The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman

First published: 1849

Type of work: Record of travel

Type of plot: Travel and adventure sketches

Time of work: 1846

Locale: The Oregon Trail

Principal Personages:

• Francis Parkman, a young man just out of college
• Quincy Shaw, his friend
• Henry Chatillon, their guide
• Deslauriers, their muleteer

Critique:

This book is one of the great documents of the West. Very few travelers wrote much about the country beyond the Mississippi as early as the 1840’s, and those who did write seldom approached their subject with the objective and unbiased point of view from which Francis Parkman wrote in his account of a region he had known and enjoyed. His motive was to set down for posterity what he had observed on his trip to the Rocky Mountains. He realized only too well that the Indian, the trading post, the mountain man, and the great buffalo herds were passing figures in history. He wanted to leave a record of them, for he saw in them something of glamour and interest which, once gone, could never return.

The Story:

In the spring of 1846, Francis Parkman and his friend, Quincy Shaw, traveled by railroad from the East to St. Louis. From St. Louis they went by river steamer up the Missouri River to Kansas, then called Kanzas, about five hundred miles from the mouth of the river. Their object was a trip to the Rocky Mountains, a very unusual excursion in the 1840’s.

Disembarking, the two young men went by wagon to Westport to get horses and guides for their journey. At Westport they met three acquaintances with whom they agreed to travel; two British army officers and another gentleman, who were planning a hunting expedition on the American prairies. Pleased to have companions on their dangerous journey, the two Easterners were also glad they did not need to travel with a train of emigrants, for whom Parkman expressed the utmost contempt.

The journey began inauspiciously for the five travelers. The Britishers decided to start by a trail other than the one which had been previously decided upon. The result was that the party discovered, after several days of travel, that they had gone far out of their way. The party then rode northward to the Oregon Trail, which they decided to follow to Fort Laramie, seven hundred miles away.

On the twenty-third of May the party arrived on the Oregon Trail, where they saw the first human being they had met in eight days of travel. He was a straggler from a caravan of emigrants. At the end of three weeks Parkman and his companions, the Englishmen and a small group of emigrants who had joined them, reached the Platte River. They were still four hundred miles from Fort Laramie. The journey to the Platte River had been a muddy one, for each night the party was drenched by a terrific thunderstorm. During the day they also ran into numerous showers as they made their way westward across the uninteresting country east of the Platte, a country almost devoid of any game except for a few birds.

At the Platte the party entered the buffalo country. Parkman and Shaw were fascinated by those animals, and they slaughtered hundreds, mostly bulls, before their journey ended. When they entered the buffalo country they also entered the first territory where they were likely to encounter hostile Indians. A few days after crossing the Platte, Parkman, Shaw, and their guide went on a sortie after buffalo. Parkman became separated from his companions and spent several anxious hours before he found his solitary way back to the camp. Shortly after that adventure the party met the chief of the trading station at Fort Laramie, who was on his way downstream on the Platte with a shipment of skins. He warned them to watch out for Pawnees, in whose country the party was then traveling.

While traveling up the river, the Englishmen made themselves obnoxious to Parkman and his friend by encouraging emigrants to join the party and by camping at any time of the day they pleased without consulting the Americans. Since Parkman and Shaw had a definite schedule which they wished to keep, they left the Englishmen and pushed on ahead with Henry Chatillon, their guide, and a muleteer named Deslauriers. Not many days afterward Parkman and his group reached Fort Laramie, at that time a trading outpost and not a military fort.

At Fort Laramie the travelers introduced themselves and gave the factor in charge a letter they had brought from his superiors in St. Louis. They were entertained and housed in the best fashion possible at the fort. Parkman and his friend spent the next few days visiting the Indian villages outside the fort, talking with the trappers, and occasionally looking in on emigrant trains which were on their way to the Oregon country. Using a small chest of medical supplies he carried with him, Shaw gained some little reputation as a medicine man by doctoring a few of the more important Indians.

The most decisive news which came to Parkman and Shaw at the fort was that the Dakota Indians were preparing to make war upon their traditional enemies of the Snake tribe. Parkman and his friend decided that they would accompany the Dakotas on the raid, since their guide, Henry Chatillon, was married to a Dakota squaw and could, through her, promise the protection of the Dakota tribe. The travelers felt that it would be an unusual opportunity to study Indians and their customs.

On June twentieth Parkman’s party, now augmented by two traders of Indian and French descent, left Fort Laramie to join the village of a Dakota chief named The Whirlwind. A few days later, reaching a point on Laramie Creek where the Indians would pass, they decided to camp and await the arrival of The Whirlwind and his village. While they waited, two misfortunes broke upon them. Parkman fell seriously ill with dysentery and word came that Chatillon’s Indian wife, who was a member of The Whirlwind’s village, was dying. Chatillon went ahead to meet the Indians and see his wife before she died. When the Indians failed to arrive, Parkman, recovered from his illness, went back to Fort Laramie. There he discovered that the Dakota war-spirit had lessened, so that there was some doubt as to whether the tribe would take the war-trail.

Parkman and Shaw decided to follow The Whirlwind’s village of Dakotas. A day or two after they started, however, they received word that a trader was going to the Indian rendezvous and wished Parkman and Shaw to accompany him. They never did find the trader, but pushed on by themselves to the place where they expected to find the Indians camped before they went on the warpath.

Arriving at the rendezvous, Parkman and Shaw found no Indians. Since Shaw was not particularly interested in studying the Indians, Parkman took one man, who was married to an Indian, and set off by himself to find The Whirlwind’s village. It was a dangerous undertaking, for there was some risk of bad treatment from all the Indians in the vicinity, both friendly and hostile.

After many days of lonely travel, Parkman and his companion came upon a Dakota village hunting in the foothills of the Rockies. They learned that The Whirlwind had left this village with a few families. A Frenchman named Reynal lived in the village, however, and Parkman gained the protection of Reynal and his squaw’s relatives. Without ceremony Parkman and his man Raymond went to live in the lodge of Chief Big Crow, who was honored that the white men would come to live with him.

Until the first of August Parkman lived with Big Crow and shared the tribal life of the village. With his host or with other Indians he went on hunting expeditions after buffalo, antelope, and other game. It was a dangerous life, but Parkman enjoyed it in spite of the many risks.

That summer was a perilous time for the Indians. In search of a large herd of buffalo needed to get skins for the repair of their worn tepees, they had deeply penetrated the hunting grounds of their enemies. At last, after a successful hunt, the village turned eastward toward Fort Laramie, to rejoin the other Indians who had not dared to accompany them. Parkman and his man traveled part of the way with the tribe. But in order to reach Fort Laramie by the date he had set, Parkman found that he had to push ahead by himself, for the Indian village traveled too slowly. Women, children, and dogs reduced their rate of travel considerably.

Back at Fort Laramie, where he rejoined Shaw, Parkman prepared for the return journey to St. Louis. They left the fort on the fourth of August, accompanied by several traders who had promised to go with them for part of the journey. These men left the party, however, before it reached the Platte. Parkman and Shaw made most of the return journey with only their two hired men. At Bent’s Fort, a small trading post, they were joined by a volunteer who had left the army because of sickness. This man gave them the first news of the Mexican War that Parkman and Shaw had received, for the war had begun after they had left civilization behind them. From that time on, the travelers met many wagon trains and columns of troops on their way westward to fight the Mexicans. Because of the many troop units in the territory, the small party had no difficulty with any of the Indian bands they encountered.

Early in September the four men rode into Westport, where they sold their horses and camping equipment. Parkman and Shaw traveled by boat downstream to St. Louis. There they discarded the buckskins they had been wearing for many weeks.

It had been an amazing vacation. For five months they had traveled through the heart of the Indian country, far from the protection of the government and the army. They had seen many Indians, but without loss of valuables or life. The only casualty had been an old mule that died as a result of a snake bite. The good fortune of Parkman and his friends was pointed up by the hostilities which began shortly after they left the frontier region. Three weeks after their return to civilization, Comanches and Pawnees began raiding the trail over which they had traveled. The raids were so methodical that not a single party passed over the Oregon Trail in the next six months.

Further Critical Evaluation of the Work:

When Francis Parkman made the journey to Oregon in 1846, he kept a series of diaries, and these journals were the basis for his first book, THE OREGON TRAIL. Unfortunately the editor found Parkman’s notes too crude and earthy for public taste and in the transformation the writings were watered down.

In the foreword to the first edition Parkman stated that he was taking the trail to Oregon with his friend Quincy Shaw to study the Indians, and in this role Parkman proved to be a pioneer literary observer. While he did omit much ethnological material by today’s standards, the work is full of data on the Sioux and other Plains tribes. His compatriots included Henry Chatillon, who already knew much about the Indians; and Parkman acquired information from the mountain man Thomas Fitzpatrick, another “walking encyclopaedia” of information about the West. His treatment of the Indians, while it is most descriptive, reflects unquestionably Parkman’s views that the Indians were less than “civilized.”

What Parkman learned and accomplished during this adventure would provide the background for his later works on France and England and their role in the New World. Additionally he called attention to the miracles of this land with all of its environmental blessings: the minerals, soil, timber, and water. Logically, then, THE OREGON TRAIL focuses on the relation of men to the land and weather.

The work first appeared serially in The Knickerbocker Magazine beginning with the issue of February, 1847, and running until 1849. The travel he had undertaken was for Parkman the one great physical test of his life, and he ran some real risks of death. He suffered a nervous breakdown on his return to Boston in October, 1846. But he had accomplished what many writers of the twentieth century fail to undertake. He had traveled to observe at firsthand the region about which he would write.

This first work of Parkman reflects the attempts of a literary apprentice, for he exhibits a tendency to stress too many facts and is too emphatic in conversations. One who reads his later writings recognizes such formal devices as stereotyping, a flaw which often dilutes the prose in THE OREGON TRAIL. Parkman tended to be too melodramatic at times, but he wrote as the events took place and was likely stimulated by the great adventure on which he had embarked. The descriptions thus become functional rather than mere background. A reader can sense that Parkman tried to write a history, but strained to use his self-conscious college writing techniques, such as the out-of-place Byronesque epigraphs which appear in both the serial and in the later editions of the work. Such literary formalities did not appear in the original journals, however.

Parkman, nonetheless, saw the importance of the struggles in the wilderness which made America unique. Subsequent historians have recognized this accomplishment. Frederick Jackson Turner in his classic essay on the closing of the frontier stressed the validity of Parkman’s acute perceptions.