Francis Parkman (1823–1893)

This narrative describes 23-year-old Parkman's travels west in with fellow Boston Brahmin Quincy Adams Shaw. Together they travel with settlers adventurers through the future states of of Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, and Kansas (the title is a misnomer as they never go to Oregon), and spend three weeks hunting buffalo with the Ogala Sioux. It's a well-written narrative that captures the flora and fauna of the prairies, the lives of settlers, soldiers, and Native Americans, and the show more uncertainty of so much change happening in the region at one time.
Unfortunately, the huge problem is that Parkman is deeply prejudice against the native peoples, which yes is a characteristic of the time, but there were more sympathetic contemporary white American writers of the time as well. Parkman also is dismissive of a number of white settlers he encounters. I kind of imagine that Parkman and Shaw were like Charles Emerson Winchester haughtily looking down on those around them. So, yes, this is a terrific descriptive narrative, but there are a lot of aspects that will be hard to stomach for modern readers. show less

I had never had any interest in this type of book, but found it captivating in its language and descriptions of Indians and life in the West in the 1850's.

This is a well-written book, though no longer in the front of the controversies. But, the standard White, English speaking account of the period of 1700 to the 1750's. The Indians are villainous, the French are devious, and the white settler is pushing back the frontiers of culture. But it has several lovely quotes.
I had a 1962 reprint of the 1892 edition.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see the frontier, as a well-educated young Eastern man, in the days when you really would need to worry about Indians taking your scalp, and there were no showers or electricity back home to miss? This book pretty much shows you.

The author is a twenty-something Harvard educated man - think of John Adams or Robert Gould Shaw here - in the 1840s, who enthusiastically roams the world in search of adventure and edification and things to write home show more about. He lies to his mother and tells her he's taking the safe route to Fort Bridger, all he knows about Mormons is that they're really religious and people in Missouri hate them, and his attitude towards hunting buffalo can be summed up with: "they're stupid, you can kill a million of the males and not hurt the species since Indians kill only cows, they're stupid, we're hungry, they're stupid, when they're all dead the Indians will die off too, they're really, really stupid, and killing is fun, whee!" He also, by the way, is really ill for most of his adventures - he details many weeks of lying on the ground unable to function, trying to ride a horse without falling into unconsciousness, and taking drugs he suspects will poison him just because there was a chance it'd make him feel better.

The author is judgmental and, from our perspective, remarkably unkind. He's also brutally honest, especially considering that the insults and criticism of fellow Easterners was always written for publication. Later in life, he went back and changed a lot of the things he said in this book - that was after the Civil War, after polygamy scandals and the invention of the telegraph, after he was respected and married and so forth. The Oxford World's Classics edition is pretty much what he first wrote, so it's rougher and there's a lot more "look how smart I am, quoting ancient Latin poetry from memory" silliness than are found in other editions. He became one of the most famous and influential Western historians in the later 19th century.

I definitely recommend it for people who are interested in the period, especially since it's first person. Someday everything you write today will be 160 years old; a certain amount of sympathy and understanding will, I promise you, take you a long way.

(about the buffalo: no buffalo dies before page 220 or so, that wasn't killed for a good reason and put to the best usage it could be; some of the later stuff is gross and beyond excessive from a 21st century standpoint, but seriously, guys, this was the 1840s, and there were no grocery stores on the plains.) show less