American Indian Culture and Research Journal

A title of this scope might lead the reader to expect some discussion of two great nineteenth century writers: Lewis H. Morgan and Francis Parkman. Indeed Morgan's League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (Rochester, 1851) started scientific ethnography in America; and Francis Parkman's classic on France and England in North America ran to seven parts, and the remainder into twelve volumes, which represent a kind of literate narrative history that is no longer fashionable among historians. Parkman is not without his biases toward the savages, and he does not lack critics today. However thorough his research, and however much he distorted sources to support his views, as Francis Jennings has charged, he was a great writer and a master of historical style. "Parkman's work is one grand historical novel," as Edmund Wilson once reminded me, and he should be read in that light . Early on Parkman intended to write an Iroquois history, but he abandoned the plan when he found that he could not connect the culture of their living descendants with their historical past. Instead he turned to the then still viable cultures of the Plains as represented in his personal experiences of the Oregon Trail (1872) and derived from the buffalo hunters of the northern Plains the inspiration for the Indians that populated his novel. I remain a Morgan and a Parkman enthusiast, their works merit separate treatment, which I have accorded them elsewhere, and they are not my present concern.