Books: Strenuous Historian

THE JOURNALS OF FRANCIS PARKMAN (718 pp.)—Edited by Mason Wade—Harper ($10).

According to a Harvard classmate, Historian Francis Parkman suffered from "Injuns on the brain." Even on a tour of Switzerland, he sat on a rock "fancying myself again in the American woods with an Indian companion." His ailment, if such it was, gave strength and color to some of the most readable history written by any U.S. scholar (The Oregon Trail, The Conspiracy of Pontiac). Parkman was born a Boston Brahmin, but spent much of his life covering, on foot and on horseback, the wild Western ground he was to write...