teach him and later put it to good use.
In his college years he ventured into the more sizable wilderness of the Magalloway River, where he and a fellow sophomore made a canoe exploration, “seeking a superior barbarism, a superior solitude, and the potent charm of the unknown.” The Magalloway was a miniature Wild West, and it fixed Parkman’s attention on the great New World drama of men and land. There he saw his first Indian, first slept under the stars, and first shot big game.
Soon after, he obtained letters of safeguard from the American Fur Company and headed West on the Oregon Trail to find some Sioux. The Brahmin held himself aloof from the emigrants in covered wagons along the trail, for “this strange migration” of zealots and land-hungry farmers perplexed him. To his Boston tastes, the emigrants were unkempt, homespun people, oblivious to the magnificence of the country. He saved his admiration for the old frontiersmen who seemed to have the breath of the wilderness in them.
The climax of Parkman’s trip came when he was accepted by a band of Oglala Sioux, who were roaming the high plains with primitive vigor. Sick from alkali water and the rigors of his trip, Parkman stayed at the side of Chief Big Crow seventeen days as his tribe hunted buffalo and prepared for war. This Oglala interlude, at twenty-three, was the summit of Parkman’s active life. The simple ways of the Sioux and their attachment to the land reverberated in his mind as long as he lived.
It was surely some sixth sense that had sent Francis Parkman to the wilderness in 1846 before his body failed him. He saw and felt the open land before it was too late and met the rival forces that were contesting for dominion. The following winter he was felled by a nervous breakdown and, a half-blind invalid, turned his imagination inward and began his life’s work.
The darkness was closing in as he sat at home in Boston and wrote of his frontier adventures. He wrote blindfolded with the aid of a wire frame, but he could reach out and touch the buckskin, feathers, arrows, and lance of the Oglala and remember the exaltation of his Indian encounter. The result was his first book, The Oregon Trail, published in 1849.
The abiding significance of Parkman’s wilderness research unfolded in the forty-five years after his Oregon journey, as he wrote eight volumes of history. In his books he savored the excitement of the wilderness, yet his work eventually became a vast inquiry into geography and anthropology, a study of a virgin land and the competing cultures that struggled to master it. Parkman’s histories abounded in glowing descriptions of wild country: he was an avid reader of the earlier naturalists and once pirated passages from Bartram’s Travels to recreate the pristine aspect of the Florida savannas, but such words were mere background music, for once Parkman’s organ-toned prose began to flow, the land had found its historian. His language caught the melody of the red man and the Jesuits, of Pontiac and Frontenac, of Wolfe and Montcalm, and occasionally one even caught a glimpse of Parkman as he revealed himself through his word pictures of the shy priest, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle.
Parkman wrote with the style of a novelist and the insight of a historian; to him the saga of American settlement had all the overtones and grandeur of classic tragedy. The European invaders, Parkman could see, would inevitably subjugate their Stone Age adversaries. Indian ways and Indian values would be eradicated by the onrush of a “superior civilization.” Here were the grand themes of Parkman’s books, and his contribution as a historian rests on his feeling for the land and his understanding of the irrepressible conflict over its future. In his last years, he took up his pen for the forests and for the Indians, and he died a city man who loved wild things, a sick man who esteemed physical prowess and saw that unspoiled nature had indispensable truths to tell.
While Parkman was a boy, preparing to enter Harvard, not far away a movement was developing that invigorated and reoriented American thought. It began in Concord and its captain was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who bade his countrymen to drop their imitation of Old World ways and strike out on their own.
To Emerson the nature discoveries of such men as Audubon and Bartram were valuable, but no substitute for his own discoveries. He was concerned not merely with the details that preoccupied the specialists, but also with developing some broad conclusions about man and his environment. To do so it was not enough to rely on books and secondhand experiences; every man should be his own naturalist and his own philosopher.
The principal thesis of his essay, Nature, published in 1836, was that the individual should “enjoy an original relation to the universe,” and that message became the cardinal article of faith in the philosophy of New England transcendentalism. “The inevitable mark of wisdom,” he advised, “is to see the miraculous in the common.”
To pursue his vision more intently, Emerson steeped himself in Plato, Goethe, and fresh air. The easiest way to develop Olympian insights was to turn the mind into an aeolian harp and attune it to the winds and sounds and rhythms of nature. Many of Emerson’s essays were forest prose poems and, for our purposes, the principal significance of the transcendental movement lies in the fact that it is rooted in nature. Solitude and meditation were Emerson’s meat and drink, and the inner harmonies of fife were clearest in his mind in the out-of-doors.
Emerson had many messages for his countrymen, but none was more profound than his conviction that they would find their own pathway only if they gave up their veneration of the Old World, cultivated self-reliance, and responded to the rhythms of the American earth:
Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us, by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past . . .? In the woods is perpetual youth. . . . In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity . . . which nature cannot repair . . . the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.
The transcendental philosophy needed poets to sing of the natural world and natural men, so Emerson wrote verse and was the first to hail the roughhewn images of young Walt Whitman. Before Emerson’s work was done, he became the first great American philosopher. His message was an affirmation of optimism, but in terms of land the optimism was the mote that marred his vision. Self-reliance was a quality that had defects, and already men who possessed it to excess—men who were solely concerned with immediate profits—were plundering their way through the forests and across the countryside.
Emerson, however, viewed such developments with unconcern. He was so attached to his hopes for America that he dismissed flagrant waste with the euphoric observation that pirates and rebels were the real fathers of colonial settlement, and men would adopt sound policies once the frontier was settled and the ennobling influence of nature took effect. This was sophistry, as Emerson would have realized had he roamed the back country as Bartram did, or traveled west with Parkman.
If Emerson made no major protest against resource waste dining his lifetime, his grand themes nevertheless helped arouse interest in the natural world, and inspired his Concord neighbor, Henry David Thoreau.
Fourteen years Emerson’s junior, Henry, in 1837, gave a Harvard commencement address in which he enlarged on Emerson’s Nature essay and offered the proposition that the order of things should be reversed: the seventh day should be a day of work, for sweat and toil; the remaining six days man should be free to feed his soul with “sublime revelations of nature.” He then proceeded straightway to turn his life into an object lesson of this expansive proposal.
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