James Parkman

“ We follow the casualties of battle with the intense interest of one who has friends or acquaintance there. Mr. Parkman’s familiarity also with the scenery of his narratives is so intimate, his memory of the eye is so vivid, as almost to persuade us that ourselves have seen what he describes. ”

“ Critics of exact knowledge—such as Justin Winsor, for instance—find limitations in Parkman’s books that may impair the permanence of his fame, but I suspect that his is the only work in American history that cannot and will not be written over again. The reason of it is that he had a unique [p29] life which has permeated his narrative, giving it the stamp of originality. No man whose training had been gained wholly in the best schools of Germany, France, or England could have written those books. A training racy of the soil was needed. ”

“ As we read Parkman's words, we can feel his heart glow with the joy of the climbing lad, we know that in the historian there was beating the throb of human love such as would have made him an admirable essayist had he turned his hand to the form. ”

“ The buffalo were getting farther off at every instant. James, being ambitious to mend his pace, tugged hard at the rein, and one of his rider’s boots escaped from the stirrup.
“Woa! I say, woa!” cried Tete Rouge, in great perturbation, and after much effort James’ progress was arrested. The hunter came trotting back to the party, disgusted with buffalo running, and he was received with overwhelming congratulations.
“Too good a chance to lose,” said Shaw, pointing to another band of bulls on the left. We lashed our horses and galloped upon them. Shaw killed one with each barrel of his gun. ”

“ The boy or girl who has not read Parkman's histories has missed one of the greatest treats which literature has to offer.
Other historians there are who have done good service to American letters and whose work is outranked only by the men we have already mentioned—John Bach McMaster, whose "History of the People of the United States" is still uncompleted; James Ford Rhodes, who has portrayed the Civil War period with admirable exhaustiveness and accuracy ”

“ Francis Parkman began his career at the New North in 1812,--"a man of various information, a kind spirit, singular benevolence, polished yet simple manners, fine literary taste." [5] A few years later John Gorham Palfrey became the minister of the Brattle Street Church, and James Walker was settled over the Harvard Church in Charlestown. Among the laymen in the churches to which these men preached were many persons of distinction. The liberal fellowship, therefore, was of the highest social and intellectual standing. The piety of the churches was serious, if not profound ”

“ Parkman never loses sight of those links of cause and effect, whether to be sought in political theory, religious belief, or mortal incompleteness, which give to the story of Man a moral, and reduce the fortuitous to the narrow limits where it properly belongs. ”

“ After his defeat in the Assembly, Shirley returned, vexed and disappointed, to his house in Roxbury. A few days later, James Gibson, a Boston merchant, [Pg 68] says that he saw him “walking slowly down King Street, with his head bowed down, as if in a deep study.” “He entered my counting-room,” pursues the merchant, “and abruptly said, ‘Gibson, do you feel like giving up the expedition to Louisbourg?’” Gibson replied that he wished the House would reconsider their vote. “You are the very man I want!” exclaimed the governor. ”

“ Among the many men who have distinguished themselves as mountaineers, traders, and Indian fighters along the line of the Old Trail, was one who eventually became the head chief of one of the most numerous and valorous tribes of North American savages—James P. Beckwourth. Estimates of him vary considerably. Francis Parkman, the historian, who I think never saw him and writes merely from hearsay, says: "He is a ruffian of the worst class; bloody and treacherous, without honor or honesty; such, at least, is the character he bears on the great plains. ”

“ We may well thank Heaven for sending us such a scholar, such an artist, such a genius, before it was too late. As we look at the changes wrought in the last fifty years, we realize that already the opportunities by which he profited in youth are in large measure lost. He came not a moment too soon to catch the fleeting light and fix it upon his immortal canvas.
Thus Parkman is to be regarded as first of all the historian of Primitive Society. No other great historian has dealt intelligently and consecutively [Pg 211] with such phases of barbarism as he describes with such loving minuteness. ”

“ It was a superb theme, better after all for an American than the themes chosen by Prescott and Ticknor 186 and Motley, and precisely adapted to the pictorial and narrative powers of the soldier-minded, soldier-hearted author.
The quality which Parkman admired most in men—though he never seems to have loved men deeply, even his own heroes—was strength of will. That was the secret of his own power, and the sign, it must be added, of the limitations of this group of historians who came at the close of the golden age. ”

“ Having heard much of this ill-fated gentleman, for many years, before the late awful occurrence, and still more since the event—for he was extensively known, and all, who knew him, have something to relate—I am satisfied, that those very traits of eccentricity, to which I refer, have led the larger part of mankind, to form erroneous impressions of his character.
Dr. George Parkman was the son of Samuel Parkman, an enterprising, and successful merchant, of Boston, who was a descendant of Ebenezer Parkman, who graduated at Harvard College, in 1721, and was ordained Oct. ”

“ First and most obvious, plainly visible from the threshold of the subject, was its extreme picturesqueness. It is a widespread notion that American history is commonplace and dull; and as for the American red man, he is often thought to be finally disposed of when we have stigmatized him as a bloodthirsty demon and grovelling beast. It is safe to say that those who entertain such notions have never read Mr. Parkman. In the theme which occupied him his poet's eye saw nothing that was dull or commonplace. ”

“ He was at that time a busy journalist and in the first flush of his success as a novelist, and no one could have deserved it better, for his novels had the historical fidelity and felicity of Francis Parkman, in addition to their graceful and romantic style. In spite of the solid work he has done in politics, he will be remembered as an author more than as a politician, though now we clap him on the back for the splendid spade-work he does for the Conservative Party. As a writer he fires the imagination, like the bugles in his famous story. ”

“ Francis Parkman, an eminent American historian, was born at Boston, September 16, 1823, and died at Jamaica Plain, Mass., November 8, 1893. He wrote: “The Oregon Trail: Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life,” “History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac,” “The Pioneers of France in the New World,” “The Jesuits in North America,” “La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West,” “The Old Régime in Canada,” “Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV,” “Montcalm and Wolfe,” and “A Half-Century of Conflict.”
The essayist rises higher than the poet—witty, tender; wise in human frailty, but never bitter. ”

“ Great in his natural powers and great in the use he made of them, Parkman was no less great in his occasion and in his theme. Of all American historians he is the most deeply and peculiarly American, yet he is at the same time the broadest and most cosmopolitan. The book which depicts at once the social life of the Stone Age, and the victory of the English political ideal over the ideal which France inherited from imperial Rome, is a book for all mankind and for all time. The more adequately men's historic perspective gets adjusted, the greater will it seem. ”

“ It is difficult to understand how an author could have written so fully and so eloquently of men, the dignity of whose aims he seems not to have formed the slightest conception of, or that he should have chosen this theme at all under the circumstances. We can only hope that a more profound feeling stirred him to the task than he is willing to acknowledge. But Mr. Parkman is a New Englander, and it befits not the Puritan traditions of his people to display any enthusiasm. ”

“ It was he who crushed French Protestantism in America. To plant religious freedom on this western soil was not the mission of France. It was for her to rear in northern forests the banner of absolutism and of Rome; while among the rocks of Massachusetts England and Calvin fronted her in dogged opposition, long before the ice-crusted pines of Plymouth had listened to the rugged psalmody of the Puritan, the solitudes of Western New York and the stern wilderness of Lake Huron were trodden by the iron heel of the soldier and the sandalled foot of the Franciscan friar. ”

“ To-day such a thing can hardly be done within the United States, for nowhere does the primitive wilderness exist save here and there in shreds and patches. So recently as the middle of the 19th century, however, it covered the western half of the continent, and could be reached by a journey of 1600 or 1700 miles from Boston to the plains of Nebraska. Parkman had become an adept in woodcraft and a dead shot with the rifle, and could do such things with horses, tame or wild, as civilized people never see done except in a circus. ”

“ He burned the grass, and sowed crops of wheat, rye, and barley in its stead. His appearance gave so little promise of personal vigor, that some of the party assured him that he would never see France again, and warned him to husband his strength; but he knew himself better, and set at naught these comforting monitions. He was the most diligent of workers. He made gardens near the fort, where, in his zeal, he plied the hoe with his own hands late into the moonlight evenings. The priests, of whom at the outset there had been no lack, had all succumbed to the scurvy at St. Croix ”

“ Never, under the impenetrable mail of paladin or crusader, beat a heart of more intrepid mettle than within the stoic panoply that armed the breast of La Salle. To estimate aright the marvels of his patient fortitude, one must follow on his track through the vast scene of his interminable journeyings, those thousands of weary miles of forest, marsh, and river, where, again and again, in the bitterness of baffled striving, the untiring pilgrim pushed onward towards the goal which he was never to attain. America owes him an enduring memory ”

“ Parkman's face were deepening. They worked on unfalteringly—hypodermics, heat, rubbing, oxygen, all those things with which man seeks to deceive himself, and for which the foe, with the tolerance of power, is willing to wait. But their faces were changing. The call of the outgoing tide, that tide over which human determination has not learned to prevail, was coming close. They worked on, for they were trained to work on, even through the sense of their own futility.
Looking about her Ernestine saw it all, and held him with a passionate protectiveness. ”

“ He stood stark naked at the door of a large wigwam, holding up both hands as if to shield his eyes. "Frenchmen, how bright the sun shines when you come to visit us! All our village awaits you; and you shall enter our wigwams in peace." So saying, he led them into his own; which was crowded to suffocation with savages, staring at their guests in silence. Having smoked with the chiefs and old men, they were invited to visit the great chief of all the Illinois, at one of the villages they had seen in the distance; and thither they proceeded, followed by a throng of warriors, squaws, and children. ”

“ Parkman has special qualifications, taste, and talents for the line of historical studies to which he has devoted his life, and in which—in spite of most discouraging and embarrassing impediments of ill-health and physical suffering in eye and limb, and the sympathetic demands of the brain for rest and inaction except at long intervals and for short efforts—he has already done enough to give him place in our foremost literary ranks. ”

“ Francis Parkman, 1823-1893, the son of a clergyman of the same name, was born in Boston, and graduated at Harvard University in 1844. He spent more than twenty years in a careful study of the early French explorations and settlements in America; and he published the fruits of his labor in twelve large volumes. Although troubled with an affection of the eyes, which sometimes wholly prevented reading or writing, his work was most carefully and successfully done. His narratives are written in a clear and animated style, and his volumes are a rich contribution to American history. ”

“ We see plainly that you [Pg 290] mean only to deceive our father. If we should leave him, as you wish, you would fall upon him and kill him. You are dogs who have always bitten him. You thought that we did not know all the messages you have had from the English, telling you to cut our father's throat, and then bring them into this our country. We will not leave him alone with you. We shall see who will be the master. Go back to your fort. We are going to fire at you again."
The envoys went back with a French escort to prevent their being murdered on the way, and then the firing began again. ”

“ Parkman, on the other hand, conceives and presents his subject as a whole. He forgets nothing, overlooks nothing; but whether it is a bloody battle, or a theological pamphlet, or an exploring journey though the forest, or a code for the discipline of nunneries, each event grows out of its context as a feature in the total development that is going on before our eyes. It is only the historian who is also philosopher and artist that can thus deal in block with the great and complex life of a whole society. ”