The first three chapters of this project will interrogate the work of Francis Parkman in relation to his use of geography. More specifically, chapter one describes Parkman‘s
methodology in relation to earlier generations of American historians and his contemporaries. Further, chapter one traces the emergence of his unique brand of romantic historicism and chronicles important influences. Parkman‘s method marks a decisive shift in the development of American historiography and is therefore the starting point for my analysis. In Parkman‘s historiographic method, space is not merely the theater in which history unfolds, but the very essence of historical memory and historiographic methodology. For Parkman, space is sensed and experienced by his historical characters and therefore an essential component of historical experience and its representation. The spaces Parkman conceived are therefore more than representations of past geographical locations; they are highly condensed metaphors that reveal valuable insights into the American historical consciousness of the nineteenth century and the methods a historian like Parkman used to construct it.
Chapter two analyzes Parkman‘s first major work: The Oregon Trail. In my discussion of
the text I interrogate how Parkman‘s account of his trip to the far West reconstructs the Oregon Trail as a historiographic counter-space. Parkman‘s text, I argue, describes forts and trading posts along the trail as sites of cross-cultural interaction and markers of geographical conquest. The text, the chapter suggests, creates utopian and dystopian geographies that are employed by Parkman to critically examine American westward settlement (such as the Great American Desert, the Ogillallah Village, and Fort Laramie). Further, the chapter interrogates Parkman‘s description of the far western frontier as a testing ground for American virtues and breeding ground for a new American identity. Characters such as Henry Chatillon and other mountain
men and frontier trappers are evoked by Parkman as trans-historical heroes that symbolize American imperial power. Finally, the chapter scrutinizes Parkman‘s ambivalent description of Native American tribes and villages.
Chapter three analyzes Parkman‘s Montcalm and Wolfe, arguably his greatest work and the center piece of his seven volume series France and England in North America. The text explains
American history and American consciousness as intrinsically related to the violent struggle between France and England for domination in the New World. As an antagonistic history,
Montcalm and Wolfe chronicles the clash between the two empires in the transnational border
spaces and primordial forests of New France. My discussion of Montcalm and Wolfe
interrogates, following the same structure as in chapter two, Parkman‘s employment of
geographical and mental spaces as historiographical tools. Thereby, I am specifically interested in his conceptualization of wilderness fortifications as markers of spatial control and sites of economic and cultural interaction between colonizers and colonized. In addition, the chapter discusses Parkman‘s description of the French-English border as a site of trans-cultural exchange and the important role border raids and other forms of partisan warfare played in the conflict. Finally, the chapter also examines Parkman‘s depiction of historical characters (including both French and British combatants as well as Native Americans) under special consideration of future American heroes (George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Rob Rogers).
Chapters four and the afterword of the dissertation trace the postmodern continuation, deconstruction, and contention of the spatial histories I have identified in Parkman‘s work. Chapter four focuses on Thomas King‘s novel Truth and Bright and Water and begins with a
discussion of the changing significance of the U.S.-Canadian border over the course of the last two hundred years. Chapter four further focuses on tracing the continuation of Parkmanian
themes in contemporary Native American fiction, but, more importantly, chronicles the ways in which King‘s text uses the American landscape to challenge Anglo-American hegemony and historical master-narratives. Chapter four will therefore specifically focus on three models of space that King‘s text employs to interrogate postmodern Native American identity: heterotopian spaces of separation, simulated spaces, and sacred geographies. While Parkman‘s representations of Native Americans emphasized the transformation of indigenous cultures through the presence of trading posts and forts along the Oregon Trail, thereby chronicling the assimilation of
indigenous customs and cultures by an ever-expanding Anglo-American cultural dominant, the counter-geographies of Truth and Bright Water attempt to re-appropriate sacred Blackfoot sites
as well as discover new ways to narrate the American experience. Chapter four thus investigates how postmodern Native American writers replace the geography of cultural destruction of the nineteenth century with spaces of cultural affirmation such as heterotopias and sacred
geographies. My discussion of King‘s fiction is especially informed by the theories of Gerald Vizenor. Vizenor‘s writing seems especially appropriate for this chapter because texts like The
Heirs of Columbus and Manifest Manners not only focus on debunking the myths of alleged
liberation of Native American culture in casinos and reservations, but also aims at populating American historical memory with formerly excluded protagonists.
Finally, the afterword will be dedicated to William T. Vollmann‘s novel Fathers and Crows
within the context of his Seven Dreams: A Book of American Landscapes series and
simultaneously serve as a conclusion to this dissertation. Interestingly, both Vollmann‘s 1992 novel and Francis Parkman‘s Montcalm and Wolfe mark the center piece of a seven volume series on the history, geography, and population of North America. Similarly, Vollmann‘s and Parkman‘s work focus on the bloody struggle for dominance on the American continent while
extracting the tragic element from the clash of their protagonists. However, whereas Parkman‘s romantic history of North America focuses on the inevitable clash between two colonial powers who equally claim North America for their respective crown, Vollmann concentrates on the colonial onslaught‘s impact on Native American culture. Vollmann‘s postmodern history of New France reverses Parkman‘s epic encounter of representative men and turns the progressive determinism of his predecessor into a trans-historical mosaic of peripheral voices. Thereby,
Fathers and Crows refashions Parkman‘s New France, the ancestral birthplace of American
revolutionary virtues, as a space of violent tyranny and colonial oppression. In my discussion of the novel I will specifically emphasize Vollmann‘s reconfiguration of Canadian geographies (for Parkman New France was defined by its forests, for Vollmann Canada is marked by its
waterways) as well as his attempt to construct a postmodern counter-narrative of New France. Further I will show how Vollmann‘s ―symbolic history‖ (Fathers and Crows 939) sets up textual heterotopias that thoroughly reconfigure our understanding of American space and history by supplementing, or even replacing, the principle performers of established historical texts with a host of formerly marginalized characters and events.
CHAPTER 1: FRANCIS PARKMAN AND THE WRITING OF AMERICA’S