FRANCIS PARKMAN [Francis Parkman was born in Boston, Sept. 16, 1823, and died at his country house in Jamaica Plain, one of the suburbs of Boston, Nov. 8, 1893. His ancestors had for several generations been honorably known in Massachusetts. Much of Francis Parkman's early life was spent in the woods. The home of his maternal grandfather, Nathaniel Hall of Medford, was situated on the border of the Middlesex Fells, a superb piece of wild and savage woodland, 4000 acres in extent, within eight miles of Boston. As the boy's health was not robust, he was allowed to spend much of his time in this enchanting solitude, and learned there the craft of huntsman and trapper. He was graduated at Harvard in 1844, with high rank. While in college he spent several months in a journey in Europe, and afterward, in 1846, he travelled in the Rocky Mountain region, in what was then a howling wilderness, and lived for some time in a village of Sioux Indians of the Ogillalah tribe, whose acquaintance with white men was but slight. A graphic account of this wild experience was given in Parkman's first book, The Oregon Trail, published in 1847. Some time afterward he published a historical novel, Vassall Morton, which had not much success. In 1851 he published the first of his great series of histories, The Conspiracy of Pontiac. This remarkable book, though the first to be published, was in its subject the last of the series to which it belongs, and which, with their dates of publication, are as follows: Pioneers of France in the New World (1865), The Jesuits in North America (1867), La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869), The Old Régime in Canada (1874), Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV. (1877), A Half-Century of Conflict (1892), Montcalm and Wolfe (1884). It will be observed that the last-named work, the climax of the series, was completed before the less important one which precedes it. Mr. Parkman was eminent in the culture of roses, and author of a work entitled The Book of Roses (1866). He was president of the Horticultural Society, and was at one time Professor of Horticulture in Harvard University. He was afterward an Overseer and finally a Fellow of the University. No biography of him has as yet been published except the brief sketch by the present writer, prefixed to the revised and illustrated edition of his complete works, in twenty volumes (Boston, 1897-1898).] THE significance of Parkman in literary history lies chiefly in the fact that he was the first great American historian to deal on a large scale with American themes. Two men of genius before him had taken subjects from the ever-fascinating age of maritime discovery. Seventy years ago Washington Irving published a biography of Columbus which still remains without a worthy rival in any language; in his life of Washington the same writer was less successful. Prescott's narratives of Spanish conquest in Mexico and Peru, extremely brilliant but inadequate and misleading because of the writer's imperfect acquaintance with American archæology, barely approach the threshold of American history, properly so called. Our only other historian of genius occupied himself with the noble story of the Netherlands and their war of independence. For American history one had to choose between the jejune registration of Hildreth and the vapid rhetoric of Bancroft. Far above such writers we must rank Palfrey, in spite of his one-sidedness; but his work, though excellent, is without genius; it does not clothe with warm flesh and red blood the dry bones of the past. Before Parkman wrote it used commonly to be said, either that our country had no history, or else that such as it had was devoid of romantic interest. What! Two and a half centuries, more crowded with incident and richer in records than any that had gone before, and yet no history! A leading race of men thrust into a savage wilderness, to work out a new civilization under these strange conditions, and yet no romantic interest! Truly the history was there, and the romance was there, only it needed the touch of the artist to bring it out. So it might have seemed in Dr. Johnson's day that there was but little of interest in Britain north of the Tweed, but the enchanter, Scott, forever dispelled such a monstrous illusion. The first thing that strikes us in reading Parkman's books is their picturesqueness. But they are equally remarkable for their minute accuracy and for their wealth of knowledge. For patient and careful research Parkman has never been excelled by any of the Dryasdust family. He would follow up a clew with the tenacity of a sleuth-hound. It was very rarely that anything escaped him, and it is but seldom that the most jealous criticism has detected a weak spot in his statements or in his conclusions. Parkman's accuracy, indeed, is a notable element of his picturesqueness. His descriptions are vivid because in every small detail they are true to life. His preparation for his subject was admirable. It grew naturally out of his early wanderings in the Middlesex Fells. A passionate love of wild nature took possession of him, and in youth he conceived the plan of writing the history of the American wilderness, and the mighty struggle between Frenchmen and Englishmen for the mastery of it. This struggle between political despotism and political liberty for the possession of such a vast area of virgin soil for future growth and expansion gives to the theme an epic grandeur. For dealing with such a subject Parkman prepared himself by various experiences. Though his sojourn with a wild tribe of Sioux in 1846 was not long, yet he brought away from it knowledge of the highest value, for his faculty of observation was as keen as that of any naturalist. On his first journey in Europe, during his college days, he had spent several weeks in a monastery of Passionists at Rome, and what he saw there must have been of infinite service to him in studying the labors of Jesuits and Franciscans in the New World. The next thing in order was to study history at its sources, and this involved much tedious exploration and several journeys in Europe. A notable monument of this research exists in a cabinet now standing in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, containing nearly two hundred folio volumes of documents transcribed from the originals by expert copyists. Ability to incur heavy expense is a prerequisite for such undertakings, and herein our historian was favored by fortune. Against this great advantage were to be offset the hardships entailed by delicate health and inability to use the eyes for reading and writing. Parkman always dictated instead of holding the pen, and his huge mass of documents in French, Italian, Latin, and other languages, had to be read aloud to him, while it was but seldom that he could work for more than half an hour without stopping to take a long rest. The heroism shown year after year in contending with physical ailments was the index of a character fit to be mated, for its pertinacious courage, with the heroes that live in his shining. pages. Parkman's descriptions seem like the reports of an eyewitness. The realism is so strong that the author seems to have come in person fresh from the scenes he describes, with the smoke of the battle hovering about him and its fierce light glowing in his eyes. Parkman did not feel ready to write until he had visited nearly all the localities that form the scenery of his story, and studied them with the patience of a surveyor and the discerning eye of a landscape painter. His love of nature added keen zest to this sort of work. To sleep under the open sky was his delight, and his books fairly reek with the fragrance of pine woods. But except for Parkman's inborn temperament all his microscopic industry would have availed him but little. To use his own words, "Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning." These are words which the mere Dryasdust can never comprehend; yet they are golden words for the student of the historical art to ponder. To make a truthful record of a vanished age, patient scholarship is needed, and something more. Into the making of a historian there should enter something of the naturalist, something of the poet, and something of the philosopher. Seldom has this union of qualities been realized in such a high degree as in Parkman. His philosophic habit of mind is seen in all his books, but it may best be studied in The Old Régime in Canada. The fate of a nationalistic experiment, set on foot by one of the most absolute of monarchs and fostered by one of the most devoted and powerful of religious organizations, is traced to the operation of causes inherent in its very nature. These pages are alive with philosophy and teem with object-lessons of extraordinary value. Free industrial England pitted against despotic militant France for the possession of an ancient continent reserved from the beginning of time for this decisive struggle, and dragging into the conflict the belated barbarism of the Stone Age,—such is the wonderful theme which Parkman has treated. Thus, while of all our historians he is the most deeply and peculiarly American, he is at the same time the broadest and most cosmopolitan. His work is for all time, and the more adequately men's historic perspective gets adjusted, the greater will it seem. JOHN FISKE THE BLACK HILLS To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell, Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unrolled. Childe Harold WE travelled eastward for two days, and then the gloomy ridges of the Black Hills rose up before us. The village passed along for some miles beneath their declivities, trailing out to a great length over the arid prairie, or winding at times among small detached hills of distorted shapes. Turning sharply to the left, we entered a wide defile of the mountains, down the bottom of which a brook came winding, lined with tall grass and dense copses, amid which were hidden many beaver-dams and lodges. We passed along between two lines of high precipices and rocks, piled in disorder one upon another, with scarcely a tree, a bush, or a clump of grass to veil their nakedness. The restless Indian boys were wandering along their edges and clambering up and down their rugged sides, and sometimes a group of them would stand on the verge of a cliff and look down on the array as it passed in review beneath them. As we advanced, the passage grew more narrow; then it suddenly expanded into a round grassy meadow, completely encompassed by mountains; and here the families stopped as they came up in turn, and the camp rose like magic. The lodges were hardly erected when, with their usual precipitation, the Indians set about accomplishing the object that had brought them there; that is, the obtaining poles for their new lodges. Half the population, men, women, and boys, mounted their horses and set out for the interior of the mountains. As they rode at full gallop over the shingly rocks and into the dark |