Francis Parkman

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) was an American historian, born in Boston to a wealthy family. In 1846 he traveled west and lived for weeks among the Oglala Sioux, an experience he described in The Oregon Trail. Afterward, despite eyesight so poor that he often had to dictate and could work only minutes at a time, and nervous illness that plagued him for decades, he devoted his life to a single subject, the struggle between France and Britain for North America, told in seven parts from Pioneers of France in the New World to Montcalm and Wolfe. He was also a skilled horticulturist and briefly professor of that subject at Harvard.