On June 15, he arrived at Fort Laramie, which was established in southeast Wyoming 12 years earlier as a fur trading fort. It later evolved into the largest military post on the western plains.
The fort served as a stopping point for tens of thousands of immigrants bound for Oregon, California and the Salt Lake Valley, according to data from the Fort Laramie National Historic Site. Indian tribes, especially the Sioux, traded buffalo robes at the fort for a variety of goods.
While he was inside the fort, Parkman received a visit from the Sioux, who he described in The Oregon Trail as “diffident and bashful” people whose “soul is dormant” and who would not “trouble themselves to inquire into what they cannot comprehend.”
The book, a narrative chronicling Parkman’s experiences with the Sioux, is acclaimed as an important historical account and literary work, though it also has come under fire for its arrogant tone and Parkman’s discriminatory views of Indians, trappers and immigrants he met along the way.
Parkman wrote with “real prejudice,” Drummey said. Although he recorded valuable information and observations about life on the plains, Parkman viewed all his experiences through a critical lens.
“He really saw Indians as being ‘others,’” Drummey said. “Parkman can be very harsh, but not specifically aimed toward Indians. He was harsh about class differences. He was taking the pose of the sophisticated person and as a result, he’s kind of making fun of people he saw.”
Critics have blamed Parkman’s wealth and Boston upbringing for the prejudice that inevitably appears in his published works.
“Perhaps the most serious single handicap that Parkman had as a student of the West was the very inherited wealth that made the trip possible,” biographer Mason Wade wrote in his 1942 book, Francis Parkman: Heroic Historian. “The means that enabled him to devote two-thirds of a year to a journey, simply for adventure, recreation and study, which so many were making in order to live, blinded him to the profound social forces which were at work in the West in 1846.”
