The Oregon Trail

<b>"The sons of civilization, drawn by the fascinations of a fresher and bolder life, thronged to the western in multitudes which blighted the charm that had lured them."</b><br><br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1655572339i/33071355._SX540_.jpg" alt="Francis Parkman Jr. Wrote the Story of America from a Darkened Room - New England Historical Society" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><br><br>This quote about the 'sons of civilization' reflects the tone in Francis Parkman's <i>The Oregon Trail</i>. The blight Parkman speaks of has nothing to do with how American Indians were killed or pushed off their land. I know this is considered an important historical work, but it was difficult to appreciate much about this account. Sure, he is a product of his times. However, given Parkman's biases, how can anything he wrote about Indians be trusted? I was astonished when he described the decent behavior of some Indians, but put it to the fact that they had been threatened with extermination. He called this "an admirable state of mind." <br><br>While there are some observations of immigrants on the Oregon Trail and descriptions of nature (translated especially as the hunting of buffalo), there are many many long-winded descriptions of treacherous, motley, ugly snake-eyed squalid uncouth brutish savages with their "strange, unbridled impulses." The hordes of Indians pass in front of Parkman's eyes as "agents or villainy" or as a diseased scourge on land that they seem to have no right to occupy. The arrogance was breathtaking. I'd had some of the same difficulty with Osborne Russell's contemporary account<i>Journal Of A Trapper: Nine Years in the Rocky Mountains, 1834-1843</i> that I read a few weeks ago, but, I think, there are still reasons to read it. <i>The Oregon Trail</i> not so much. 1.5 stars rounded down.

In my little book reviews I’m always coming back to this idea of sympathetic imagination. Sympathetic imagination, for me, is the ability to put oneself in another person’s place, to imaginatively enter into someone else’s mind and perspective. Exercising sympathetic imagination means withholding judgment, extending charity, allowing – either by stepping forward or by not retreating – the gap that separates us from others to close at least a little bit. It’s the stuff of cliché (walking in another’s shoes, seeing through another’s eyes, etc.) but without it life and art are unbearable. <br /><br />It’s not always easy. Sometimes the effort is exhausting. When it comes to the exercise of sympathetic imagination in reading, it helps when the prose is pleasant and the story a good one. Because characters can disappoint. <br /><br />Francis Parkman’s autobiographical <i>The Oregon Trail</i> is a nice example of what I mean. Fresh out of Harvard, the young Parkman and his friend Quincy Shaw set out in 1846 for the Great Plains. From St Louis they move upriver with a revolving cast of emigrants, trappers, traders and wilderness guides. At Fort Laramie, in what’s now eastern Wyoming, Parkman sets out with a band of Sioux for the Black Hills. He lives with them, hunts with them, eats with them, and smokes with them, for two months.<br /><br />Parkman explains that he’s had a lifelong fascination with the Indians. As an historian, he would go on to spend most of his career analyzing the story of their relations with the French and British colonists. In order to experience the life of aboriginal Americans in an uncivilized state, he’s travelled halfway across the continent. It’s remarkable, then, how little curiosity he exhibits. To him, the Sioux in whose company he’s living are (for the most part) unenlightened savages. He frankly considers them stupid, cruel, stubborn, backward. He doesn’t ask, or doesn’t think worth reporting, much of what they have to say about the world and their place in it. What does the universe look like to the Sioux in the summer of 1846? Parkman doesn’t explore the question deeply. By the time he’s making his retreat to St Louis at summer’s end, you get the idea that he’s sick to death of Indians and will cheer on their eventual genocide.<br /><br />That’s probably putting it too strongly, but the fact is that Parkman’s sympathetic imagination utterly fails him. And not only with regard to the Indians. The white man (preferably Anglo-Saxon and Protestant) he considers the paragon of creation. The Indians he places lower; but lower still (he explicitly states), are most of the unlettered French Canadian mountain men, the Mexicans with whom the United States has just entered into war, and the Mormon “fanatics” on their way over the mountains where, Parkman speculates, they’ll try to forge a Californian empire.<br /><br />(The perfect vermin of the earth for Parkman, however, isn’t human at all. It’s the buffalo. I’m not going to suggest that he owes the beasts the same debt of sympathy he owes his fellow man, but his unrelenting campaign of bloodlust against the buffalo – especially on the return trip – gets hard to stomach.)<br /><br />Herman Melville, reviewing the book a couple years after its publication, gives Parkman a righteous chastisement for his lack of curiosity and fellow-feeling. Melville in his own masterpiece goes to some length (especially considering the era) to avoid the same pitfall. His Tashtego and Queequeg are fully realized and fully sympathetic men, equal heirs and possessors of earth and sea with Ishmael himself.<br /><br />However, as Melville says once he’s put away the stick, Parkman’s book is nonetheless successful, wonderfully so, full of fascinating observations of frontier and wilderness life, hilarious and pitiful anecdotes and vignettes, gritty character sketches and reportage. Parkman is a good writer and the story he tells is utterly fresh and bracing. Despite its flaws, <i>The Oregon Trail</i> is a real “treasure” of American letters and history. There’s less sympathy than we might have hoped for, yes, but thankfully there’s even less sentimentality. <br /><br />In the end, Parkman’s limitations don’t let us off the hook. It becomes necessary for us to exercise our sympathetic imagination, as readers, for the benefit of Parkman, who so frequently fails to exercise his own for the benefit of his subjects.

I was disappointed in this book. I had highly anticipated reading this book for several years. I had the impression it was about a journey from Missouri to Oregon or California on the Oregon Trail. <br /><br />The author only traveled perhaps half of the trail and did not comment or even mention the iconic landmarks like Chimney Rock. Or what it felt like to ride in a Conestoga Wagon. <br /><br />Rather the author regaled us with reasons why the "white" man was so superior. Indeed he ranked in order men of the prairie thusly: 1. Whites 2. Indians. 3. Mexicans. Gave a biased snap shot of life on the prairie and demonstrated why there are no buffalo left: they were all shot- some for sport and trophies; some for food. The Native Americans depended in them to live. The book shows the beginning of the destruction of the prairie and the beginning of the displacement if the Native American.

Turned out “The Oregon Trail” by Francis Parkman was not the book I was looking for about the Oregon Trail, but it was interesting. The book was published in 1849. Parkman provided beautiful, detailed descriptions of his travels including the flora and fauna but also people and places. I find one must be careful not to judge but to learn from how things were in the time frame the book was written. Overall, the book was worth the read.<br /><br />I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book is six hours and six minutes. Frank Muller does a good job narrating the book.<br />

"Pur-sioux-ing Exotica"<br /><br />In the 1970s, British university graduates could take a year off and make their way across Europe, through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, overland to India. It was "breaking away", "a testing of self", "seeing the world", "the search for the other" or maybe just drugs and a hippie vibe. In 1846, a Harvard graduate certainly didn't have such an option, but still he could choose not to travel across to Europe for the usual Grand Tour. The 20th century European travelers in Asia viewed the various peoples they met with a mix of incomprehension, awe, prejudice, and myth. Parkman's account of a journey to the high plains of America reminded me of the latter day tales immensely, though in his day, "cultural relativity" had not been thought of. At 23, just out of Harvard, he and another Boston friend headed for the West, then just being opened up (or invaded) by overland pioneers, Mormons, trappers, buffalo hunters, and soldiers. Parkman and Co. travelled through Kansas, Nebraska, and into parts of South Dakota, Wyoming and Colorado. He met many Indians, spending a couple months with an Oglala Dakota band. Totally ignorant of their language and assuming innate understanding on his own part, he drew a rather biased portrait. Yet such is the skill of his writing and his feel for drama, that any reader will still, over 160 years later, find this book hard to put down. His descriptions of the land, the storms, the vast herds of bison, the rugged but raggedy trappers and mountain men, and the look and behavior of the Indians is as vivid as a book of photographs. Parkman has left us an invaluable document whatever its shortcomings. He provides us with a rare look at an America now completely disappeared. After all, "Overland to India" occurred in the Age of Photography, but Parkman had no camera. To have written this book despite being in bad health for most of the trip is indeed an achievement. It's an American classic well-deserving of the name, despite its jaundiced treatment of the so-called savages, who hosted him, helped him, and never hurt him. That bias too is part of the same history.

I nearly didn't finish this. I've been obsessed with pioneers and the west and my ancestors. This book, which I've read a couple of times many, many years ago, I've read with new eyes and ears this time, and since it was published in 1849, it is absolutely not PC. Where in the past I was able to overlook and seek out word of my people in the pages, this time it was anything but that.<br /><br />I'm still disgusted and pondering this. I don't quite know what to do with this other than weep and wonder how to reconcile all that's happened. For right now, am just trying to read the other side of this story, rather than this blather. Mr. Parkman was marketing and spreading his own kind of hate, making sure to cover the land with people like him, at an incredible cost to those who'd been here for thousands of years.<br /><br />As Helen Hunt Jackson said, it truly was a Century of Dishonor.

A good book for history buffs. It doesn't read life a mm ovel. The author handled the research well. <br /><br />

Tak dapat aku habiskan buku ni haha tapi dahsyat jugak publisher ni, terjemah novel spaghetti western 1849 ke bahasa melayu! Bukan apa, aku rasa versi asal memang best dan popular, cuma versi yang memang target untuk budak sekolah ni diringkaskan seringkas ringkasnya daripada 400 muka asal kepada 120 page je (lagi 10 tu iklan), aku perasan banyak perkara dilangkau sebab dari bab ke bab sampai ceritanya kacau bilau, sekejap sini, sekejap sana, watak pun banyak gila. Bila aku baca review english version semua orang suka je. Nampak sangat penterjemah "gagal" menterjemahkan roh novel ini ke bahasa ibunda. <br /><br />p/s: bak kata Dali Fazuri (penterjemah Frankenstein dan Dracula), ko kena kaji latar masa novel tersebut ditulis supaya ko boleh faham "feel" zaman tu. Bukan main terjemah "word to word"!.

It was ok! <br /><br />Almost rated 3 stars but...<br /><br />The Oregon Trail or Let's Shoot Some Buffalo or Indians Suck, Whites Rule.<br /><br />I really love the way Parkman describes a scene. and for that and that only I'll read more of his stuff and try something else too, what made me not put 3 stars, was that he was talking about shooting buffalo so much that at some point I was searching for a page in the damn book that didn't include the word "buffalo", like, seriously.. we get it, you shot and hunt buffalos for fun and food and whatever. WE. GET. IT. <br /><br />And, also, the constant hate on mexicans and indians, that went along with the constant (white) men rule all and we're superior and with all of his fancy talking. That's a bit excused cuz it's my personal pet peeve, fancy talkers. Every now and then he would think of something he said when something would happen and that something would be such an amazing thing to say at the moment like it's straight out of a fucking poem, so, no, you're not convincing to me and I won't bite and I'll be cringing to your quotes.<br /><br />Anyway... so for all of that plus all the racism, he gets one star off cuz it made me angry lots of times while reading. The dude REALLY hates indians and he makes sure to talk about it lots of times.<br /><br />As I explained in other books about "those times", I choose not to judge someone's book based on what it was like to live in times like these back then and whatnot, but I choose to judge someone's book by what the person's like, so if you're a racist like Twain or Parkman or whoever, you're shitty and that's that for me, because people who weren't fucking racists, they too were alive back then.<br /><br />Oh well, it was ok. I liked the theme and times, I love the old west, and the way he describes everything from the places to the tribes and whatnot, he's writings are holding up great, even though sometimes I kinda doubt that some things happened the way he says they did, mostly cuz of what was happening, Parkman should be dead like a handful of times from a buffalo to an accident happening or illness or whatever. And that makes me wanna read more of his stuff to really get into his books.<br /><br /><br /><br />

This is an illustrated true story by Francis Parkman, an American historian who takes you over the Oregon Trail breaking new frontier in the early American West. Parkman went on a 2,000 mile journey through the wilderness of the American West that would take him six months to reach the end of his trail, Fort Laramie. He wrote several historical books as a result of his journey, including "The Oregon Trail".<br /><br />Readers should beware, Parkman never went to Oregon as the title inspires. His goal was to meet and study the Indians. Coming West to meet the Indians is why he made the trip, not to go to Oregon. Fort Laramie was his destination and turn-around point where he headed back East after his mission was complete. <br /><br />The Oregon Trail is an easy-to-read, young adult type book that reads like a Western novel complete with illustrations. But it's not fiction, it is the historical recording 23-year-old Parkman, a recent Harvard College student, wrote during his journey from the East to the great American West. <br /><br />A gifted writer who captured history as his wagon train travels across the Great Plains, the American prairie, through Indian land and buffalo ranges. He was fascinated with the Native American people and that was his primary motivation factor in heading West into untested wilderness territory, to meet these people and write about them. <br /><br />Parkman's book makes a great read for anyone who wants to escape the modern world and venture into the wagon trails of the Old West where danger and risk are an hourly part of life, and death. Parkman wasn't only a historian, he was a good writer who wrote good ol' stories. It's a book that you don't want to close the back cover on, you want it to keep on going. Unfortunately, it does not. And the greatest let down to most people is the title was a bit deceiving since the wagon train that moved slowly up the Oregon Trail never arrived in Oregon. Still, it was a good read with a great little story.