Chapter IV: Early Work

_OREGON TRAIL_, _CONSPIRACY OF PONTIAC_, _VASSALL MORTON_

_The Oregon Trail_ ranks high among books which, though sometimes written for quite another purpose, are read chiefly for entertainment. Such was _Two Years before the Mast_, such was _The Bible in Spain_, that skilful work of a most accomplished poseur.

In addition to its value as literature, _The Oregon Trail_ is a trustworthy account of a no longer existent state of society. It is a document. The range of experience was narrow, and the adventures few, but so far as it goes the record is perfect; and when read in connection with his historical work, the book becomes a commentary on Parkman’s method. Here is shown how he got that knowledge of Indian life and character which distinguishes his work from that of other historical writers who touch the same field. The knowledge was utilized at once in his next work.

_The Conspiracy of Pontiac_ is the sort of book people praise by saying that it is as readable as a novel. The comparison is unfortunate. So many novels are disciplinary rather than amusing. One wishes it were possible to say of them that they are as readable as history.

Nevertheless it is quite true that the virtues supposed to inhere chiefly in a work of fiction are conspicuous in this the first of Parkman’s historical studies. _The Conspiracy of Pontiac_ is a story, filled with incident and abounding in illustrations of courage, craft, endurance, stubbornness, self-sacrifice, despair, triumph. The plain truth shames invention. Pontiac lives in these pages describing his towering ambition. So do the other actors,--Rogers, Gladwyn, Campbell, Catharine the Ojibwa girl. The supernumeraries are strikingly picturesque,--Canadian settlers, trappers, coureurs des bois, priests, half-breeds, and Indians, the motley denizens of frontier and wilderness. A forest drama played by actors like these is bound to be absorbing were it only as a spectacle.

One fact becomes apparent on taking up this book. History as Parkman writes it is both dramatic and graphical, filled with action and movement, filled with color, form, and beauty. With such an eye for effect it is impossible for him to be dull. Open the volume at random and the wealth of the author’s observations seems to have been showered on that page. But the next page is like it, and also the next.

The vivacity of youth explains much in this narrative. Parkman was but twenty-six when he wrote _The Conspiracy of Pontiac_. Being young, he was not afraid to be eloquent, to revel in descriptions of sunrise and sunset, tempests, the coming of spring, the brilliant hues of autumn foliage, the soft haze of Indian summer. His chapters are richly enamelled with these glowing pieces of rhetoric. He is no less brilliant in his martial scenes; the accounts of the Battle of Bloody Bridge and of Bouquet’s fight in the forest are extraordinarily well done.

The historian is severe on writers who have idealized the Indian. Here is one of Parkman’s own characterizations: ‘The stern, unchanging features of his mind excite our admiration from their very immutability; and we look with deep interest on the fate of this irreclaimable son of the wilderness, the child who will not be weaned from the breast of his rugged mother. And our interest increases when we discern in the unhappy wanderer, mingled among his vices, the germs of heroic virtues,--a hand bountiful to bestow, as it is rapacious to seize, and, even in extremest famine, imparting its last morsel to a fellow sufferer; a heart which, strong in friendship as in hate, thinks it not too much to lay down life for its chosen comrade; a soul true to its own idea of honor, and burning with an unquenchable thirst for greatness and renown.’ Neither poet nor novelist really needs to embroider such an account of the Red Man.

This successful historic monograph was followed by an unsuccessful novel, written, it is thought, for recreation. Without being an autobiography, _Vassall Morton_ abounds in autobiographical passages. Its failure was not of the kind that proves inability ever to master the art of fiction. The loss to American letters however would have been incalculable had Parkman’s genius for historical narrative been sacrificed in any degree to novel writing. And this might have happened had _Vassall Morton_ been a success.