The Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail put an end to the sentimentalized portrait of pioneer travel. Altering the course of American history and shaping early views of Native Americans, Parkman denounced the image of the Noble Savage found in such popular works as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha.Parkman had traveled to a village of the Oglala tribe after graduating from Harvard Law School, and The Oregon Trail is a result of the notes he took along the newly-developed roads to the West. Full of “true wild-game flavor,” as Herman Melville (Moby Dick) put it, the work first appeared as a serial in and was revised at least four times before its final book form. Today it remains a critical work of the Conestoga wagon generation.