No one of our American historians determined upon his career and selected his field so early in life, and no one of them made so intelligent and broadly planned a preparation for his chosen work. Irving knew Spain and Spaniards, but could not know the primitive inhabitants of the West Indies, nor did he follow the track of Columbus; Prescott's knowledge of Spain, as of Mexico and Peru, was derived wholly from books or conversation; Bancroft's tastes did not lead him to study the frontier of his time where could be observed with slight variation the chief phases of Colonial life; Motley knew his Netherlands and numbered many Netherlanders among his friends, but he never saw Spain, and apparently did not regard a first-hand study of the Spanish character as a part of his preparation. Parkman, on the other hand, while he was not less assiduous in the pursuit and analysis of documents, devoted extraordinary pains to the personal study of the actual phenomena with which he had to deal.
The scene of action was the frontier and the forest; the actors: French and English adventurers and explorers, bush-rangers and pioneers, missionaries and wild Indians. Realizing the relative permanence of these types—that frontier life and colonial life were essentially the same, and that an identical environment acting on the same human factors would produce in the middle of the nineteenth century substantially what existed in the eighteenth,—Parkman not only systematically studied these phases of human character where they could be found, unsophisticated by modern ideas, but he lived with the people themselves.
He had already familiarized himself with the wilder parts of New England, and during his sojourn in Rome in 1844, he spent some days in a Convent of the Passionist Fathers to see face to face the monk and devotee, and now he resolved to study the real Indian neither bettered nor spoiled by civilization. In the St. Louis of 1846 he would still find not a little that was like the Montreal of 1756, Fort Laramie would reproduce in some essentials the Machilli-mackinac of Pontiac's time, and in the Oregon pioneers could
