The Oregon trail of Francis Parkman

Front matter

Cla&Bics

PARKMAN l;i

Class Book

Prefatory Note

This edition of The Oregon Trail has been prepared for the teacher, the schooh*oom, and the general reader, not for the technical student of the Old West. Thus from the Notes much collateral information has been excluded, and in the Introduction the attempt has been to emphasize only the intellectual outlines and the philosophic significance of the subjects broached.

The editor is indebted to Dr. Frederick Jackson Turner, Professor of American History at the University of Wisconsin, to Dr. Reuben Gold Thwaites, Secretary of the Wisconsin Historical Library, and especially to Louise Phelps Kellogg, of the same library, for useful information, and to his wife for much clerical assistance.

W. E. L.

Madison, April 30, 1910

Contents

PAGE

Introduction xi

Suggestive Bibliography xxvii

Introduction

FRANCIS PARKMAN: A GREAT WRITER IN THE GREAT WEST

I. Biographical Memoranda

Francis Parkman, the historian of the Indians, French, and English "in early North America, was born in Boston on September 16, 1823, the son of a prominent New England clergyman. After a delicate but significant childhood, spent somewhat in reading Cooper, but more in roaming the outof-doors, his little world of wilderness, now collecting birds' eggs, now trapping woodchucks, now creeping along with juvenile bow and arrow after a blue jay or robin, he entered Harvard College in 1840, where, like Emerson before him, he profited more by devotion to his own devices than to the narrow curriculum then in vogue, reading during term time in Gibbon, Sismondi, Eobertson, and other historians, cultivating his English style with his eye on the pages of Burke, and indulging in slight social relaxation with college chums. So too it was during his next two years at the Harvard Law School.

His vacations were passed in tramps through the forests and wilds of New England and New York, in visits to the Indians, to ruined forts, or other objects identified with American history before the Eevolution, and in filling many notebooks with comments and data that betray the scholar's instinct for original sources and historic method long before history was taught in our universities as a science.

In 1843 ill health, which was to pursue him forever, drove him for some months abroad, chiefly to Italy, where he ol> served not so much the ruins and art as the Church and its xii THE OREGON TRAIL

priesthood, which, as he already knew, had played such an imposing part in the founding and building of the American continent. In 1846, after leaving the Law School, he went off on the Oregon trail for a study of the red man in his primeval state.

Before he was twenty, the plan of his life work lay distinct as a mountain before him, an arduous peak, clear and far, its sure path seen by the visionary eye, yet soon to be more arduous than even he could guess. His youth is the story of his preparation ; his subsequent years the story of the ascent ; and he died at the top in the cool sunshine of a mountain afternoon. It took him fifty years to climb that mountain, a half century of conflict, perhaps no less momentous to our appreciation of the human spirit than the conflicts of nations he so splendidly recorded. For, if the mysterious lifelong infirmities of his body are a problem to the scientific physician, what the man achieved in despite of them is a problem and an inspiration to the student of the mysterious resources of the human mind.

Full of high aims and a lover of action, from the time of his return as a lad of twenty-three out of the Far West he was beset by inflamed and weak eyes that kept him often in a dark chamber, by rheumatic gout that often prevented the small boon of a walk around its walls, by bad digestion, by insomnia, and at times by a strange perturbation and heaviness in the brain that made it perilous even to think. Yet, with unmurmuring patience and iron self-confidence, watching for the moments of some easement, which now and then mercifully extended into hours and days and weeks, he accomplished his task : sometimes through the mechanical device of a frame, with parallel wires for guiding the pencil, that enabled him to write with shut eyes ; sometimes through assistants, paid out of the small competence left him by his father ; sometimes through the help of a good sister, who read to him or took his dictation. Even when he was well

INTRODUCTIOX xiii

enough in middle life to journey to Paris, it was as much to consult the physicians for his body as the archives for his history. Only rarely could he work as ordinary men ; and during one period of many years he could not wOrk at all.

It was then, with the resourcefulness of a versatile and indomitable spirit, that he began at his home on the borders of Jamaica Pond his successful cultivation of exquisite flowers ; and Parkman's gardens of lilies and roses, which, with his book on the subject, won him such fame as a horticulturist, furnished the one genial resting place amid the stern victories of his mountain road. And even the gardens, we remember, were saddened by the death of his wife and boy (1857-1858).

He died with serene dignity at the homestead in Jamaica Plain, November 8, 1893. The life work, planned in boyhood, he had completed a year before. His career has thus something of that entirety which so satisfies us in contemplating the career of Goethe or of Emerson, as opposed to the pathetic fragmentariness, so puzzling and solemn, in that of Byron, or Shelley, or Keats, or Coleridge.

Parkman had kindliness, modesty, sociability, humor, besides those other traits so manfully witnessed by his books. As a man, however, he is impressive as a simple yet difficult nature, — simple in the dominance of two clearly defined characteristics, difficult in view of their baffiing and extraordinary development : his singleness of purpose, almost coincident with his life, and his silent and unconquerable strength in putting it through, though the very stars fought against him. His singleness of purpose can be paralleled by many names, as by the author of Faust and by the first Napoleon, to mention two of the greatest ; but for a parallel to that grim heroism of elemental manhood, so distinct from the resignation acquired by a mystic philosophy or the martyrdom sustained by a devout faith, I know not where to seek. Milton was blind and Poe was poor ; yet neither xiv THE OREGON TRAIL

was in chains. It seems there is left us but Prometheus himself on the bleak rock with the vulture ; yet the Titan merely endured, his tasks already done. Parkman endured and — worked. The point is just that. There is something here for those of us who chafe and whine and give up.

II. Parkman's Wkitixgs

Parkman's writings are listed in Whitcomb's Chronological Outlines as follows :

1. The California and Oregon Trail, 1849.-^

2. History of the Conspiraey of Pontiac, 1851.

3. Vassall Morton, 1856.

4. Pioneers of France in the New World, 1865.

5. Book of Roses, 1866.

6. The Jesuits in North America, 1867.

8. The Old Regime in Canada, 1874.

9. Count Frontenac and New France, 1877.

10. Montcalm and Wolfe, 1884.

11. Historic Handbook of the Northern Tour, 1885.

12. A Half Century of Conflict, 1892.

With the exception of 1 (the present volume), of 3 (an indifferent novel of some interest as autobiography),^ of 5 (a work on horticulture), and of 11 (a mere comj^ilation from his histories), the publications make one story, of which

1 Originally published serially in the Knickerbocker Magazine.

2 Later revised and enlarged.

3 The novel is absurdly conventional in the plot and personages. Vassall is betrothed. His Friend, loving the lady too, gets Vassall imprisoned on false suspicion in an Austrian dungeon. After four years Vassall escapes, and, on returning to America, finds his betrothed married to the Friend. Friend is unmasked — goes to sea — is washed overboard. Vassall then marries the widow. But we get glimpses of Harvard College and the woods, and there is a reminiscence of Parkman's own captivity in tlie fate of the title character, who, like Parkman, " loved action and loved study " (Chapter VI).

INTRODUCTION xv

Pontlac, though written first, is the last tragic event. That story is the epic of the American forest, the long struggle of the French and English for the possession of a continent about whose streams and valleys and cliffs still roamed the implacable savage of the age of stone. The issues fought for have an epic simplicity and grandeur of outline : here is Catholic against Protestant, Latin against Germanic, Feudalism against Democracy, and, from another point of view. Savagery against Civilization. The hero is the Anglo-Saxon Genius warring by destiny for its new home, —

whence the American people and the lofty towers of these states ; Parkman fully realized the significance of his theme as the first chapter in the history of our country. But, like the Iliad and the Mneld, it has many minor heroes on either side, all men of simple and large natures : Pontiac, fighting fiercer than Mezentius for an hereditary domain ; indomitable La Salle and loyal Tonty of the iron hand ; courteous Champlain and stern and fractious Frontenac; Marquette, discoverer of the great inland river ; Wolfe, sturdy soul in feeble frame, victor on the Plains of Abraham ; the young Washington on the Susquehanna. Out of the heroism of his own life came to Parkman the power to paint heroes, and out of his own unsatisfied craving for action came the epic verve of his fascinating style. Again, like an epic this story strikes the note of religion, — here is the Protestant farmer at prayer in his Deerfield home, the Jesuit missionary saying mass on the borders of Lake Huron in a bark chapel before the naked and astonished heathen. It is varied by episodes almost as stirring as ever were sung by epic poet : the vengeance of Gourgue, the slaughter of the Long Saut, the siege of Louisburg, the defeat of Braddock. And, as we read, nature is around us in the silence of curving streams xvi THE OREGON TRAIL

and fragrant woods, in the majesty of her sunsets, in the terror of her thunder and rain, in her infinitudes of sea and sky — nature as she is, not as she is seen by some cult of symbolists or mystics.^

But in thus bearing witness to Parkman's skill in artistic choice and grouping of materials, and Parkman's power of imaginative portrayal of nature and man and action, I would not forget that he is the scientific historian as well. His work is based on a minute and painstaking researcli, the admiration of later scholars. The points of dramatic emphasis are also the points of historic emphasis. The vision of art and the vision of fact coincide. Every question and individual is, I believe, presented without prejudice And though the pageant and the conflict itself dominate his pages, he has the critical mind which can, unobtrusively but effectively, analyze human character and historic cause and effect.

Thus in Parkman the writer we see, as in Parkman the man, again two qualities of chief note : that of the imagination and that of truth. And in the all but perfect fusion of the two consists his literary fame. Few European historians from Thucydides to Gibbon, down to Macaulay and Carlyle, have equaled him in this ; and of American historians there is no second. Our historians of yesterday — Motley, Bancroft, Irving, Prescott, Fiske — had the literary gift ; but their facts and their judgments are too often unreliable. Our historians of to-day, it seems, have accuracy, method, and philosophic understanding ; but they do not produce literature.

1 Yet the student must not forget that "the vision and the facultydivine " of the poets can reveal to him deeper meanings, richer passions, and a higher loveliness than any historian. Parkman, great as he is, is still neither a Homer, a Vergil, nor a Dante.

INTRODUCTION xvii

III. Parkmax's Oregox Trail 1. Parkman's Narrative

The Oregon Trail is the classic of travel and adventure in the Far West. Irving, who had, to be sure, once spent a few weeks in that country, writes a charming narrative in his Cajytain Bonneville, full of people, pictures, and information ; but it fails to stir the blood like the buoyant and exuberant life communicated to us by the lad Parkman. We not only see the young horseman out on the Platte, and the Oglala in their tepees near the Medicine Bow, and the dirty bourgeois at the gates of the trading post, but we mingle among them ourselves. And we thrill with a sense of danger, and laugh at absurd situations and absurd people. Primeval nature is here in all her picturesqueness and charm and terror. We are in reality ; it is as if we too left our books and went afar at the call of the wild. It is for youth to have such adventures ; and it is for youth to record them. Perhaps, too, it is for youth to read them.

But, after all, in some matters of fact, it is a confusing world; and, unless we are already familiar with the Far West as it was at that time, we will sometimes lose the pleasure of the imagination in a moment of intellectual bewilderment. Hence the map and the notes to this edition, and the explanatory remarks to follow.

2. The Itinerai'ij

Parkman went out in the spring from Westport on the Missouri, through what is now northeastern Kansas, and, striking the Platte, followed it across the present state of Nebraska to Fort Laramie. He then spent some weeks ranging with the Oglala between the Medicine Bow Mountains and the Black Hills. Back at Fort Laramie again, he rode xviii THE OREGON TRAIL

south along the foot of the Rocky Mountains through what is now Colorado, then eastward to the settlements through central Kansas, part of the way along the Arkansas. In a letter to his mother on October 7 he speaks of " gaining a great deal of sport and a cartload of experience."

It was an entirely uncivilized region, visited only by trappers, United States dragoons, and occasional explorers and travelers and missionaries, Oregon and California emigrants, and the caravans of the Santa Fe traders. But it was a wilderness only from the white man's point of view. The Indian knew it as an open book ; the trails and watercourses, the hills, the boundaries between tribes, all were well known and all had their legends and traditions. An immemorial world of man passed away when the Anglo-Saxon set Europe on the Plains.

3. The Indians

Some of the tribes near the settlements, like the Delawares and Shawnee, had been deported from the east. The western Indians of the Plains and the Rockies were still in their aboriginal state : chiefly, (1) the Siouan stock ^ (including the Sioux or Dakota, of which Parkman's Oglala were a band, the Crow, the Iowa, the Mandan) ; (2) the Caddoan (including the Pawnee) ; (3) the Shoshonean (including the Shoshone, Comanche, Ute) ; (4) the Algonquian (including the Blackfeet, Chippewa, Cheyenne, Arapaho) ; (5) the Athapascan (including the Apache and the Navajo, and the large tribes far off in Alaska). Space forbids anything but these general facts : the reader must turn to TJie Oregon Trail itself. But he must remember that Parkman, even with

1 The classification of the Indian tribes, begun by Gallatin (1836) and developed by Powell (1885-1886), is by languages, which, if not absolutely scientific ethnology, is the best working basis for study. The spelling of Indian names throughout the Introduction and Notes to this edition is that agreed on by the Bureau of American Ethnology and the Indian Bureau.

INTRODUCTION xix

his keen eye for Indian character and customs, yet wrote before the days of Indian ethnology or of comparative anthropology.

4. The Traiypevs

The trappers that so frequently turn up in Parkman's narrative were the product of the great fur trade. From the earliest days of French Canada the trappers had gone out into the wilderness far beyond even the small protection of a frontier post. England, and then, especially in the person of John Jacob Astor, the United States had entered the field. Companies were formed, abandoned, amalgamated, — a complex history. But the individual trapper, whether a Frenchman from Canada or the settlements of the old regime along the Mississippi, or a restless Yankee from the border, continued year after year in the same hunt for beaver or bear or buffalo. The trapper it was who first knew the Indians, the Indian trails, their fords, their mountain passes ; who prepared the way for the government explorers (Lewis and Clark, Pike, Long, and Fremont), and for the missionaries (Marcus Whitman, - Father De Sniet, etc.). He built, privately or for the fur compan}^, the first defenses. His trading posts, usually called forts, sometimes became government stations, sometimes hamlets, and have more than once bequeathed their names to modern cities, where the factory whistle blows, the newsboy cries the paper, and the smug citizen visits art museum and music hall or votes for a president of the United States.

5. The Army of the West in the Dle.rlcan War

Every now and then, as we read The Oregon Trail, we are reminded of the march of events at home. General Kearney's dragoons gallop over the prairie, or the commissary wagons with their white tops shine along the river. Away out in

XX THE OREGON TRAIL

the deserts of peace we hear of war and rumors of war. It seems that no place is far enough away for escape from the brutal facts of civilization. What is General Kearney doing here ? The conflict with Mexico was on. " One of the earliest steps in the strategy of the war," says Paxson, " Avas the organization of an Army of the West at Fort Leavenworth." On June 3, 1846, Kearney was appointed to lead an expedition to Upper California by way of Santa Fe. He left Fort Leavenworth, June 26, about the time when Parkman was out among the Oglala. His eighteen hundred dragoons were at Bent's Fort by the end of July, where a subsidiary branch of the Santa Fe trail crossed the Arkansas River. He took Santa Fe on August 18. On September 25 he left for California, soon sending back most of his small band, as he heard California was already in possession of the American naval forces (Monterey, in California, taken July 9, 1846).

6. The Oregon K migrants

One may ask, too. What are those emigrant farmers and families doing here ? This is not the place to explain the " Oregon question " ; suffice it that American jealousy of the British fur trade in the Northwest, American missionary zeal, and the narrative of Lewis and Clark, distributed widely as a government document, had by the thirties aroused a very practical interest in that remote region. By treaty with Great Britian it was opened for squatter privileges. The first emigration of any size was that of 1843. In 1844 about seven hundred, in 1846 about three thousand, went forth ; and the numbers swelled. Some, especially from Missouri and Kentucky, went to avoid living with the institution of slavery ; some to avoid the fever and ague of the Mississippi valley or the cholera of the forties and fifties ; some impelled by the hard times of 1837-1841 ; many again, in the words of one of them, '' because the thing was n't fenced in, and nobody

INTRODUCTION xxi

dared to keep 'em out." The last explanation goes deepest — but who shall explain in turn the age-old roving impulse of the race ? Early every spring, with as little prearrangement as birds flocking together for a migration, they collected at Independence or some nearby town on the Missouri, buying there much of their outfit, and organizing themselves, with the Anglo-Saxon's genius for government, into a company with pilot, captain, lieutenant and subalterns, sergeants and judges, either there or at the camping place on the first day out. There was one large annual migration, but sometimes small parties, like those met by Parkman, arriving too late, set out alone. It was a journey of four months. The whitecovered wagons, " the prairie schooners," were drawn by mules or oxen. Huge droves of cattle plodded on beside. The caravans made from five to thirty miles a day, with regular encampments by night and occasional longer halts for hunting and washing. There were quarrels to be settled by due process of improvised law, newborn babes to be swathed, young couples to be married, and many of young and old to be laid in mother earth. It was civilization en route. It was the last great migration of the Aryan race ; when it was accomplished, the Volkerwanderungen were over forever.

Parkman, primarily interested in the Indian, seems not to have appreciated its significance. Moreover, he seems to have been unlucky in the emigrant types he met. A reader of the contemporary diaries or the reminiscences of the old pioneers comes to respect the sturdy manhood and native intelligence of those ^people. Nor were they all uncouth. One young man during a prairie halt passed off the time in reading Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor. Palmer advised that '^ every family should lay in [i.e. on fitting out] a good supply of school-books for their children." The earlier parties had not been more than two or three years in the Willamette valley before they had organized themselves into a temporary government with a constitution modeled on that xxii THE OREGON TRAIL

of Iowa. A great state is to-day what she is by virtue of those who sixty and seventy years ago took the Oregon traih A few sometimes left the main caravan, when west of the Rockies, for the fertile farm lands of California ; but what is famous as the California migration had its inception later, and in a far different motive — more exciting perhaps, more easily defined, but not more earnest and brave.

Parkman named his narrative after the old highway from the settlements through South Pass, which he followed in the main to his stopping point at Port Laramie. Beyond the portion shown on our map, it wound through the present state of Idaho, near the Snake River, across the modern Oregon, down the banks of the Columbia to the Willamette valley ; while the California trail originally branched off at Fort Bridger, rounded Salt Lake on the east and north, and passed through the modern Nevada, on into the valley of the Sacramento,

Por some little distance, as indicated by the niap, the Oregon trail was identical with the road to New Mexico ; indeed its few traces in the fields and golf grounds near Kansas City are still known as the Santa Pe trail. At about the site of the present town of Gardner, Kansas, the traveler came to the fork. Here stood a guidepost pointing west. '' Road to Oregon " it said, with an eloquence as simple and full as in that word '' Italia " which the Alpine tourist may read to-day on a certain roadside stone in the mountains just south of the Swiss border.

The Oregon trail was already historic. Originally, like many of the main traveled roads of the west, it was made by the Indians with man's primitive instinct for the shortest or most convenient thoroughfares. The trappers had found and followed it. Over a portion of approximately the

INTRODUCTION xxiii

same course came the land party sent out by Astor in his fur-company enterprise of 1811. The exj^lorers and dragoons had helped to beat it deeper. The Mormons were soon to furrow it on their hegira to the Great Salt Lake. Now it began to grow broader under the rolling wagons of the emigrant caravaneers. Year by year saw it deeper and broader. In 1849 came the rush for the gold of California. Some flung along on horseback ; some crept in ox teams ; some trudged afoot, each pushing a wheelbarrow. An army of forty thousand. Five thousand died of cholera on the way. Then the rumor of wealth in the Eockies brought the hordes bound for Denver, on the canvas sides of whose wagons stood scrawled " Pike's Peak or Bust," now an American proverb of some pith. The pony express of 1860-1861, from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, swept along the entire course in eight days. The eastern part was soon traversed by the Overland Mail, bearing to the Pacific news of Gettysburg and Appomattox ; and we think what a pother, after all, De Quincey made of his suburban coach rides down the inland lanes of England a half century before. The Indians gazing upon the graven wheel tracks stretching, in parallel lines a hundred feet wide, a dusty and grassless ribbon of bare earth, interminably toward the sunset, called it " the great medicine road of the white men" — in the days when it belonged to their fathers it had been no more than a footpath or a buffalo run.

To-day, west of the Rockies, much of its course is marked by the railroads. But eastward, out on the prairies it lies, overgrown with grass and flowers, distinct, yet desolate and untraveled, a relic which, though it lifts no broken column or ivied arch to the winds, and throws no solemn shadows along the silent plain, abides a Avhile longer,- with the annual revolution of earth, as one of her most vast and impressive witnesses to the Endeavor and Achievement of Man.

xxiv THE OREGON TRAIL

The human race has girdled the globe with paths for many feet. We look at a map of the Roman Empire and trace them, Appian and Flaminian and all the rest, radiating from the Eternal City through western Europe. Others cross the Russian steppes, and others pass through the wall of China. Still others thread the Andes of the vanished Incas. Now they bind together all the nations, all the cities, all the isles. And, as long as the stars arise, we shall pass from place to place.

8. The Santa Fe Trail

On his return Parkman encountered the Santa Fe trail (see map). For two hundred years trade with Santa Fe had been upward through the mountains by pack train and ox cart, from Vera Cruz, the Spanish-Mexican port of entry, two thousand miles below. By 1822 it surrendered to the enterprise of the north — not that of the French-American trapper and traveler, be it remarked, but that of the incorrigible Yankee. In 1825 the United States, more watchful of her commerce then than now, commissioned its civil engineers to mark a road from the Missouri frontier to the Mexican. The annual caravan of the Yankee traders, wellappointed wagons drawn by teams of eight or ten mules or oxen, laden with portable manufactures of the cities of the young republic, accompanied part way sometimes by military escort of the United States, usually set out, like the Oregon emigrants, from Independence, and organized itself, with captains, pilot, etc., when it got to Council Grove, one hundred and fifty miles away. It had then some six hundred and fifty miles to go. Its arrival became the event of the year for the Santa Feans. After barter and social excitement it returned with animals, robes, furs, and the silver of the Mexican mines, sometimes escorted to the frontier by a guard of native soldiery. In 1843 the caravan numbered two hundred and fifty wagons ; but that same year Mexico forbade

INTRODUCTION xxv

the trade, and it was thereafter sporadic and unimportant. A '' commerce of the prairies " extending merely over a score of years, and of little ulterior importance, save as it helped to make the United States familiar with the region in the Mexican War a few years later, it nevertheless has to our imagination to-day something of the romance of the immemorial traffic over the beaten routes in the Orient — of the Arab camels crossing the Sahara, of the caravaneers, with the silks of China and India, winding along through Syria to the Midland Sea.

IV. Epilogue

Such is the man, and such is the country through which he passed and of which he has something to tell. We go with a great writer into the great West.

SUGGESTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

The editor has found the following works of especial interest in preparing this edition :

Adventures of Captain Bonneville (entitled in the first edition The Rocky Mountains), 1837, Washington Irving. Accessible in the Riverside Edition, J. B. Lippincott. It takes us into the region traversed somewhat later by Parkman, and beyond, amid trappers, traders, and Indians.

The American Fur Trade of the Far West, 3 vols., II. M. Chittenden, New York, Francis P. Harper, 1902. It furnishes exhaustive information on the old trading posts, the itineraries of the Oregon and Santa F^ travel, and (in Vol. Ill) a detailed map, drawn by Paul Burgoldt, of the trans-Mississippi territory as it was between 1807 and 1843.

The American Nation, edited by Albert B. Hart, especially Vol. XIV, Rise of the New West 1819-1829, Frederick J. Turner, and Vol. XVII, Westward Extension 1841-1850, George P. Garrison, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1906.

Breaking the Wilderness, Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1905. " The story of the conquest of the far west from the wanderings of Cabeza de Vaca to . . . the completion of the Union Pacific Railway." Copiously illustrated ; " a good story," both popular and reliable.