An entire volume of the series is devoted to the Life of Count Frontenac, the great French governor of Canada. "Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV." was issued in 1877. Parkman describes him in the preface as "the most remarkable man who ever represented the crown of France in the New World. He grew with every emergency and rose equal to every crisis. Under the rule of Frontenac occurred the first serious collision of the great rival Powers.… The present volume will show how valiantly, and for a time how successfully, New France battled against a fate which her own organic fault made inevitable. Her history is a great and significant drama, enacted among untamed forests, with a distant gleam of courtly splendor and the regal pomp of Versailles." A large portion of the volume is devoted to the warfare between the French and English, including the Iroquois Invasion, the attack on Schenectady, the unsuccessful Massachusetts attack on Quebec under Sir William Phips, the border warfare against New England, and the war in Acadia.
With the possibility that he might not live to complete his design, Mr. Parkman passed over the period between 1700 and 1748, and for seven years devoted himself to the preparation of Montcalm and Wolfe, the longest of his works, issued in two volumes, in 1884. His popularity had been, since the publication of "Pioneers of France," constantly increasing, but "Montcalm and Wolfe" at once directed universal attention to his writings, and gave him a greater reputation than he had achieved by all the previous volumes of the series. The subject, a great one, had never before received the study and research given to it by Parkman. He visited and examined every spot where events of any importance in connection with the contest took place, examined documents in the archives and libraries of France and England, great numbers of autograph letters, diaries, etc., had access through the permission of the present Marquis de Montcalm to all the letters written by General Montcalm to members of his family in France, searched the voluminous records of the colonial history of New York and Pennsylvania, and used in the preparation of the work a large amount of unpublished material, the papers copied in France alone exceeding six thousand folio pages of manuscript. He began the work with sketches of the condition of England and France and the Colonies in the eighteenth century (1745), treated of the conflict for the West, the conflict for Acadia, the colony of Virginia under Dinwiddie, and the defeat of Washington at Fort Necessity, the death of Braddock, the removal of the Acadians, the expedition against Crown Point, Shirley and the Border War in 1755-1756, and the arrival of Montcalm, the first volume concluding with chapters on the massacre at Fort William Henry.
The second volume opened with a description of the events in the years 1757-1758, sketched the character of Intendant Bigot, discussed Pitt and Newcastle, described the Siege of Louisbourg, the destruction of Gaspé by Wolfe, the death of Howe at Ticonderoga, the expedition of Bradstreet against Ticonderoga, the evacuation of Fort Duquesne, and Governor Vaudreuil's jealousy of Montcalm. More than half of the volume is devoted to the expedition against Quebec under Wolfe, the capture of the Heights of Abraham, the death of Montcalm and Wolfe, the fall of Quebec, and the description of the ruins of the town, the volume closing with chapters on the Fall of Canada and the Peace of Paris.
The work was reviewed in the United States, in Canada, and in England as a masterpiece of military history and the first authentic, full, sustained, and worthy narrative of these momentous events and extraordinary men.
The author's physical condition greatly retarded the completion of his labor; but in 1892, fifty years after he had planned his history, he was able to finish his task with the sixth part of the series, "A Half Century of Conflict," in two volumes, the preparation of which had been put aside, as previously stated, in order that he might write the work which he considered of the utmost importance to his design, "Montcalm and Wolfe." "A Half Century of Conflict" covers the years 1700 to 1748, and makes the series form a continuous history of the efforts of France to occupy and control the American Continent. The importance of the at one time almost unhoped for completion of this great literary enterprise received due attention on all sides.
"The completion of this history," said the New York Times, "is an event that should awaken interest wherever historical genius can be appreciated. Since Prescott, Motley, and Bancroft, Francis Parkman alone has thoroughly sustained American reputation in this field. He has not only sustained, but has measurably increased that reputation, for his work ranks with the most brilliant and lasting historical undertakings that have marked the past fifty years. The charm of his narrative is not greater than his scholarship, the rare importance of his theme not greater than the sustained interest with which he has carried it forward to completion."
"We doubt not," said the Atlantic Monthly, "that we express the feeling of the whole English-speaking world of literature when we congratulate the author upon the completion of the imperishable monument which commemorates his own noble endeavor and the glory of the race to which he belongs. It is rare indeed that a literary project conceived in youth is so comprehensive in its character, and is pursued so steadfastly to its final achievement after nearly fifty years of toil, under discouragements of physical privation induced by the very devotion which led the young author at the outset to turn his back upon civilized life, and to cast in his lot for a time with the race whose ancestors bore so conspicuous a part in the history which he was to unfold."
The Century Magazine, in commemoration of the event, published a "Note on the Completion of Mr. Parkman's Work," by Edward Eggleston, and an Essay, "Francis Parkman," by James Russell Lowell, undertaken by him at the request of the Editor of the Magazine, and left unfinished at his death. It was the last piece of writing prepared by Mr. Lowell for publication. "It is a great merit in Mr. Parkman," wrote Lowell, "that he has sedulously culled from his ample store of documents every warranted piece of evidence that could fortify or enliven his narrative, so that we at least come to know the actors in his various dramas as well as the events in which they shared. And thus the curiosity of the imagination and that of the understanding are altogether satisfied. We follow the casualties of battle with the intense interest of one who has friends or acquaintance there. Mr. Parkman's familiarity also with the scenery of his narratives is so intimate, his memory of the eye is so vivid, as almost to persuade us that ourselves have seen what he describes. We forget ourselves, to swim in the canoe down rivers that flow out of one primeval silence to lose themselves in another, or to thread those expectant solitudes of forest (insuetum nemus) that seem listening with stayed breath for the inevitable axe, and then launch our birchen egg-shells again on lakes that stretch beyond vision into the fairyland of conjecture. The world into which we are led touches the imagination with pathetic interest. It is mainly a world of silence and of expectation, awaiting the masters who are to subdue it and to fill it with the tumult of human life, and of almost more than human energy."
Mr. Eggleston, in his Century Magazine article, said: "It is possible that the historian of the last quarter of the nineteenth century in America will find few events more notable than the completion of the work of Mr. Francis Parkman,—that series of historical narratives, now at last grown to one whole, in which the romantic story of the rise, the marvellous expansion, and the ill-fated ending of the French power in North America is for the first time adequately told. Since its charms have been set before us in Mr. Parkman's picturesque pages, it is easy to understand that it is one of the finest themes that ever engaged the pen of a historian. But before a creative spirit had brooded upon it, while it yet lay formless and void, none but a man of original genius could have discovered a theme fit for a master in the history of a remote and provincial failure. And yet in no episode of human history is the nature of man seen in more varied action than in this story of the struggles of France and England in the new world.… I do not believe that the literature of America can show any historical composition at once so valuable and so delightful as the two volumes entitled 'Montcalm and Wolfe,' with which the whole work culminates."
The Nation, reviewing "A Half Century of Conflict," termed the work "the completion of a memorable undertaking. The task was one of the most important to which an American historian could devote his pen. Mr. Parkman's painstaking research has earned him a permanent place in the front rank of American writers of history, while the brilliancy of the style in which his thought is clothed imparts a charm to his narrative unsurpassed by that of Prescott or Motley. He may well look back with satisfaction on the stately series of volumes in which he has narrated the great attempt to plant on American soil the civilization and institutions of royal France,—a drama heroic and tragic enough to claim the admiration of those who most sincerely rejoice that it ended in essential failure."