Synopsis
Francis Parkman, Jr. (September 16, 1823 - November 8, 1893) was an American historian, best known as author of The Oregon Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and his monumental seven-volume France and England in North America. These works are still valued as historical sources and as literature. He was also a leading horticulturist, briefly a professor of Horticulture at Harvard University and author of several books on the topic. Parkman was a trustee of the Boston Athenaeum from 1858 until his death in 1893 Rene-Robert Cavelier de La Salle (1643-1687), one of the most legendary explorers of the New World, is best known for claiming the entire Louisiana Territory for France in 1682. Two years later, he was given the order to colonize and govern the great expanse of territory between Lake Michigan and the Gulf of Mexico. He set out from France with four ships but never reached his destination. Landing somewhere in East Texas, he and his men were ravaged by disease, weakened by hard labor, even gored by buffalo as they tried to locate the mouth of the Mississippi River, which was obscured by the sandy sameness of the Gulf coastline. In 1687, on a third attempt to locate the river by an overland route, La Salle was murdered by his own men in the desolate country between the Trinity and Brazos rivers. His body was never found. First published in 1869, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West is the vivid, richly detailed story of that final grim expedition, told by America's foremost historian."
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La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West
Published by
Signet/New American Library, 1963
ISBN 10: 0451501659
ISBN 13: 9780451501653
Used
paperback
First Edition
Seller: zenosbooks, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A.
Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars
paperback. Condition: Very Good in Wrappers. No Jacket. First Edition. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 1st Printing of This Signet Classic Edition. Very Good in Wrappers. 0451501659. Foreword By John A. Hawgood. 352 pages. paperback. CT165. keywords: Signet Classic Paperback America History Literature 19th Century. DESCRIPTION - The heroic figure of Cavelier de La Salle and the epic scope of his achievements dominate this classic history of conquest and conflict in the New World. His is the leading role in a drama of Homeric proportions, set against the backdrop of a vast and savage wilderness: a network of lakes, rivers, and valleys stretching from New France to the Gulf of Mexico, shaping a dream of French empire and glory. Parkman's description of this untamed land is justly famous; but equally memorable is his vivid delineation of the indomitable explorer whose iron will and fierce pride led him both to triumph and to tragic death - struck clown by the forces of intrigue and avarice he so fiercely scorned. The reader is plunged into the living stream of the past in a saga not only of man against nature but also of man against man; he then emerges with the sense of intensely felt experience, which is the mark of history raised to the level of art. Samuel Eliot Morison called Francis Parkman 'one of the greatest - if not the greatest - historians that the New World has produced.' Frederick Jackson Turner also cited Parkman as 'a great historian' and noted that 'his work will live on because he was even greater as an artist.' inventory #33631. Seller Inventory # z33631