Francis Parkman · 1849 · overland

Francis Parkman's 1849 account of a summer on the plains. A sickly young Boston Brahmin went west in 1846 to see the Sioux before the emigrant wagons changed everything, rode with a hunting band for weeks, and wrote the book half-blind from illness - the last first-hand description of the plains as they were about to stop being.

1. 1
   St Louis

   Parkman, twenty-three, half-blind and in poor health, outfits at St Louis with his cousin Quincy Shaw - the jumping-off place for everything going west, and full of traders, emigrants and men who have already been.

2. 2
   Westport

   At Westport on the Missouri the wagons form up for Oregon and California, and Parkman falls in with a party of hunters and mules - watching the emigration he is riding alongside with a distinctly Bostonian eye.

3. 3
   Fort Laramie

   Fort Laramie is the trading post where the plains business is done, crowded with Sioux lodges, traders and emigrants resupplying - and where Parkman arranges to travel on with an Oglala band rather than with his own people.

4. 4
   The Black Hills

   He rides for weeks with the Oglala into the Black Hills, living on buffalo, sleeping in lodges and joining a war party - so ill by then that he could barely sit a horse, and recording the whole thing in a notebook.

5. 5
   Pueblo

   The return runs south by the Arkansas to Pueblo and Bent's Fort, through country already filling with soldiers for the Mexican war - and Parkman goes home to write it out while going blind.