PARKMAN 



4503 



PARKS 



federation, and several of his best books deal 

 with this problem. Among them are Imperial 

 Federation, Round the Empire, and The Great 

 Dominion. His Life of Sir John A. Macdonald, 

 a standard work, reveals occasionally the impe- 

 rend of Dr. Parkin's ideals, as does 

 a later book, The Rhodes Scholarships. 

 II constantly emphasizes, too, that Canada, 

 like other young and flourishing nations, does 

 well to take careful note of its past. It may 

 not be on a grand scale, but it is a foundation 

 whost- significance grows with the lapse of time. 



PARKMAN, FRANCIS (1823-1893), an Ameri- 

 iiistorian, born in Boston. Like all boys, 

 Parkman took delight in stories of the Indians 

 and their conflicts with the early settlers; but. 

 the subject took a deeper hold on him than on 

 most, and while a sophomore in Harvard he 

 formed the purpose of writing a history of the 

 early days of the Frenchmen in America. To 

 get himself as much as possible into the atmos- 

 phere of the period in which he was interested, 

 he camped and canoed, rode horseback and 

 practiced with the rifle until, as one historian 

 says, he became "an adept in woodcraft and a 

 dead shot with the rifle, and could do such 

 thinps with horses, tame or wild, as civilized 

 people never see done except in a circus." 



After his graduation he went to live for some 

 months with the Indians of Dakota, and the 

 hardships he then endured injured his health 

 permanently. He had meantime enlarged his 



plans to include the whole history of the strug- 

 gle between France and Great Britain for domi- 

 nation in North America, and he began with 

 the end, rather than the beginning, of the pe- 

 riod, writing first The Conspiracy of Pontiac. 

 During the composition of this and the other 

 volumes that formed the complete work France 

 and England in the New World, Parkman 

 fought against almost unsurmountable difficul- 

 for his health was such that some days he 

 could not produce more than half a dozen lines, 

 and he was almost blind. By the aid of copy- 

 ists and secretaries, however, he made a most 

 thorough study of all the original sources for 

 the period, visiting Europe five times for ma- 

 terial. 



The volumes of the series, besides the one 

 above named, are Pioneers of France in the 

 New World, The Jesuits in Xorth America, 

 LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West, 

 The Old Regime in Canada, Count Front enac 

 and New France under Louis XIV, Montcalm 

 and Wolfe and A Half -Century of Conflict. 

 Park man's work, based on one of the most in- 

 defatigable and thorough searches ever made, 

 seems to leave nothing for any successor to 

 add, while his style is, without being rhetorical 

 or ornate, so vivid that the scenes he pictures 

 live before his readers, and are more interest- 

 ing than the scenes in a novel. 



Consult Farnham's A Life of Francis Parkman ; 

 \ ick's Francis Parkman. 



THE STORY OP NATIONAL PARKS 



.ARKS, * In OOUntliei nth, r than 



i In- I "nit M! States or Canada few people con- 

 sider scenery as a possession of raltM to a na- 

 tion, unless, as in Switzerland, it attracts 

 money-spending foreign tourists. Hut the two 

 great L- its of North America have rec- 



i. in establishing national parks, that 

 scenery really is valuable, quite apart from all 



rons id -ration of money. It is an intere?' 

 not a significant, fact, thut the most r: 

 races of the earth are also the greatest trn 

 The Ai i Ins "vacation," or the Cana- 



dian on his "holiday," travels if he can, and in M 

 ty of cases he goes where he can be in 

 touch with nature, afterwards r< lurmnn to hi< 

 work refreshed and invigorated. Each year 



