjoys books about exploration will enjoy these.  At the far end of the series, Montcalm and Wolfe, which covers the entire French and Indian War and is quite exciting – George Washington, the expulsion of the Acadians, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, etc.  The stretch of The Old Regime in Canada (1874), Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877), and A Half Century of Conflict (1892) does not cover such interesting material, although it will all prove to be enormously useful during your vacation in Quebec City.

Parkman’s great weird masterpiece, though, is The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867), a cruel and dark book about the meetings of two cultures alien to each other; they are also both alien to Parkman, the Jesuits much more so than the natives of the Canadian forest.  This book is not quite a narrative history, but it is certainly not fiction, or no more so than Parkman’s sources require.  I have never read anything quite like it.

There, that was some opinionating on Francis Parkman, which I believe meets the requirements of the badge.

What preposterously enormous history should I launch into next?  John Motley’s seven-volume history of the Netherlands (1856-67)?  Could that be as exciting as a history of Canada?  Theodor Mommsen’s three-volume History of Rome (1854-6) is tempting, too.  The most likely answer is that I’ll never read such a thing again, although I would like to re-read Gibbon.  Well, I’d like to re-read Parkman, too, someday, a long time from now.

With us the name of the savage is a byword of reproach - Francis Parkman's insensitivities, such as they are

When Francis Parkman traveled up the Oregon Trail in the summer of 1846, he had already decided, at age 22, to write a massive, multi-volume history of the "American forest," as he described the subject.  He meant the exploration and settlement of French America, and the conflicts with the English.   At the center of the work, always, were a dizzying variety of Native Americans.  Parkman thought he needed to get to know them.  Thus, his trip west, his sojourn with a band of Lakota Sioux, and his first book, The Oregon Trail. 

Parkman was violating my Guideline #1, letting the culture of one group (one subgroup of one group) stand in for the whole.  Thus his all-too-common generalizations about the "mind" or "character" of the Indian.  In fairness, though, Parkman's descriptions seem more observed than received.  But today's historians have to be more careful.

Another problem for - I was about to say "the modern reader," but I mean "me" - is Parkman's incessant use of the word "savage."  Here, he's using a word that is essentially forbidden now.  Too many malignant connotations are attached to it.  Yet Parkman does say, in The Conspiracy of Pontiac, just what he means:

With us the name of the savage is a byword of reproach.  The Indian would look with equal scorn on those who, buried in useless lore, are blind and deaf to the great world of nature. (end of Ch. 5)

Or later, describing a soldier's murder of a group of Shawnee, including his own wife and children, for the price of the scalps, Parkman writes:

His desertion was pardoned; he was employed as an interpreter, and ordered to accompany the troops on the intended expedition.  His example is one of many in which the worst acts of Indian ferocity have been thrown into shade by the enormities of white barbarians. (Ch. 27)

It's here in The Conspiracy of Pontiac, actually, that Parkman presented the proof (which he discovered) that English officers considered using smallpox-infested blankets as a weapon against the Indians (see Chapter 19).  Parkman was appalled; professional, but appalled.  He never violated Guideline #3: to Parkman, Native Americans were people.

Style in History

I'm stealing the title of a Peter Gay book (1974) that I have looked at but not read, a study of the styles of a number of European historians (Gibbon, Burckhardt, etc).  I want to write a bit about the style of some American historians.

This week I have presented a few samples of Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire, enough to demonstrate that he's a good, concise professional writer.  The difficulty of the book comes not from its style, but from the huge mass of material and the difficulty of organizing it: two centuries, three borderlands, multiple European nations, a multitude of Indian nations.  Hämäläinen himself succumbs to the problem a time or two.  See the beginning of Chapter 5, where he resorts twice in two pages to the "In this chapter" formulation.  I recognize the symptom, and can diagnose the problem - that section must have been a beast to write.  At some point, he gave up - "Good enough, it works." 

It is good enough, and it does work.  Like I said at the beginning of the week, the book is a triumph.  A generation or more of American history students are going to have to work their way through it.  If I were one of them, the first thing I would do upon re-reading is to make a giant timeline, which would have been a nice addendum to the book.

As I have been writing about The Comanche Empire, I have been reading a different book about a different episode of Native American history, Francis Parkman's The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851).  Parkman's book about the 1763 uprising of the Great Lakes Indians immediately following the French and Indian War was a similarly path-breaking history in its time.  That hardly explains why the book is still in print, as part of the Library of America, along with the rest of Parkman's massive France and England in North America, all seven fat volumes, and God willing I'll read them all.  The Conspiracy of Pontiac was excellent.

Parkman's books are still read for their style.  He is one more author writing under the shadow of Walter Scott, and the somewhat more transparent shade of James Fennimore Cooper.  It for some reason had never occurred to me that Scott's historical novels might influence not only novelists but also historians.  If a novel can include history, why can't history read like a novel?

Well, there are lots of good reasons why it can't, but Parkman really worked on the problem.  Some of the best scenes  in The Conspiracy of Pontiac are at least as exciting as Scott's battle scenes (the siege of Detroit, for example).  Other sections are more traditional - dense but necessary summaries of the political or military background of an event.

Some atmospheric but overwritten, even ridiculous, Parkman:

The wildcat glared from the thicket; the raccoon thrust his furry countenance from the hollow tree, and the opossum swung, head downwards, from the overhanging bough. (Ch. 28)

And some of Parkman at his best, the very last paragraph, on the fate of the murdered Chief Pontiac:

Neither mound nor tablet marked the burial-place of Pontiac.  For a mausoleum, a city [St. Louis] has risen above the forest hero; and the race whom he hated with such burning rancor trample with unceasing footsteps over his forgotten grave. (Ch. 31)

An example of something happening, from Osborne Russell's Journal of a Trapper

I'll give you a for example.

The book is Journal of  Trapper by Osborne Russell, which records the author's life and adventures as a fur trapper from 1834 to 1843.  Due to bad luck, it was not published until 1914, twenty years after the author's death.  Like Parkman in The Oregon Trail, Russell mostly just tells us how he went about his business in an unusual place.  Russell's working, not on vacation, so a lot of the book is about which river he followed, where he found beaver, and where he wintered.  Until we get to page 101 of the 1965 University of Nebraska Press edition.

Russell and his comrades are trapping in what is now Yellowstone National Park.  They're not working too hard.  They're taking a bit of a vacation, themselves, actually, hunting and admiring the geysers and mudpots.   Russell and his co-worker White are napping when:

Presently I cast my eyes towards the horses which were feeding in the Valley and discovered the heads of some Indians who were gliding round under the bench within 30 steps of me I jumped to my rifle and aroused White and looking towards my powder horn and bullet pouch it was already in the hands of an Indian and we were completely surrounded (102)

Now here, something is happening:

an arrow struck White on the right hip joint I hastily told him to pull it out and I spoke another arrow struck me in the same place but they did not retard our progress At length another arrow striking thro. my right leg above the knee benumbed the flesh so that I fell with my breast accross a log. The Indian who shot me was within 8 ft and made a Spring towards me with his uplifted battle axe (102)

Russell and White miraculously escape, but the Blackfoot Sioux have taken everything they own except for a bag of salt.  And both men have been shot in the legs by arrows.  They walk back to a fort on the Snake River, maybe 250 or 300 miles through the Rocky Mountains.

I guess this is only about 10 pages out of 120.  Still, what an adventure.  There are other reasons to read Journal of a Trapper - as an account of how the fur trade worked, it's essential, and this line is curious:

We passed an agreeable winter We had nothing to do but to eat attend to the horses and procure fire wood We had some few Books to read such as Byrons Shakespeares and Scotts works the Bible and Clarks Commentary on it and other small works on Geology Chemistry and Philosophy (109)

It's not exactly as exciting as the story of how Frederick Douglass learned to read, but the path that turns this fur trapper into a posthumous author is almost as unlikely.

The Oregon Trail is the greater book - well-written, more varied - but in Journal of a Trapper, holy cow, something happens, does it ever.

Francis Parkman is boring

I'm talking about The Oregon Trail (serialized 1846-8).  I've read the book twice now and find it exciting, even thrilling in places.  But I recently came across a book blogger - no idea who, unfortunately, and Google is no help - whose verdict was "boring," and I understand what she meant.

Because nothing really happens in Parkman's book, except for all of the things that are constantly happening.  If you know what I mean.

Parkman and his college chum Quincy Adams Shaw (now is that a Boston name or what?) spend their 1846 summer vacation out West.  They hire a guide in St. Louis, and take the Oregon Trail to Fort Laramie, where they split up so Parkman can live with a band of Dakota Sioux.  When they join up again, they head south along the edge of the Colorado Rockies to Bent's Fort, then go home along the Santa Fe Trail.

They hunt, a lot, to eat and for sport.  I think Shaw was really there to hunt.  They never fight it out with Indians, or with bandits, or with grizzly bears.  They never dangle from the edge of a cliff, or discover anything new, or climb an unclimbed peak.  Parkman does not paint portraits of his Sioux hosts, or witness their secret mutilation ceremonies.  Both men nearly die, but from disease, which is not so dramatic.   A war among the Indians threatens, but fizzles.

For me, this book fires the imagination.  Parkman actually chances onto the most eventful year in Western American history.  The migrations to Oregon and Utah are at their heights - Parkman's party travels in the middle of it.  In the Rockies, they encounter the dying remnants of the fur trade and the last of the mountain men.  On their way home on the Santa Fe Trail, they encounter detachments of the U.S. Army, on the way to the war with Mexico.  And Parkman's chapters about the Sioux are almost unrivaled.  He's describing daily life, though, not anything extraordinary - even the great buffalo hunt chapter is just part of daily life.

It's strange.  I read the book and it seems so eventful.  But nothing happens.