The California and Oregon Trail: Being Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life
Sep 2007 · Cosimo, Inc.
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328
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About this ebook
The firsthand account of a personal journey through Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, and Kansas in the 1840s, this classic work of American adventure is not only an excellent resource for eyewitness observations of Native American culture in the mid 19th century but also an essential document of the cultural attitudes and prejudices of Eastern European-descended Americans of the era.Criticized by contemporary reviewers, including Herman Melville, as demeaning to Indians, Parkman's tale nevertheless remains a fascinating and entertaining read. Originally serialized in Knickerbocker's Magazine and first published in book form in 1849, this replica edition returns to print a previously hard-to-find work of American history.American horticulturist and historian FRANCIS PARKMAN (1823-1893) helped found the Archaeological Institute of America. He is the author of The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century and the eight-volume France and England in North America, both considered among the great masterpieces of historical literature.
About the author
Early in his youth, this Boston-born historian was infected with what he called (in language offensive to today's readers) "Injuns on the brain." For the rest of his life, he dedicated himself to writing what he had called at the age of 18 "a history of the American forest." In 1846, following the completion of his studies at Harvard College, he set out in company with a cousin on an expedition from St. Louis over the Oregon Trail to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, a journey that brought him into close contact with the Lakota Indians. Back in Boston, he turned the journal that he had kept on the trail into a series of sketches that were published in the Knickerbocker Magazine and afterwards as a book, The California and Oregon Trail, Being Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life (1849), now better known by the abbreviated title of a later revised edition, The Oregon Trail. By this time, Parkman had well underway the historical work that would occupy him during the rest of his life, an account of the French and English in North America, the first installment of which was his History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac and the War of the North American Tribes against the English Colonies, published in 1851.
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