Voto even at this distance, I can say that most of the physical geography,
the popular science, and the military, emigrant, fur-trade, and Native
American identifications, biographies, and history still hold up. Park-
man's own letters and journals from 1846 remain always the first source
for what he saw and felt in that year of his own and America's decision.
There are, however, some details I might have further clarified or gotten
right in the first place: I misplaced the mouth of the Colorado River; Des-
lauriers' "charette" might have been different in make and purpose from
what I thought was a "Red River Cart" (though Remington's illustrations
looked that way); and someone named or dit "Lee Bontee the guide" was
killed at the Fetterman Fight in 1866.

Parkman scholarship has always been an active and expansive en-
deavor; I'm glad to recommend three or four exceptional titles out of the
ten or fifteen recent studies in Parkman biography and western history, a
field as constantly interesting and generous as the scholars engaged in it.
For Parkman himself, Wilbur R. Jacobs' Francis Parkman, Historian as
Hero: The Formative Years ( 1991) and Robert L. Gale Francis Park-
man ( 1974) present a strenuous advocacy for the historian's greatness. Of
more general and cross-disciplinary or cross-cultural studies, Roderick Nash's
Wilderness and the American Mind ( 1982) and Robert C. Vitzthum's
The American Compromise: Theme and Method in the Histories
of Bancroft, Parkman and Adams ( 1974) are exceptionally useful. I wish
I had had all of them twenty-five years ago.

--This again looks to Mark, Ellen, Barbara.

E. N. Feltskog
Madison, Wisconsin
April 1994

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