Francis Parkman Jr. The Oregon Trail (1845)The Oregon Trail (1849)

Why go West?• Land speculation• Depression after panic of 1837• Moral objections to moving South

Parkman’s reasons

• Adventure• Desire to know more

about ‘Indians’• Wanted to experience

what he had read

• 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

• 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

• 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

“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

Travel narratives and Cultural Anxieties

• End of civilisation• Battle for survival• Vast landscapes• Setting out into dangerous, unknown territory

C19th Travel narratives

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

Main types of narrative…

1. Narratives that ROMANTICIZE the landscape2. Narratives that focus on the INDIVIDUAL

EXPERIENCE of the traveller3. Narratives that ANALYSE AND ASSESS the

experience, providing cultural commentary

Frequent criticism of The Oregon Trail- Parkman ‘s lack of reflection; observation WITHOUT analysis

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

Masculinity and individualism

• Hero figure• Man in the wilderness• Recklessness

Landscape• Wilderness• ‘Great American desert’• Settling empty land• ‘unknown’• ‘unexplored’• ‘peaceful’ settlement of ‘free’ land

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

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.

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

Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851)

• Indian ‘destined to melt and vanish before the advancing waves of Anglo-American power.’ (I: x, xi.)