PARKMAN, FRANCIS (1823-1893), American historian, was born in Boston on Sept. 16, 1823. He was the son of Francis Parkman, a graduate of Harvard in 1807.
Francis Parkman was the eldest of six children. As a boy his health was delicate, so that it was thought best for him to spend much of his time at his grandfather Hall's home in Medford on the border of the Middlesex Fells, a rough and rocky wood land, which was as wild in many places as the primaeval forest. This breezy life saved him from the artificial stupidity which is too often superinduced in boys by their school training. At the age of 14 Parkman began to show a strong taste for literary com position. In 1841, while a student at Harvard, he made a rough journey of exploration in the woods of northern New Hampshire, and at this time he determined to write a history of the last French war in America, which ended in the conquest of Canada, and some time afterwards he enlarged the plan so as to include the whole course of the American conflict between France and Great Britain; or, to use his own 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." In the course of 1842 illness led to his making a journey to Italy. In 1844 he graduated at Harvard with high honours.
He now determined to study the real wilderness in its gloom and vastness. He 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. In company with his friend and classmate, Quincy Shaw, he passed several months with the Ogillalah band of Sioux. Knowledge, in trepidity and tact carried Parkman through these experiences unscathed, and good luck kept him clear of encounters with hostile Indians. It was a very important experience in relation to his life-work.
But outdoor life did not suffice to recruit Parkman's health, and by 1848, when he began writing The Conspiracy of Pontiac, he had reached a truly pitiable condition. The trouble seems to have been some form of nervous exhaustion, accompanied with such hypersensitiveness of the eyes that it was impossible to keep them open except in a dark room. Against these difficulties he struggled with characteristic obstinacy. He invented a machine which so supported his hand that he could write legibly with closed eyes. Books and documents were read aloud to him, while notes were made by him with eyes shut, and were afterwards deciphered and read aloud to him till he had mastered them. After half an hour
his strength would give out, and in these circumstances his rate of composition for a long time averaged scarcely six lines a day. The superb historical monograph composed under such difficulties was published in 1851. It had but a small sale, as the American public was then too ignorant to feel much interest in American history. But Parkman began his great work on France and Eng land in the New World, to which the book just mentioned was in reality the sequel. This work involved several journeys to Europe, and was performed with a thoroughness approaching finality.
In 1865 the first volume appeared, with the title of Pioneers of France in the New World; 27 years elapsed before the final volumes came out in 1892. After the Pioneers the sequence is The Jesuits in North America, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, the Old Regime in Canada, Frontenac and New France and Louis XIV ., Montcalm and Wolfe, A Half Century of Conflict. As one obstacle after another was surmounted, as one grand division of the work after another became an accomplished fact, the effect upon Parkman's condition seems to have been bracing, and he acquired fresh impetus as he approached the goal. His physical condition was much improved by his cultivating plants. He was an adept horticulturist and himself originated several new varieties of flowers. He was professor of horticulture in the agricultural school of Harvard in 1871-72, and published a few books on the subject of gardening. He died at Jamaica Plain Nov. 8, 1893.
The significance of Parkman's work consists partly in the success with which he has depicted the North American Indians. Parkman was the first great writer who really understood the Indian's character and motives. Against this savage background of the forest he shows the rise, progress and dramatic termination of the colossal struggle between France and Great Britain for colonial empire. With all its instructiveness, his book is a narra tive as entertaining as those of Macaulay or Froude. In judicial impartiality Parkman may be compared with Gardiner, and for accuracy of learning with Stubbs. (J. F.) See G. H. Farnham, Life of Francis Parkman (Boston, 190o ; 2nd ed., 1905) ; H. D. Sedgwick, Francis Parkman (Boston, 19o4) ; H. C. Lodge, "Francis Parkman," Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., vol. lvi., pp. 319-335 (Boston, /923) ; J. Russell, "What We Owe to Francis Parkman," Dalhousie Review, vol. iii., pp. (Halifax, ; J. W. Oliver, "Francis Parkman," Western Pa. Hist. Meg., vol. vii., pp. 1-9 (Pitts burgh, 1924).