Anthracite · The American frontier
1823–1893
The West before it became a legend.
In 1846, aged twenty-two, Francis Parkman rode west from Missouri, followed the Platte towards Fort Laramie, and spent weeks in an Oglala camp. The journey became his first book.
ANTHRACITE
The Great Plains in 1846: emigrant trains, buffalo hunts, trading posts, and weeks in an Oglala camp. Parkman’s first book records a journey into a West still being travelled and contested.
Explore the edition →Life & context
Born in Boston in 1823, Parkman studied at Harvard and began planning a history of the struggle for North America. His later work would follow the contest between France and England across the continent.
With his cousin Quincy Adams Shaw, Parkman travelled from St. Louis into the Great Plains. Emigrant wagons, buffalo hunts, Fort Laramie, and life among the Oglala form the substance of his account.
The return journey took him by Bent’s Fort and the Arkansas. He wrote as a young traveller, close to the encounters and hardships he described.
The narrative appeared in the Knickerbocker Magazine before its publication as The California and Oregon Trail in 1849. Parkman later became known for The Conspiracy of Pontiac and France and England in North America.
This AETERNUS edition returns to the English text of the first edition, with its chapter epigraphs and concluding note on Henry Chatillon. Thirteen newly created plates accompany the narrative.
