5. • Born 16th September 1823
• Suffered from ill health as a child
• Around age 15 he moved with family to
Boston
• Entered Harvard in 1840. Went on to Law
School.
• Travelling and exploring America and Europe
• 1845: anonymous publication of wilderness
sketches in Knickerbocker Magazine
• 1846: undertook journey that would later be
incorporated into The Oregon Trail.
• 1847-49: original version of The Oregon Trail
published serially in Knickerbocker Magazine.
‘The Oregon Trail: Or a Summer’s Journey
Out of Bounds’, author- ‘a Bostonian’.
• 1849: rev. version published as a book:The
California and Oregon Trail: Being Sketches of
Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life
6. • 1850: married Catherine Scollay Bigelow
• 1851: The Conspiracy of Pontiac
• 1852: a new ed. of The California and Oregon Trail- Prairie
and Rocky Mountain Life: Or, The California and Oregon Trail
• 1856: Vassal Morton (novel)
• Following wife’s death in 1858, Parkman travelled to Paris for
treatment of nervous disorders
• Return to Boston in 1859. Several years spent on horticulture.
• Historical study- France and England in North America-
published in two parts; Pioneers of France in the New World
(1865), The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth
Century (1867)
• 1869: The Discovery of the Great West
• 1872: new ed. of The Oregon Trail published with significant
revisions
• 1874: The Old Regime in Canada
7. • 1877: Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV
• Articles published in North American Review :
• ‘The Failure of Universal Suffrage (1878); ‘The Woman
Question’ (1879); ‘The Woman Question Again’ (1880)
• 1881- Trip to France and England
• 1884- Montcalm and Wolf published
• 1885: rev. ed. of Pioneers of France in the New World
• Around 1887: Some of the Reasons Against Woman Suffrage
• 1890: Our Common Schools- Parkman supported public
education
• 1892: A Half-Century of Conflict and final rev. version of The
Oregon Trail
• 1893: Parkman died 8th November after an attack of
appendicitis
8. “Experience the life of a pioneer as you
lead your wagon party, hunting for
food, tending to sicknesses, crossing
treacherous rivers and more throughout
the 2,000 mile journey.”
- www.oregontrail.com
12. Travel narratives
• A tradition of narratives concerned with travelling
West eg. Henry Schoolcraft Narrative of an
Expedition through the Upper Mississippi to Itasca
Lake (1834)
• 19th Century fascination w/exploring America
extended to European writers (eg. Tocqueville
Democracy in America, 1835)
• America as NEW world; sense of excitement; a
social experiment
13. Main types of narrative…
1. Narratives that ROMANTICIZE the landscape
2. Narratives that focus on the INDIVIDUAL
EXPERIENCE of the traveller
3. Narratives that ANALYSE AND ASSESS the
experience, providing cultural commentary
Frequent criticism of The Oregon Trail- Parkman ‘s
lack of reflection; observation WITHOUT analysis
14. Key aspects of The Oregon Trail
• Dismissive attitude towards emigrants (QUOTE 1)
• A class issue?
• Parkman is a gentleman on an outing- life on the
frontier as entertainment
• Intrusions of emigrants and their concerns as a
distraction from Parkman’s aim- pursuit of
adventure
16. Landscape
• Wilderness
• ‘Great American desert’
• Settling empty land
• ‘unknown’
• ‘unexplored’
• ‘peaceful’ settlement of ‘free’ land
17. Civilised vs. Savage
• Anxiety about Indians
• Negative individualism
• Worries about the shape of America
• Settling, or colonisation?
“...the progress of mankind is arrested and you condemn
one of the most beautiful and fertile tracts of the earth
to perpetual sterility as the hunting ground of a few
savages.”
Representative Strother, Annals of Congress. 15th Congress, 2nd
session, (1818-19): 838
18. PROGRESS
• Blaming the victim
• Manifest destiny
“The Indian is hewn out of a rock. You can rarely change the form
without destruction of the substance. Races of inferior energy have
possessed a power of expansion and assimilation to which he is a
stranger; and it is this fixed and rigid quality which has proved his
ruin. He will not learn the arts of civilization, and he and his forests
must perish together. The stern, unchanging features of his mind
excite our admiration from their very immutability; and we look
with deep interest on the fate of this irreclaimable son of the
wilderness.”
Parkman, Conspiracy, I:48.
19. Narratives of Justification
“The peoples of those vast countries of land
rather overran than inhabited them.”
- Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations
(New York: Samuel Campbell, 1796), I: 94.
Founding principles left ignored:
genocide and slavery
20. Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851)
• Indian ‘destined to melt and vanish before the
advancing waves of Anglo-American power.’ (I:
x, xi.)
Editor's Notes
Roughly 2000 miles of trail, traversed at a rate of 12-15 miles per day – difficult land to travel over. Spring - Autumn
Between 1843-69 thousands of people travelled by foot, horse and wagon from the eastern parts of the United States to what is now Washington, California, Nevada, Utah and Oregon. People came for many reasons. Some came because there was more land for farms and others came to search for gold. Idea of Oregon as a land of opportunity, where people would make a living. However, this trip was not always easy. One out of every ten people who travelled along the trail died. Reason for Parkman’s journey is one hardly conceivable to most pioneers, but taps into a central preoccupation of the myth of the West: a love of adventure.
Fascination with history and adventure – a way of inhabiting the past. But when we do we’re participating in cultural mythmaking. Parker was an historian, but all history is a symptom of its times. So we learn about the practical hardships: the illness, loss of life and rough travelling – but we also learn something of the way the culture saw this vast migration and its consequences.
For an example of the way this works we could perhaps look at the way the OT has been reinvented for our own times. On the one hand we have the cosy, ‘edutainment’ of the OT computer game, but we also have its adapted forms. The ‘organ trail’, a zombie filled road trip across a post apocalypse american landscape shows that the vastness of these landscapes and the trope of the challenging journey across them still inspire awe in the american consciousness. Now that the fear of the ‘other’ can no longer reasonably be projected onto people of different cultures, the zombie hoard quite often expresses a sense of vulnerability in the face of the unknown.
The travel narrative still seizes the American imagination, albeit in a much darker form.
In the 19th C, travel narratives didn’t have to invent the unknown. It was right there at the heart of the country... Many people were interested to explore. Proliferation of travel narratives
Narratives of hope and excitement, but they too hadtheir heart of darkness...
Parkman’s bluntness and lack of emotion...
Ambiguity in Parkman’s narrative
This immutability of the Indian is of course a projection. We have hints even from Parkman’s narrative that the first nations were involved in trade, that they were adapting through intermarriage, and generally trying to gain what advantage they could from a bad situation. Cherokee nation is an example of this: success in farming and cotton. But this narrative was one that leaders were simply not prepared to accept. The narrative of the immutable Indian
