Chapter 6 Slow and Long History: Geology and the Idea of History in Nineteenth-Century America

1 Historical Associations, the “Retarding” Text, and Nature’s Longue Durée

Francis Parkman once professed himself a historian of American forest, but he was a historian of American rock as well. As a historian of American forest, he took advantage of a soaring panoramic view that encompassed the vast sylvan expanse and made its history abstract by laying it onto a flat, static surface; and, as a historian of American rock, his viewpoint dove down to individual local episodes, which he most typically imagined as the subterranean memo- ries of the soil. The former project decontextualized America out of historical vicissitudes, while the latter recontextualized it into the physical realities of the continent. Parkman’s writing shuttled back and forth between the two contrasting historiographical viewpoints, and this alternate switch in perspec- tive best characterized the style of his history of the North American colonial struggle.1 Panorama was only half the story, in other words. After enjoying a grand, sweeping vision of American history, then, the reader might well accept Park- man’s invitation into the dense descriptive thicket of local episodes. As a re- viewer of the revised 1870 edition of The Conspiracy of Pontiac rightly pointed out, Parkman’s history was like an imaginary journey through historic sites,

1 Regarding Parkman’s literary style, both contemporary reviewers and modern critics have pointed out its descriptive detailedness. See, for example, “Parkman’s History of Pontiac’s War,” The North American Review 73 (October 1851): 495–529; William Dean Howells, “Mr. Parkman’s Histories,” Monthly 34 (November 1874): 602–10; “Mr. Parkman’s Montcalm and Wolfe,” The Atlantic Monthly 55 (February 1885): 265–70; , “Francis Parkman,” The Century Magazine: A Popular Quarterly 45 (November 1892): 44–45; John Fisk, “Introductory Essay” to The Works of Francis Parkman, vol. 1 (1897; , Lit- tle, Brown, and Company, 1910), xi–xli; and Richard C. Vitzthum, Compromise: Theme and Method in the Histories of Bancroft, Parkman, and Adams (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974). The best discussion on Parkman’s panoramic representation is Otis A. Pease’s Parkman’s History: The Historian as Literary Artist (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni- versity Press, 1953). Howard Doughty labels Parkman’s descriptive vividness as that of the “kinesthetic” composition. See Doughty, Francis Parkman (1962; Cambridge, MA: Press, 1983), 97–98, 156, 165, 187 and 245 specifically.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004424319_008 142 Chapter 6 and he was an experienced historic tour guide “who is not only perfectly famil- iar with the way, but has no disposition to romance any of its features.”2 With many other traveler figures roving in his textual fields, the chief commanding traveler was the author himself, who ushered his reader into the innermost views of the forest of American history. And what the reader beheld on this guided tour was a variety of historical associations buried in the land. Following the course of Baron Dieskau’s raid on the British troops in the Battle of Lake George (1755), for example, Parkman was scrupulous enough to refer to the “dark associations” of the site that the tourist/reader could not afford to miss.

This memorable conflict has cast its dark associations over one of the most beautiful spots in America. Near the scene of the evening fight, a pool, half overgrown by weeds and water lilies, and darkened by the surrounding forest, is pointed out to the tourist, and he is told that be- neath its stagnant waters lie the bones of three hundred Frenchmen, deep buried in mud and slime. (CP, 440)

As he escorted the reader through his textual tour, Parkman showed how each place had its own historical associations, like those of memorable battles and sieges. His mission in history writing was to guide the reader around the Amer- ican land and excavate and awaken the long-lost memories of place. When he recounted an expedition of the French colonial troops, he never failed to men- tion their ceremonies of nailing the fleur-de-lis plates along the way, and even went on to sketch how one of those plates was unearthed later by “a party of boys, bathing in the river,” who “melted half of it into bullets,” and how what remained changed hands and came finally under the care of the American An- tiquarian Society (MW, 877–78). These local particularities were lost as soon as Parkman’s viewpoint flew up to panoramic abstraction, but a few passages later, his description reverted yet again to the miscellaneous episodes of ver- nacular historical associations. While his panoramic representation provided

2 “Recent Literature,” The Atlantic Monthly 27 (April 1871): 522–23. Parkman actually wrote a historic guidebook later in his career, Historic Handbook of the Northern Tour (1885). The book was, he declared in its preamble, “a group of narratives of the most striking events of our colonial history connected with the principal points of interest to the tourist visiting Canada and the northern borders of the United States.” See Parkman, Historic Handbook of the Northern Tour: Lakes George and Champlain, Niagara, Montreal, Quebec (1885; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1899), vii.