Description

Franklin Library leather edition of Francis Parkman's "The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life," Illustrations by FREDERIC REMINGTON, a Limited edition, one of the COLLECTOR'S LIBRARY OF THE WORLD'S BEST-LOVED BOOKS series, published in 1981. Bound in brown leather, the book has brown moire silk end leaves, hubbed spine, satin book marker, acid-free paper, Symth-sewn binding, gold gilding on three edges---in near FINE condition---except for 'very minor' imperfection to gilt---mentioned for accuracy! 22 Pages of NOTES FROM THE EDITOR is included. Francis Parkman lived from 1823--1893. " The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life" is a first-person account of a 2-month summer tour in 1846. Having graduated from HARVARD in 1840, Parkman was 23. His trip west, from St. Louis to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, was a climax of his explorations and preparations. In the 1872 preface, Parkman wrote: "I went in great measures as a student, to prepare for a literary undertaking of which the plan was already formed. . .My business was observation, and I was willing to pay dearly for the opportunity of exercising it." The only sign of the white man's presence along the 2,000-mile length of the Oregon Trail in 1846 were four trading and trapping posts. Parkman reached the first of these, Fort Laramie, before turning back south through Colorado, and returning east along the Arkansas River and the Santa Fe Trail. Unlike the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail was one of commerce only, not organized emigration; for generations, there had been trade between Santa Fe and Mexico. Parkman quickly came to believe that Indians were subservient to superstition and lacked steadfastness of purpose. When he goes to join the Ogillallah village, he thinks it is with the purpose of watching preparations for war, for WHIRLWIND, an Ogillallah chief, has called together the DAKOTA to war against the SNAKES, who have killed a group of young warriors, including Whirlwind's son. But Parkman sees the purpose wax and wane, until even Whirlwind casually gives it up. Parkman describes horses being stabbed because of squabbles, and his own mule was stabbed because he unwittingly offended an Indian. Parkman quotes Kongra-Tonga when he found two Snakes hunting. His men shot one of them with arrows and chased the other up the side of the mountain until they surrounded him. They later built a great fire and cut off the tendons of his wrists and feet and threw him in and held him down with poles until he was burnt to death. Parkman did come to believe that the war spirit brought out the best in the Indians he visited. The book covers the three weeks Parkman spent hunting buffalo with a band of Oglala Sioux. Parkman noted that the Dakota planted no foods and formed no permanent villages. They followed the buffalo, whose skins were used to build tepees and to make bedding, robes, shields, boats, ropes, saddlebags, and lacing for snowshoes. The sinew was used for bowstring, cord, and rope. From bones came scrapers for dressing the hides. And buffalo meat was a staple of Indian diet. At their greatest number, Parkman estimated there were once 125 million buffalo in North America. IN 1859 there were 110,000 hides shipped to St. Louis. First published in 1849, Parkman was launched upon his career as a storyteller without peer in American letters. ... It is the picturesqueness, the racy vigor, the poetic elegance, the youthful excitement, that give The Oregon Trail its enduring appeal, recreating for us, as perhaps does no other book in our literature, the wonder and beauty of life in a new world that is now old and but a memory. — Historian Henry Steele Commager. 341 pages. I offer combined shipping.