Parkman, Francis
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Francis (1823-1893), an eminent American historian. He was a Boston boy of good family. As a child he was fond of stories of the early settlement of New England . When a Harvard sophomore he formed the purpose of writing a history of the French and Indian War. The possession of family wealth enabled young Parkman to form his plans and to carry them out in his own way. He spent his vacations in camping and canoeing. His "postgraduate course" he took with a cousin among the Dakota Indians in the Black Hills . After his return he wrote his first volume, The Oregon Trail, a vivid account of the tents, villages, feasts, buffalo hunts, and filthy habits of the Dakota Indians. He made five trips to Europe to explore French and Indian archives, and visited every important American locality that his historical work led him to describe. The Conspiracy of Pontiac, The Jesuits in North America , The Discovery of the Great West, and Montcalm and Wolfe are perhaps his most important volumes. Parkman gave his life to a study of the Jesuits and their great work in the exploration and settlement of Canada and the region about the Great Lakes . It is not likely that any other writer will ever bring to the history of this period so extensive a knowledge of the facts, coupled with so brilliant a literary imagination. Parkman's volumes are a treasure-house, and should be read by every boy who is fond of American history. See Buffalo ; Pontiac ; Jesuits
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's confidence in 1910 that "it is not likely that any other writer will ever bring to the history of this period so extensive a knowledge of the facts" has not held. Parkman survives as a prose stylist — his seven-part France and England in North America was reissued in the Library of America in 1983 and The Oregon Trail is still read — but since the 1970s historians have gone after his foundations, notably Francis Jennings in The Invasion of America (1975), who treated Parkman's view of Indigenous peoples as a barrier to understanding rather than a source of it. The casual phrase in the entry above, praising his account of the "filthy habits of the Dakota Indians," is exactly the tone modern ethnohistorians reject; they now build the same story from Native oral tradition, treaty records and Jesuit documents read against the grain, as in Richard White's The Middle Ground (1991). What Aiton's leaves out is that Parkman worked half-blind for much of his life, dictating and using a wire frame to guide his hand.
Written for this edition, 2026.