Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 101Kepler’s law controls the motion of the planets. The law is Progress: the result
Democracy.” That was an article of faith not only for Motley but also for Bancroft,
whose belief in the progressive character of history – and in the duty of the historian
to demonstrate the evolution of liberty in historical events – was thoroughly
exercised in his major work, a monumental, ten-volume History of the United States
(1834–1876). Prescott concentrated his attention further south, on what was the
then neglected field of the conquest of Mexico and Peru. He too, however, mixed
historical scholarship with romantic literary forms. In his finest work, the History of
the Conquest of Mexico (1843), Prescott presents his story in terms of a narrative
structure borrowed from the historical novel and, in particular, the fiction of Sir
Walter Scott. Within a panoramic portrait of two cultures in collision, the Aztec and
the Spanish, Prescott focuses on the conflict between two heroic figures, Montezuma
and Cortez. The result is an intervention in both history and literature, a matter of
scholarly record and a tragic epic. Parkman also negotiated the borderline between
the historical and the literary, in seven works exploring the struggle for domination
in the New World published over the period between 1865 and 1892. Surveying, in
particular, the conflict between the English and the French for control of colonial
America, the series pivoted on a contrast between progress and reaction – represented,
respectively, by England and France – seen from the standpoint of an author who
once described himself as a conservative republican.
Published before his histories, The Oregon Trail is an account of a journey
Parkman took along the trail of the title in 1846. His purpose in taking the trip was
twofold: to improve his frail health and study Indian life. Skilled in woodcraft and a
decent shot, he survived the hardship of the trek, but only just: the strain of traveling
eventually led to a complete breakdown in his health, rather than the recovery for
which he had hoped. Incapable of writing, he was forced to dictate his story to a
cousin and traveling companion. The result has been described as the first account
of a literary white man who actually lived by choice for a while among Native
Americans. What emerges from this account is, like the other work of Parkman and
the romantic historians, an intriguing mix of fact and fiction, matters of record and
the stuff of the imagination. It is also, and equally intriguingly, double-edged. As the
narrator of The Oregon Trail, a Harvard graduate and a member of a prominent
Boston family, encounters the landscape and peoples of the West, his tone tends to
hover sometimes between condescension and disgust, the style verging on the
mandarin. “The Ogillallah, the Brule, and the other western bands of the Dahcotah
or Sioux, are thorough savages, unchanged by any contact with civilisation,” Parkman
tells the reader. “Not one of them can speak a European tongue, or has ever visited
an American settlement.” The white people, the emigrants he meets, also strike the
young traveler, very often, as savage, unkempt, and unruly. “I have often perplexed
myself to divine the various motives that give impulse to this migration,” Parkman
confesses, “but whatever they may be ... certain it is that multitudes bitterly repent
the journey, and, after they have reached the land of promise, are happy enough to
escape from it.” Certainly, it seems to the young narrator that the territories the
migrants encounter – drawn, it may be, by their “desire of shaking off restraints ofGGray_c02.indd 101ray_c 02 .indd 101 8 8/1/2011 7:54:38 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 38 AM