be seen the counterparts of the sturdy settlers of the forests of Pennsylvania and Ohio; the French half-breed trappers and guides were still the same. This experience, the most remarkable in his course of self -training, is recounted in The Oregon Trail.
The Indian literature of the day was prolific, and the most popular author in the country had made three notable contributions to it. Yet the Oregon Trail differs essentially from Irving's Tour on the Prairies, Astoria, or The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, for it not only records the vivid impressions by a most alert observer of a bygone phase of life, but it is, in addition, a fragment of the autobiography of an historian enjoying an almost unique experience. For to Parkman the whole excursion was a journey into the past; each successive stage took him not merely further west, but further back in time.
He was on the prairies about five months in all, about five weeks of which he spent in a village of the Ogillalah Sioux. In his pursuit of these Indians and his sojourn with them, he went as far west, following in part the Oregon Trail, as the Black Hills in Wyoming; then, turning toward the South, he went past Pike's Peak to Pueblo, and homeward in part by the Santa Fé Trail.
Pow-wows, war dances, feasts, buffalo hunting, Oregon trains, Santa Fé caravans and companies of frontier troops on the march to New Mexico—all the varied spectacle of a life now gone forever in this country passed before his eyes and was indelibly printed upon his mind. The influence of this experience can be traced throughout all his works, and in his latest volumes he recalls incidents of this summer. By a strange fatality, however, a course of life that has restored many invalids to health nearly cost ^him his life, and bequeathed him an accumulation of infirmities which attended him to the grave. He was taken ill soon after leaving St. Louis, and then, and later on during renewed attacks of the malady, when he should have rested, a seemingly imperative necessity of continued exertion overstrained a
