15 February

Francis Parkman launches The Oregon Trail

1849 The Oregon Trail grew out of a ‘summer’s journey out of bounds’ that Parkman made to the American West in 1846, of which he kept a journal. On this day the book was published, just in time for the Forty-Niner market of adventurers going to California in search of gold.

Parkman was another of those well-bred, well-educated easterners – like Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister (see 4 August and 29 June) – for whom the West was a rite of passage to American manhood. In the book this theme is heightened by three points of reference, none of which is important in the original journal.

One is a group of English tourists whom Parkman and his party meet on the trail, who carry with them enough ammunition for a regiment, and a redundancy of ‘spare rifles and fowling pieces, ropes and harnesses’ – not to mention ‘telescopes and portable compasses’ and their personal baggage. Of course they ‘broke the axle-tree of their wagon’, bringing ‘the whole cumbrous machine lumbering into the bed of a brook!’ Oddly, in the journal it’s Parkman’s wagon that breaks its axle-tree, but here it has to happen to the English to show how encumbered the Old World is by precedent.

Then there are the natives. Parkman couldn’t make up his mind whether they represented a complex traditional culture, or no culture at all. Of one Oglala Sioux ‘warrior’ he first describes him with a ‘statue-like form limbed like an Apollo of bronze’ and then lying ‘there in the sun before our tent, kicking his heels in the air and cracking jokes with his brother’.

Finally the issue of the author’s health, barely mentioned in the journal, becomes a recurring concern in the book – until one morning when, feeling a renewed ‘strength and elasticity of limb’, he climbs a mountain and stepping ‘forth into the light’ sees the ‘pale blue prairie … stretching to the farthest horizon’. This prospect sets the West in perspective – not just visual but moral and intellectual too. It’s the real climax of The Oregon Trail, because it’s when the neophyte becomes the initiate.