Books: Epic Labors

THE BATTLE FOR NORTH AMERICA (746 pp) — Francis Parkman — Edited and Abridged by John Tebbel—Double-day ($7.50).

If it can be said of any author that his early life was a preparation for writing, it can be said of Francis Parkman. The 13 volumes of his masterwork, France and England in North America (now skillfully reduced to one compact volume), appeared over a period of 27 years, beginning in 1865. But they had been forming in his notebooks, for 24 years before that.

The son of a minister and grandson of a wealthy merchant, Francis Parkman set out with his rifle as soon as he graduated from Harvard in 1844, tramping over the trails that the French and Indians had followed when they invaded western Massachusetts. Two years later, when he was 22, he rode by horseback over part of the Oregon Trail, south through the Rockies, and home over the Santa Fe Trail.

Owl In the Twilight. At this point, when he had gathered much of his material and learned life in the wilderness and among the Indians at first hand, his health gave way. He overtaxed his heart, his eyesight failed, and he became too crippled with arthritis to sit on a horse. He wrote a novel—the sort of book, said Van Wyck Brooks, read only by friends of the author —and The Oregon Trail and The Conspiracy of Pontiac, but the great epic of exploration and conquest that he visualized was not even begun.

Illness kept him out of the Civil War, deepening his depression. For years Parkman could sleep only two or three hours a night, could never work longer than two consecutive hours. He sat in the dark, with bandaged eyes, memorizing his chapters. He wrote with wires across the page to guide his hand, an average of six lines a day. When he went to France for treatment, physicians warned him that he would go insane if he continued to write. His wife and son died. He envied his fellow historian, William Prescott (also half blind), because Prescott, “confound him,” could read his proofs, “but I am no better off than an owl in the twilight.” At 42, Parkman began writing France and England in North America.

The work he created was a vast chronicle of the seizure of the land from the Indians by the French, the defeat of their “effete and cumbrous feudalism” by the English. In the final pages he discussed the defeat of England in turn by the colonies. His purpose was to inform the people of the struggles that had been necessary to win the continent for them, to warn them against the practices that had lost it for theirpredecessors.

The first two volumes, The Pioneers of France in the New World (1865), was an account of the complicated negotiations of France and Spain and the settlement of their first colonies. In them there was none of the urge to create a new world that lay behind the founding of the towns of New England: an extreme example was the settlement off Nova Scotia where 40 convicts were abandoned on a desolate isle for five years. (Twelve lived.) Another volume, The Jesuits in North America, told of the incredible heroism of these first missionaries. Said Parkman (who was anti-Catholic): “These men aimed at the conversion of a continent . . . They surveyed a field of labor whose vastness might tire the wings of thought itself, a scene repellent and appalling, darkened with omens of peril and woe.” The Indians put their hands to their mouths in wonder and amazement when they heard where the missionaries intended to go. The Jesuits were tolerated in Indian camps when harvests were good, and in danger of death if a crop failed.

Heroes. With La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869) Parkman began introducing his great characters, followed it with Count Frontenac and New France (1877) and his masterpiece, Montcalm and Wolfe (1884).

The epic really begins with the founding of Quebec and ends with its fall. The first great scene is Champlain establishing the fort where “the fierce sun fell on the bald, baking rock, with its crisped mosses and parched lichens.” The last great scene is Wolfe dying on the Plains of Abraham, hearing a soldier say, “They run; see how they run!”

Champlain, with his matter-of-fact air and his love of the New World—”the piny odor of forests, the noise of waters, the sharp and piercing sunlight”; Frontenac, 52 when he came to Canada, a ruined man, ostentatious, lavish; Père Marquette, who paddled a canoe 2,500 miles in four months; Hennepin, with his boldness and good humor and his astounding lies; La Salle, who mastered eight Indian languages and led his handful of men from the Great Lakes to Texas—these are the men whose lives sustained Parkman’s inspiration through decades of toil.

Jesuit Jogues. Isaac Jogues was his archetype of the Jesuit. Jogues was shy, thoughtful, modest, with great native literary ability which he did not exploit, and a sensitive conscience. In August 1642, when Jogues was 35, he was captured along with 39 Hurons and Frenchmen by a party of 70 Iroquois. They beat him until he was senseless and then gnawed his fingers like famished dogs. He ran the gauntlet; his hands were mangled again, and fire applied to his body. At night the Iroquois lacerated their captives’ wounds and pulled out their hair and beards. The prisoners were placed on a scaffold and one of the converted Indians was ordered to cut off Jogues’s thumb. After fresh tortures he was placed on a scaffold again. Later, given an ear of green corn to eat, he discovered a few drops of rain on it, and baptized two of the Hurons with the water.

Ten Into One. EditorTebbel has omitted altogether three of Parkman’s volumes and condensed the others, but his cutting is not so damaging as it might seem. Parkman’s books were brief, his style spare and dry. By removing footnotes and index, and eliminating much of the background material, Editor Tebbel has cut Parkman’s 715,000 words of text to about 286,000. The characterizations, especially of such men as Frontenac, are much livelier in the original version.

But the scope and color of the work are still here: a vision of the immense forest, gloomy and foreboding, “encumbered with rocks and logs, tangled with roots and underbrush, damp with perpetual shade and redolent of decayed leaves and moldering wood.” Parkman was no follower of Rousseau and Jefferson; he found little romance in the wilderness and small nobility in the savages.

Parkman saw that his own country had taken over the work of the French and English before her. “She has tamed the savage continent, peopled the solitude, gathered wealth untold, waxed potent, imposing, redoubtable. And now it remains for her to prove, if she can, that the rule of the masses is consistent with the highest growth of the individual; that democracy can give the world a civilization as mature and pregnant, ideas as energetic and vitalizing, and types of manhood as lofty and strong as any of the systems which it boasts to supplant.”

He did not believe that democracy’s success was a foregone conclusion. To achieve success said Parkman, the U.S. must “shun the excess and perversion of the principles that made her great, prate less about the enemies of the past and strive more against the enemies of the present, resist the mob and the demagogue as she resisted Parliament and King . . . and turn some fair proportion of her vast mental forces to other objects than material progress and the game of party politics.”