Franklin Library: OREGON TRAIL: FRANCIS PARKMAN: AMERICAN WEST 1840s: INDIANS

Description: Franklin Library leather edition of Francis Parkman's "The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life," Illustrations by THOMAS HART BENTON, a Limited edition, one of the 100 GREATEST MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE series, published in 1983. Bound in brown leather, the book has chocolate brown moire silk end leaves, hubbed spine, satin book marker, acid-free paper, Symth-sewn binding, gold gilding on three edges---in FINE condition---opened from SHRINK WRAP for photos. 22 Pages of NOTES FROM THE EDITOR is included. Francis Parkman, who 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 of the NEBRASKA, WYOMING, COLORADO, and KANSAS. Having graduated from HARVARD in 1840, Parkman was 23. Unlike the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail ws 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. 334 pages. I offer combined shipping.

Price: 49.95 USD

Location: Walnut Ridge, Arkansas

End Time: 2024-11-20T19:11:20.000Z

Shipping Cost: 8 USD