Word: parkman
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...BATTLE FOR NORTH AMERICA (746 pp) - Francis Parkman - Edited and Abridged by John Tebbel-Double...
...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...
...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...
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...
...Buffalo Liver. Parkman lived with the plains Indians just before they took to the warpath to halt the whites. Often he traveled with only two companions, but, Boston gentleman that he was, always carried calling cards. He learned to eat boiled dog and to like raw buffalo liver, and discovered that the noble savage of Novelist James Fenimore Cooper was a library creation. Parkman thought Indians "not much better than brutes...