The Oregon Trail of Francis Parkman - Sunny Hills High School

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THE OREGON TRAIL
south along the foot of the Rocky Mountains through what
is now Colorado, then eastward to the settlements through
central Kansas, part of the way along the Arkansas. In a
letter to his mother on October 7 he speaks of .. gaining a
great deal of sport and a cartload of experience."
Itwas an entirely uncivilized region, visited only by trappers,
United States dragoons, and occasional explorers and
travelers and missionaries, Oregon and California emigrants,
and the caravans of the Santa Fe traders. But it was a wilderness
only from the white man's point of view. The Indian
knew it as an open book; the trails and watercourses, the
hills, the boundaries between tribes, all were well known and
all had their legends and traditions. An immemorial world
of man passed away when the Anglo-Saxon set Europe on
the Plains.
3. The Indians
Some of the tribes near the settlements, like the Delawares
and Shawnee, had been deported from the east. The
western Indians of the Plains and the Rockies were still ill
their aboriginal state: chiefly, (1) the Siouan stock 1 (including
the Sioux or Dakota, of which Parkman's Oglala were
a band, the Crow, the Iowa, the Mandan); (2) the Caddoan
(including the Pawnee); (3) the Shoshonean (including the
Shoshone, Comanche, Ute); (4) the Algonquian (including
the Blackfeet, Chippewa, Cheyenne, Arapaho); (5) the
Athapascan (including the Apache and the Navajo, and the
large tribes far off in Alaska). Space forbids anything but
these general facts: the reader must turn to The Oregon
Trail itself. But he must remember that Parkman, even with
1 The classification of the Indian tribes, begun by Gallatin (1836) and
developed by Powell (1885-1886), is by languages, which, if not absolutely
scientific ethnology, is the best working basis for study. The spe11ing ol.
Indian names throughout the Introduction and Notes to this edition is that
agreed on by the Bureau of American Ethnology and the Indian Bureau.
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