Francis Parkman

Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1896.
Copyright, 1896, by Little, Brown, and Co. University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U. S. A.

One of the convincing tests of genius is the choice of a theme, and no greater felicity can befall it than to find one both familiar and fresh. All the better if tradition, however attenuated, have made it already friendly with our fancy. In the instinct that led him straight to subjects that seemed waiting for him so long, Mr. Parkman gave no uncertain proof of his fitness for an adequate treatment of them. —James Russell Lowell.
The greatest of all American historians was indeed exceptionately fortunate in his choice of a subject. Writing as he did of the colonization of North America from the landing of Champlain, and of the warfare between France and England for the control of the American continent, his theme is so closely allied to his own countrymen that it must always have a special interest for them and for the people of Canada, upon the early history and settlement of which country he has thrown so much light, and in regard to which he has aroused such great attention. Notwithstanding physical infirmities, he lived to complete his work, and to bring his series of historical narratives down to the year 1760, when Canada passed with the death of Montcalm from the hands of the French to be ruled by the nation that had fought more than half a century for its possession.
The remarkable series of histories grouped under the general title of France and England in North America may truly be termed the life work of their gifted author. He was but a youth of eighteen at Harvard College when he conceived the plan of writing a history of the French and Indian Wars, and his vacations at that time were passed adventurously and in a way which familiarized him with scenes in which the actors in his historical drama had moved. In the year 1846 he made with a friend his notable journey across the continent, to the desert plains and mountains and the Indian camps of the far West. I went, says the author in the preface to the fourth edition of The Oregon Trail, as a student, to prepare for a literary undertaking of which the plan was already formed. My business was observation, and I was willing to pay dearly for the opportunity of exercising it. He camped among the Sioux Indians, listened to Indian legends, and studied Indian customs, but paid dearly indeed for the opportunity, for he became through the exposure an invalid for life.