REFERENCES:
Edward Wheelwright: ‘Memoir of Francis Parkman, LL.D.,’ Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. i, 1895.
C. H. Farnham: A Life of Francis Parkman, 1901.
H. D. Sedgwick: Francis Parkman, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1904.
I
HIS LIFE
The Parkmans are descendants of Thomas Parkman of Sidmouth, Devon, whose son Elias settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1633. Francis Parkman was a son of the Reverend Francis Parkman, pastor for thirty-six years of the New North Church in Boston. Through his mother, Caroline (Hall) Parkman, he was related to the famous colonial minister, John Cotton. Two of his maternal ancestors used to preach to the Indians in their own tongue. Parkman’s deep interest in the ‘aborigines’ may have been ‘partly inherited from these Puritan ancestors.’ ‘It does not appear, however, that he ever learned their language, and it may be regarded as certain that he never preached to them.’
Born in Boston on September 16, 1823, Parkman prepared for college at Chauncy Hall School and was graduated at Harvard in 1844. During his college course he ‘showed symptoms of Injuns on the brain,’ as a classmate phrased it. In 1841 he began those vacation wanderings which gave him such an intimate acquaintance with the American wilderness. Before taking his degree he had planned a book on the conspiracy of Pontiac. The year after graduation he visited Detroit and other scenes of the historic drama, collected papers, and, wherever it was possible, ‘interviewed descendants of the actors.’
At his father’s instance Parkman then entered the Dane Law School at Cambridge and obtained his degree (1846), but took no steps to be admitted to the bar. He studied by himself history, Indian ethnology, and ‘models of English style.’ The passage in Vassall Morton describing the influence of Thierry’s Norman Conquest in directing the hero of the novel towards ethnological study, is thought to be autobiographical.
Having weakened his sight by immoderate reading, Parkman (in 1846) made a journey to the Northwest, ‘partly to cure his eyes and partly to study Indian life.’ He was accompanied by his friend Quincy Adams Shaw. For some weeks he lived in a village of Ogillallah Indians, sharing the tent of a chief and following the wanderings of the tribe in their search for enemies and buffalo. The hardships of the life ruined his health. His sight was made worse rather than better, and his first book, The Oregon Trail (1849), describing these western experiences, had to be written from dictation.[52] It was followed by The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), and that by Vassall Morton (1856), an attempt at fiction. This ends the initial period of Parkman’s literary life.
In 1850 Parkman married Catharine, a daughter of Doctor Jacob Bigelow of Boston. She is said to have been a woman of a sweet and joyful disposition, having a keen sense of humor, and, above all, endowed with ‘the high courage requisite to tend unfalteringly the pain and suffering of the man she loved.’[53] It was a perfect union, but unhappily it was not to last long. Mrs. Parkman died in 1858.