most eminent of the leaders in the great Puritan exodus of the
seventeenth century. She was the daughter of Nathaniel Hall, of Medford,
member of a family which was represented in the convention that framed
the Constitution of Massachusetts in 1780. Caroline Hall was a lady of
remarkable character, and many of her fine qualities were noticeable in
her distinguished son. Of her the late Octavius Frothingham says:
"Humility, charity, truthfulness, were her prime characteristics. Her
conscience was firm and lofty, though never austere. She had a strong
sense of right, coupled with perfect charity toward other people;
inflexible in principle, she was gentle in practice. Intellectually she
could hardly be called brilliant or accomplished, but she had a strong
vein of common sense and practical wisdom, great penetration into
character, and a good deal of quiet humour."
Of her six children, the historian, Francis Parkman, was the eldest. As
a boy his health was delicate. In a fragment of autobiography, written
in the third person, he tells us that "his childhood was neither
healthful nor buoyant," and "his boyhood, though for a time active, was
not robust." There was a nervous irritability and impulsiveness which
kept driving him into activity more intense than his physical strength
was well able to bear. At the same time an inborn instinct of
self-control, accompanied, doubtless, by a refined unwillingness to
intrude his personal feelings upon the notice of other people, led him
into such habits of self-repression that his friends sometimes
felicitated him on "having no nerves." There was something rudely
stoical in his discipline. As he says: "It was impossible that
conditions of the nervous system abnormal as his had been from infancy
should be without their effects on the mind, and some of these were of a
nature highly to exasperate him. Unconscious of their character and
origin, and ignorant that with time and confirmed health they would have
disappeared, he had no other thought than that of crushing them by
force, and accordingly applied himself to the work. Hence resulted a
state of mental tension, habitual for several years, and abundantly
mischievous in its effects. With a mind overstrained and a body
overtasked, he was burning his candle at both ends."
The conditions which were provided for the sensitive and highly strung
boy during a part of his childhood were surely very delightful, and
there can be little doubt that they served to determine his career. His
grandfather Hall's home in Medford was situated on the border of the
Middlesex Fells, a rough and rocky woodland, four thousand acres in
extent, as wild and savage in many places as any primeval forest. The
place is within eight miles of Boston, and it may be doubted if anywhere
else can be found another such magnificent piece of wilderness so near
to a great city. It needs only a stray Indian or two, with a few bears
and wolves, to bring back for us the days when Winthrop's company landed
on the shores of the neighbouring bay. In the heart of this shaggy
woodland is Spot Pond, a lake of glorious beauty, with a surface of
three hundred acres, and a homely name which it is to be hoped it may
always keep,--a name bestowed in the good old times before the national
vice of magniloquence had begun to deface our maps. Among the pleasure
drives in the neighbourhood of Boston, the drive around Spot Pond is
perhaps foremost in beauty. A few fine houses have been built upon its
borders, and well-kept roads have given to some parts of the forest the
aspect of a park, but the greater part of the territory is undisturbed,
and will probably remain so. Seventy years ago the pruning hand of
civilization has scarcely touched it. To his grandfather's farm, on the
outskirts of this enchanting spot, the boy Parkman was sent in his
eighth year. There, he tells us, "I walked twice a day to a school of
high but undeserved reputation, about a mile distant, in the town of
Medford. Here I learned very little, and spent the intervals of
schooling more profitably in collecting eggs, insects, and reptiles,
trapping squirrels and woodchucks, and making persistent though rarely
fortunate attempts to kill birds with arrows. After four years of this
rustication I was brought back to Boston, when I was unhappily seized
with a mania for experiments in chemistry, involving a lonely, confined,
unwholesome sort of life, baneful to body and mind." No doubt the
experience of four years of plastic boyhood in Middlesex Fells gave to
Parkman's mind the bent which directed him toward the history of the
wilderness. This fact he recognized of himself in after life, while he
recalled those boyish days as the brightest in his memory.
At the age of fifteen or so the retorts and crucibles were thrown away
forever, and a reaction in favor of woodland life began; "a fancy," he
says, "which soon gained full control over the course of the literary
pursuits to which he was also addicted." Here we come upon the first
mention of the combination of interests which determined his career. A
million boys might be turned loose in Middlesex Fells, one after
another, there to roam in solitude until our globe should have entered
upon a new geological period, and the chances are against any one of
them becoming a great historian, or anything else above mediocrity. But
in Parkman, as in all men of genius, the dominant motive power was
something within him, something which science has not data enough to
explain. The divine spark of genius is something which we know only
through the acts which it excites. In Parkman the strong literary
instinct showed itself at Chauncy Hall School, where we find him, at
fourteen years of age, eagerly and busily engaged in the study and
practice of English composition. It was natural that tales of heroes
should be especially charming at that time of life, and among Parkman's
efforts were paraphrasing parts of the Æneid, and turning into rhymed
verse the scene of the tournament in "Ivanhoe." From the artificial
stupidity which is too often superinduced in boys by their early
schooling he was saved by native genius and breezy woodland life, and
his progress was rapid. In 1840, having nearly completed his seventeenth
year, he entered Harvard College. His reputation there for scholarship
was good, but he was much more absorbed in his own pursuits than in the
regular college studies. In the summer vacation of 1841 he made a rough
journey of exploration in the woods of northern New Hampshire,
accompanied by one classmate and a native guide, and there he had a
taste of adventure slightly spiced with hardship.
How much importance this ramble may have had one cannot say, but he
tells us that "before the end of the Sophomore year my various schemes
had crystallized into a plan of writing the story of what was then known
as the 'Old French War,'--that is, the war that ended in the conquest of
Canada; for here, as it seemed to me, the forest drama was more
stirring, and the forest stage more thronged with appropriate actors,
than in any other passage of our history. It was not until some years
later that I enlarged the plan to include the whole course of the
American conflict between France and England, or, in other words, the
history of the American forest; for this was the light in which I
regarded it. My theme fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness
images day and night." The way in which true genius works could not be
more happily described.
When the great scheme first took shape in Mr. Parkman's mind, he
reckoned that it would take about twenty years to complete the task. How
he entered upon it may best be told in his own words:--
"The time allowed was ample; but here he fell into a fatal error,
entering on this long pilgrimage with all the vehemence of one starting
on a mile heat. His reliance, however, was less on books than on such
personal experience as should in some sense identify him with his theme.
His natural inclinations urged him in the same direction, for his
thoughts were always in the forest, whose features, not unmixed with
softer images, possessed his waking and sleeping dreams, filling him
with vague cravings impossible to satisfy. As fond of hardships as he
was vain of enduring them, cherishing a sovereign scorn for every
physical weakness or defect, deceived moreover by a rapid development of
frame and sinews which flattered him with the belief that discipline
sufficiently unsparing would harden him into an athlete, he slighted the
precautions of a more reasonable woodcraft, tired old foresters with
long marches, stopped neither for heat nor rain, and slept on the earth
without a blanket." In other words, "a highly irritable organism spurred
the writer to excess in a course which, with one of different
temperament, would have produced a free and hardy development of such
faculties and forces as he possessed." Along with the irritable organism
perhaps a heritage of fierce ancestral Puritanism may have prompted him
to the stoical discipline which sought to ignore the just claims of the
physical body. He tells us of his undoubting faith that "to tame the
Devil, it is best to take him by the horns;" but more mature experiences
made him feel less sure "of the advantages of this method of dealing
with that subtle personage."
Under these conditions, perhaps the college vacations which he spent in
the woods of Canada and New England may have done more to exhaust than
to recruit his strength. In his Junior year, some physical injury, the
nature of which does not seem to be known, caused it to be thought
necessary to send him to Europe for his health. He went first to
Gibraltar in a sailing ship, and a passage from his diary may serve to
throw light upon the voyage and the man: "It was a noble sight when at
intervals the sun broke out over the savage waves, changing their
blackness to a rich blue almost as dark; while the foam that flew over
it seemed like whirling snow wreaths on the mountain.... As soon as it
was daybreak I went on deck. Two or three sails were set. The vessel was
scouring along, leaning over so that her lee gunwale scooped up the
water; the water in a foam, and clouds of spray flying over us,
frequently as high as the main yard. The spray was driven with such
force that it pricked the cheek like needles. I stayed on deck two or
three hours, when, being thoroughly salted, I went down, changed my
clothes, and read 'Don Quixote' till Mr. Snow appeared at the door with
'You are the man that wants to see a gale, are ye? Now is your chance;
only just come up on deck.' Accordingly I went. The wind was yelling and
howling in the rigging in a fashion that reminded me of a storm in a
Canadian forest.... The sailors clung, half drowned, to whatever they
could lay hold of, for the vessel was at times half inverted, and tons
of water washed from side to side of her deck."
Mr. Parkman's route was from Gibraltar by way of Malta, to Sicily, where
he travelled over the whole island, and thence to Naples, where he fell
in with the great preacher Theodore Parker. Together they climbed
Vesuvius and peered into its crater, and afterwards in and about Rome
they renewed their comradeship. Here Mr. Parkman wished to spend a few
weeks in a monastery, in order to study with his own eyes the priests
and their way of life. More than once he met with a prompt and
uncompromising refusal, but at length the coveted privilege was granted
him; and, curiously enough, it was by the strictest of all the monastic
orders, the Passionists, brethren addicted to wearing hair shirts and
scourging themselves without mercy. When these worthy monks learned that
their visitor was not merely a Protestant, but a Unitarian, their horror
was intense; but they were ready for the occasion, poor souls! and tried
their best to convert him, thereby doubtless enhancing their value in
the historian's eyes as living and breathing historic material. This
visit was surely of inestimable service to the pen which was to be so
largely occupied with the Jesuits and Franciscans of the New World.
Mr. Parkman did not leave Rome until he had seen temples, churches, and
catacombs, and had been presented to the Pope. He stopped at Florence,
Bologna, Modena, Parma, and Milan, and admired the Lake of Como, to
which, however, he preferred the savage wildness of Lake George. He saw
something of Switzerland, went to Paris and London, and did a bit of
sight-seeing in Edinburgh and its neighbourhood. From Liverpool he
sailed for America; and in spite of the time consumed in this trip we
find him taking his degree at Cambridge, along with his class, in 1844.
Probably his name stood high in the rank list, for he was at once
elected a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. After this he entered
the Law School, but stayed not long, for his life's work was already
claiming him. In his brief vacation journeys he had seen tiny remnants
of wilderness here and there in Canada or in lonely corners of New
England; now he wished to see the wilderness itself in all its gloom and
vastness, and to meet face to face with the dusky warriors of the Stone
Age. At this end of the nineteenth century, as already observed, such a
thing can no longer be done. Nowhere now, within the United States, does
the primitive wilderness exist, save here and there in shreds and
patches. In the middle of the century it covered the western half of the
continent, and could be reached by a journey of sixteen or seventeen
hundred miles, from Boston to the plains of Nebraska. Parkman had become
an adept in woodcraft and a dead shot with the rifle, and could do such
things with horses, tame or wild, as civilized people never see done
except in a circus. There was little doubt as to his ability to win the
respect of Indians by outshining them in such deeds as they could
appreciate. Early in 1846 he started for the wilderness with Mr. Quincy
Shaw. A passage from the preface to the fourth edition of "The Oregon
Trail," published in 1872, will here be of interest:--
"I remember, as we rode by the foot of Pike's Peak, when for a fortnight
we met no face of man, my companion remarked, in a tone anything but
complacent, that a time would come when those plains would be a grazing
country, the buffalo give place to tame cattle, houses be scattered
along the watercourses, and wolves, bears, and Indians be numbered among
the things that were. We condoled with each other on so melancholy a
prospect, but with little thought what the future had in store. We knew
that there was more or less gold in the seams of those untrodden
mountains; but we did not foresee that it would build cities in the
West, and plant hotels and gambling houses among the haunts of the
grizzly bear. We knew that a few fanatical outcasts were groping their
way across the plains to seek an asylum from Gentile persecution; but we
did not imagine that the polygamous hordes of Mormons would rear a
swarming Jerusalem in the bosom of solitude itself. We knew that more
and more, year after year, the trains of emigrant wagons would creep in
slow procession towards barbarous Oregon or wild and distant California;
but we did not dream how Commerce and Gold would breed nations along the
Pacific, the disenchanting screech of the locomotive break the spell of
weird, mysterious mountains, woman's rights invade the fastnesses of the
Arapahoes, and despairing savagery, assailed in front and rear, veil its
scalp locks and feathers before triumphant commonplace. We were no
prophets to foresee all this; and had we foreseen it, perhaps some
perverse regret might have tempered the ardour of our rejoicing.
"The wild tribe that defiled with me down the gorges of the Black Hills,
with its paint and war plumes, fluttering trophies and savage
embroidery, bows, arrows, lances, and shields, will never be seen again.
Those who formed it have found bloody graves, or a ghastlier burial in
the maws of wolves. The Indian of to-day, armed with a revolver and
crowned with an old hat, cased possibly in trousers or muffled in a
tawdry shirt, is an Indian still, but an Indian shorn of the
picturesqueness which was his most conspicuous merit. The mountain
trapper is no more, and the grim romance of his wild, hard life is a
memory of the past."
This first of Parkman's books, "The Oregon Trail," was published in
1847, as a series of articles in the "Knickerbocker Magazine." Its pages
reveal such supreme courage, such physical hardiness, such rapturous
enjoyment of life, that one finds it hard to realize that even in
setting out upon this bold expedition the writer was something of an
invalid. A weakness of sight--whether caused by some direct injury, or a
result of widespread nervous disturbance, is not quite clear--had
already become serious and somewhat alarming. On arriving at the Indian
camp, near the Medicine Bow range of the Rocky Mountains, he was
suffering from a complication of disorders. "I was so reduced by
illness," he says, "that I could seldom walk without reeling like a
drunken man; and when I rose from my seat upon the ground the landscape
suddenly grew dim before my eyes, the trees and lodges seemed to sway to
and fro, and the prairie to rise and fall like the swells of the ocean.
Such a state of things is not enviable anywhere. In a country where a
man's life may at any moment depend on the strength of his arm, or it
may be on the activity of his legs, it is more particularly
inconvenient. Nor is sleeping on damp ground, with an occasional
drenching from a shower, very beneficial in such cases. I sometimes
suffered the extremity of exhaustion, and was in a tolerably fair way of
atoning for my love of the prairie by resting there forever. I tried
repose and a very sparing diet. For a long time, with exemplary
patience, I lounged about the camp, or at the utmost staggered over to
the Indian village, and walked faint and dizzy among the lodges. It
would not do, and I bethought me of starvation. During five days I
sustained life on one small biscuit a day. At the end of that time I was
weaker than before, but the disorder seemed shaken in its stronghold,
and very gradually I began to resume a less rigid diet." It did not seem
prudent to Parkman to let the signs of physical ailment become
conspicuous, "since in that case a horse, a rifle, a pair of pistols,
and a red shirt might have offered temptations too strong for aboriginal
virtue." Therefore, in order that his prestige with the red men might
not suffer diminution, he would "hunt buffalo on horseback over a broken
country, when without the tonic of the chase he could scarcely sit
upright in the saddle."
The maintenance of prestige was certainly desirable. The Ogillalah band
of Sioux, among whom he found himself, were barbarians of a low type.
"Neither their manners nor their ideas were in the slightest degree
modified by contact with civilization. They knew nothing of the power
and real character of the white men, and their children would scream in
terror when they saw me. Their religion, superstitions, and prejudices
were the same handed down to them from immemorial time. They fought with
the weapons that their fathers fought with, and wore the same garments
of skins. They were living representatives of the Stone Age; for, though
their lances and arrows were tipped with iron procured from the traders,
they still used the rude stone mallet of the primeval world." These
savages welcomed Parkman and one of his white guides with cordial
hospitality, and they were entertained by the chieftain Big Crow, whose
lodge in the evening presented a picturesque spectacle. "A score or more
of Indians were seated around it in a circle, their dark, naked forms
just visible by the dull light of the smouldering fire in the middle.
The pipe glowed brightly in the gloom as it passed from hand to hand.
Then a squaw would drop a piece of buffalo fat on the dull embers.
Instantly a bright flame would leap up, darting its light to the very
apex of the tall conical structure, where the tops of the slender poles
that supported the covering of hide were gathered together. It gilded
the features of the Indians, as with animated gestures they sat around
it, telling their endless stories of war and hunting, and displayed rude
garments of skins that hung around the lodge; the bow, quiver, and lance
suspended over the resting place of the chief, and the rifles and
powderhorns of the two white guests. For a moment all would be bright as
day; then the flames would die out; fitful flashes from the embers would
illumine the lodge, and then leave it in darkness. Then the light would
wholly fade, and the lodge and all within it be involved again in
obscurity." From stories of war and the chase the conversation was now
and then diverted to philosophic themes. When Parkman asked what makes
the thunder, various opinions were expressed; but one old wrinkled
fellow, named Red Water, asseverated that he had always known what it
was. "It was a great black bird; and once he had seen it in a dream
swooping down from the Black Hills, with its loud roaring wings; and
when it flapped them over a lake, they struck lightning from the water."
Another old man said that the wicked thunder had killed his brother last
summer, but doggedly refused to give any particulars. It was afterwards
learned that this brother was a member of a thunder-fighting fraternity
of priests or medicine men. On the approach of a storm they would "take
their bows and arrows, their magic drum, and a sort of whistle made out
of the wing bone of the war eagle, and, thus equipped, run out and fire
at the rising cloud, whopping, yelling, whistling, and beating their
drum, to frighten it down again. One afternoon a heavy black cloud was
coming up, and they repaired to the top of a hill, where they brought
all their magic artillery into play against it. But the undaunted
thunder, refusing to be terrified, darted out a bright flash, which
struck [the aforesaid brother] dead as he was in the very act of shaking
his long iron-pointed lance against it. The rest scattered, and ran
yelling in an ecstasy of superstitious terror back to their lodges."