01Biography
Francis Parkman grew up in Boston and graduated from Harvard in 1844. In April 1846, at 22, he and his cousin Quincy Adams Shaw left St. Louis on what he called 'a tour of curiosity and amusement.' They rode up the Platte past the emigrant trains to Fort Laramie, spent several weeks with an Oglala Lakota village, and came home by way of Bent's Fort and the Arkansas River.
Parkman was a sightseer, not an emigrant, and he wrote about the families on the road and the Lakota with the prejudices of his class and time. Back home, with his eyes too weak to read, he dictated the story to Shaw. It ran in the Knickerbocker Magazine from 1847 and came out as a book in 1849 as The California and Oregon Trail, later retitled The Oregon Trail.
02Why they matter
Wrote one of the best-known first-hand accounts of the trail and the Plains in 1846, and the book is still in print.
03How they died
Poor health troubled him all his life, and for long stretches he could barely see. Even so he wrote France and England in North America, a history in seven parts published from 1865 to 1892, and for a short time taught horticulture at Harvard. He died in Jamaica Plain, Boston, on November 8, 1893, aged 70.
04Legacy
The Society of American Historians gives the Francis Parkman Prize every year for a book of American history. His house on Beacon Hill in Boston is a National Historic Landmark.