The historian Francis Parkman was born in Boston in 1823, the son of the Rev. Francis Parkman, minister of the New North Church on Hanover Street. Parkman was high-strung as a child, and his parents sent him to live with his maternal grandfather, Nathaniel Hall, in comparatively rural Medford. In that country setting he developed an abiding love for natural history and the outdoors. Parkman later attended the Chauncy Hall School in Boston and Harvard College, where he graduated in 1844. He spent a large part of his free time out-of-doors, and was a great sportsman and athlete, taking his vacations from school in the northern woods, and maintaining journals of his experiences which later served as the source material for some early writings.¹

Parkman first broke into print in the Knickerbocker Magazine in 1845, with some tales based on his experiences in the northern woods. Then, in the early spring of 1846, his cousin Quincy A. Shaw invited Parkman to accompany him on a hunting expedition in the far west. At St. Louis they engaged Henry Chatillon, an expert Rocky Mountain trapper, as a guide. In May 1846 the party started on the Oregon Trail, the major route westward across the country from the Mississippi River. Parkman joined up with a roving band of Oglala Sioux warriors, with whom he spent three weeks hunting buffalo and living on the trail in the manner of the Native Americans. Parkman recorded his adventures in three notebooks, one of which is shown here, and later used these notes as the basis for his popular adventure narrative The California and Oregon Trail (later simply The Oregon Trail).²

When he returned from his Western sojourn, worn out with dysentery and the general hardships experienced among the Sioux, Parkman suffered a complete breakdown and continued to be plagued throughout his life by various "nervous disorders" and physical disabilities. Due to his failing eyesight, he was forced to dictate his narrative for The California and Oregon Trail to Quincy Shaw and other willing assistants.³ The book first appeared in serial form in the Knickerbocker, the first installment in February of 1847 and the last in February of 1849. The narrative was so popular that it substantially boosted sales of the magazine. The first edition of the book, shown here, was published in 1849, and is to this day his best-known work. Parkman has been criticized for not placing his story in the historical context of the great Westward Expansion, but he weathered this criticism, and the story remains a fascinating adventure narrative in the romantic tradition.⁴

Parkman's great lifetime achievement was the multi-volume history France and England in North America, the last volume of which appeared shortly before his death. Although he formulated the plan for this comprehensive work while still in college, the first two volumes (History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac) did not appear until 1851. Francis Parkman died in 1893, shortly after the final volume in the series, Half-Century of Conflict, appeared in print. Today, just short of a hundred years after his death, Parkman's voluminous output, remarkable considering his disabilities, still marks him as one of the foremost writers of American history.

Francis Parkman was a resident member of the Massachusetts Historical Society from 1852 until his death in 1893. His personal papers were given to the Society between 1885 and 1942 by Parkman and his descendants.