O FRANCIS PARKMAN, as much as to any one man, we owe the revival of interest in American history. His story of “The Pioneers of France in the New World,” “The Jesuits in North America,” “La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West,” “The Old Régime in Canada,” “Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV.” “A Half-Century of Conflict,” “Montcalm and Wolf,” and “The Conspiracy of Pontiac,” form a connected account of the rise and fall of the French power in America. They may well be described as one work, almost as one book. It was a great design formed when he was still a Harvard student, and held so tenaciously that no trials or disappointments could discourage him and no mountain of labor be too great for his untiring powers.
He was born in Boston in 1823, and was so fortunate as to inherit wealth which not only set him free to devote himself to his vocation, but enabled him to command an amount and kind of assistance absolutely essential to his peculiar work, and in his peculiar circumstances, and which could be secured only by large expenditure. He had traveled a year abroad before he graduated in 1844 and had made himself master of the French language and familiar with French history and institutions. By repeated summer journeys into the wilderness of northern New England, he had acquainted himself with the conditions of pioneer life and, to some extent of Indian warfare. He pursued the study of law for two years, but it may well be supposed that these studies yielded larger results in a knowledge of the history of Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and of the facts in that history bearing upon the great conflict in the new world, than in any definite grasp of the intricacies of the law itself.
In the spring of 1846, he joined his cousin, Quincy A. Shaw, in the hazardous experiment of spending the summer with the Dacotah Indians, then living in an entirely savage condition east of the Rocky mountains. The two young men carried out their undertaking at the continuous risk of their lives, but it supplied Parkman with a minute knowledge of Indian thoughts and Indian ways which equipped him, as probably no other man was ever equipped, for writing the history in which Indians were among the chief actors. But the cost was very great. While among the Indians he was attacked by serious illness and it was one of the savage customs of his Indian companions that he who confessed sickness was to be immediately tomahawked. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to fight off his disease as best he could and make what show was possible, of health and vigor. He succeeded, but the strain was so great that it left him apparently disabled. His physicians assured him that he could not live, and for three years he was compelled to suspend all intellectual work and live a life as absolutely quiet as was possible. The remainder of his life was devoted to the books which we have named. For the greater portion of this fifty years he could not use his eyes for more than five continuous minutes, and he was compelled to exercise the greatest care not to bring on final collapse by exceeding the few hours per day which he could safely devote to mental labor. Every one of his books was dictated to a relative, who cared for every detail of its preparation for the press. In gathering the materials for his histories he visited Europe seven times, and constantly employed a number of experts in copying important documents for his use. He very early became master of everything that had been printed which bore upon his subject, and realized that his main dependence must be upon manuscripts—private letters, public documents, official reports—scattered through public and private libraries in Europe and America, often unknown and frequently almost inaccessible. An interesting example of his persistency is in his continuing to search for fifteen years for a volume of letters from Montcalm in Canada, which Montcalm had requested to have burned, but which Parkman believed to exist, and which was finally discovered in a private collection of manuscripts.
The Massachusetts Historical Society possesses an oaken cabinet in which are stored some two hundred folio volumes of manuscript copies of important documents, the gift of Mr. Parkman; to Harvard College he gave a most interesting collection of fac-simile maps.
Mr. Parkman was not a recluse, but on the contrary delighted in society, and indulged his liking as far as was possible with a due regard to saving his strength for his beloved work. He took the most lively interest in public affairs, and for a number of years was one of the corporation of Harvard University.
An interesting side of Mr. Parkman’s life was his interest in horticulture. He became the owner in 1854 of a property on the shore of Jamaica Pond, and in this beautiful place devoted himself in the intervals of literary labor, and during the several periods of two or three years when he was absolutely compelled to abstain, to the culture of flowers. He made long continued and careful experiments in hybridizing lillies and other flowers and produced a number of new varieties one of which, a magnificent lilly was given his name by the English horticulturist who undertook to put the beautiful plant upon the market. He published “The Book of Roses,” held a professorship in the Bussey Institution, and was in 1886 president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. But his principal workshop was a plain, comfortable room at the top of his sister’s house on Beacon Hill, in Boston, where with an open fire and convenient bookshelves and the willing help of friends and relatives he completed his task in 1892. It was at his suburban home which had supplied occupation and entertainment when driven from his work and whose beauties were so largely his own creation, that, two years later, he passed away.
This, in brief, is the life of the man who has made La Salle and Montcalm live again for delighted thousands of nineteenth century readers. The study of our nation’s history is coming to take its proper position in our colleges and schools, our libraries are compelled to set apart more and more shelf-room for books which tell the story of the making of America and of our national life. There is no chapter in all this history more vivid, more full of action, more crowded with the conflict between high and ignoble purpose, nor one which bears a more important relation to our national development than that which tells how the Frenchman came, how he made friends with the Indian, how he contended for empire and was defeated. And no one of these chapters has been written with more absolute fidelity to the actual facts in their proper relation. It is written in a style whose grace and elegance of diction, clearness and dignity of expression, completeness and accuracy of statement bring back the Indian and the Frenchman, the priest and the voyageur and make them live and move before our eyes. It was a field unoccupied, a period of history interesting, inviting, and complete in itself. Few historians have embraced such an opportunity, of still fewer can it be said that their work is so well done that it need never be done again.
He was half a century at his work, untiringly; as has been well said, “Nowhere can we find a better illustration of the French critic’s definition of a great life—a thought conceived in youth and realized in later years.”