parkman ppt
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Francis Parkman Jr. The Oregon Trail (1845)The Oregon Trail (1849)
Why go West?• Land speculation• Depression after panic of 1837• Moral objections to moving South
Parkman’s reasons
• Adventure• Desire to know more
about ‘Indians’• Wanted to experience
what he had read
• Born 16th September 1823• Suffered from ill health as a child• Around age 15 he moved with family to Boston• Entered Harvard in 1840. Went on to Law School.• Travelling and exploring America and Europe• 1845: anonymous publication of wilderness sketches in Knickerbocker Magazine• 1846: undertook journey that would later be
incorporated into The Oregon Trail.• 1847-49: original version of The Oregon Trail published
serially in Knickerbocker Magazine. ‘The Oregon Trail: Or a Summer’s Journey Out of Bounds’, author- ‘a Bostonian’.
• 1849: rev. version published as a book:The California and Oregon Trail: Being Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life
• 1850: married Catherine Scollay Bigelow• 1851: The Conspiracy of Pontiac• 1852: a new ed. of The California and Oregon Trail- Prairie and
Rocky Mountain Life: Or, The California and Oregon Trail• 1856: Vassal Morton (novel)• Following wife’s death in 1858, Parkman travelled to Paris for
treatment of nervous disorders • Return to Boston in 1859. Several years spent on horticulture.• Historical study- France and England in North America- published in
two parts; Pioneers of France in the New World (1865), The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867)
• 1869: The Discovery of the Great West• 1872: new ed. of The Oregon Trail published with significant
revisions• 1874: The Old Regime in Canada
• 1877: Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV• Articles published in North American Review : • ‘The Failure of Universal Suffrage (1878); ‘The Woman
Question’ (1879); ‘The Woman Question Again’ (1880)• 1881- Trip to France and England• 1884- Montcalm and Wolf published• 1885: rev. ed. of Pioneers of France in the New World• Around 1887: Some of the Reasons Against Woman Suffrage• 1890: Our Common Schools- Parkman supported public
education• 1892: A Half-Century of Conflict and final rev. version of The
Oregon Trail• 1893: Parkman died 8th November after an attack of appendicitis
“Experience the life of a pioneer as you lead your wagon party, hunting for food, tending to sicknesses, crossing treacherous rivers and more throughout the 2,000 mile journey.”
- www.oregontrail.com
Travel narratives and Cultural Anxieties
• End of civilisation• Battle for survival• Vast landscapes• Setting out into dangerous, unknown territory
C19th Travel narratives
Travel narratives• A tradition of narratives concerned with travelling
West eg. Henry Schoolcraft Narrative of an Expedition through the Upper Mississippi to Itasca Lake (1834)
• 19th Century fascination w/exploring America extended to European writers (eg. Tocqueville Democracy in America, 1835)
• America as NEW world; sense of excitement; a social experiment
Main types of narrative…
1. Narratives that ROMANTICIZE the landscape2. Narratives that focus on the INDIVIDUAL
EXPERIENCE of the traveller3. Narratives that ANALYSE AND ASSESS the
experience, providing cultural commentary
Frequent criticism of The Oregon Trail- Parkman ‘s lack of reflection; observation WITHOUT analysis
Key aspects of The Oregon Trail
• Dismissive attitude towards emigrants (QUOTE 1)• A class issue?• Parkman is a gentleman on an outing- life on the
frontier as entertainment• Intrusions of emigrants and their concerns as a
distraction from Parkman’s aim- pursuit of adventure
Masculinity and individualism
• Hero figure• Man in the wilderness• Recklessness
Landscape• Wilderness• ‘Great American desert’• Settling empty land• ‘unknown’• ‘unexplored’• ‘peaceful’ settlement of ‘free’ land
Civilised vs. Savage
• Anxiety about Indians• Negative individualism• Worries about the shape of America• Settling, or colonisation?
“...the progress of mankind is arrested and you condemn one of the most beautiful and fertile tracts of the earth to perpetual sterility as the hunting ground of a few savages.”
Representative Strother, Annals of Congress. 15th Congress, 2nd session, (1818-19): 838
PROGRESS• Blaming the victim• Manifest destiny
“The Indian is hewn out of a rock. You can rarely change the form without destruction of the substance. Races of inferior energy have possessed a power of expansion and assimilation to which he is a stranger; and it is this fixed and rigid quality which has proved his ruin. He will not learn the arts of civilization, and he and his forests must perish together. The stern, unchanging features of his mind excite our admiration from their very immutability; and we look with deep interest on the fate of this irreclaimable son of the wilderness.”
Parkman, Conspiracy, I:48.
Narratives of Justification
“The peoples of those vast countries of land rather overran than inhabited them.”
- Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations (New York: Samuel Campbell, 1796), I: 94.
Founding principles left ignored: genocide and slavery
Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851)
• Indian ‘destined to melt and vanish before the advancing waves of Anglo-American power.’ (I: x, xi.)