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SEVEN JOURNEYS IN THE AMERICAN WEST

Transcript from the online video resource visit website

TRAVELS WITH THE OGLALA

(Francis Parkman, 1846)

FRANCIS PARKMAN: “It’s a striking landscape, and strangely beautiful, if only for its vast extent,
its solitude, its wilderness. Here you live by the strength of your arm and the courage of your
heart. And the very shadow of civilization lies a hundred leagues behind you.”

In 1846, a young American writer made a journey into the wilds of Wyoming, in search of the
Plains Indian. His name was Francis Parkman.

FRANCIS PARKMAN: “I was pretty well used to travel; the birch canoe was as familiar to me as a
steamboat. And I was as restless as any young man. But that wasn’t the only reason I undertook
this journey. I wanted to make some inquiries into the character of the remote Indian nations – I’d
been curious about them since childhood – and having failed to satisfy that curiosity by reading, I
resolved to see them for myself.”

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By the 1840s white Americans had settled only the eastern half of the present USA. Parkman had
left „civilization‟ behind him; he‟d crossed into the Great American Wilderness, following the
Oregon Trail, a route taken by early white explorers into the „Wild West‟.

In the foothills of the Rocky Mountains he reached Fort Laramie, then a lonely outpost of the
American Fur Company. Here the traders bought buffalo hides from the local Indian tribes, the
Sioux, the Arapaho, the Shoshone and the Kiowa. Parkman hired a guide here – a French trapper
called Raymond. And leaving the safety of these mud-baked walls, they headed further west,
towards the Laramie Mountains.

FRANCIS PARKMAN: “We passed hill after hill, hollow after hollow, through a country arid,
broken, parched by the sun. At length I heard Raymond shouting; I saw him jump from his mule to
examine some object. I rode up to his side. It was the clear and palpable impression of an Indian
moccasin.”

John Noyes is a historical researcher. Following clues in Parkman‟s book, he‟s retraced his
journey through the Wyoming landscape.

INTERVIEW – JOHN NOYES: “OK, we’re driving towards Laramie Peak, and in the near distance,
where those buffs are, is the Little Medicine Bow River. The Indian village camped somewhere off
to the right. Francis Parkman picked up their trail coming through that blue chain of mountains,
and made his way to the Laramie River, and found the Oglala.”

FRANCIS PARKMAN: “As soon as we saw them they saw us, and several men came forward to
greet us, and the ceremony of shaking hands began. A squaw came out and took our horses. I put
aside the leather nap that covered the low opening of the lodge and I entered the dwelling, and
scarcely were we seated before the place was full of Indians, who’d come crowding in to see us.
The chief, Big Crow, produced his pipe and filled it with a mixture of tobacco and red willow bark,
and round and round it passed, and a squaw placed before us a wooden bowl of boiled buffalo
meat.”

Parkman stayed with the Oglala for four weeks, an honoured guest. And he recorded a culture
unchanged for generations. Like these photographs taken more than twenty years later, he offers
a snapshot of Oglala life.

FRANCIS PARKMAN: “As the whole people is divided into bands, so each band is divided into
villages. Each village has a chief, who is honored and obeyed only so far as his personal qualities
deserve it. Courage and enterprise might raise any warrior to this highest honor.

War is the breath of their nostrils. Against most of the neighboring tribes they cherish a deadly,
rancorous hatred, transmitted from father to son. Many times a year, in every village, the Great
Spirit is called upon, the war parade is celebrated, and the warriors go out by handfuls at a time
against the enemy. Hunting and fighting, they wander incessantly through summer and winter.
Some follow the herds of buffalo over the waste of prairie; others traverse the Black Hills,
emerging at last upon the "Parks", those beautiful but most perilous of hunting grounds.”

The Great Buffalo Hunt was more than an exercise in survival – it was a sacred ritual – as
Parkman himself observed.

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INTERVIEW – JOHN NOYES: “This is where the buffalo hunt took place, on July 20th 1846. The
Oglala, with Francis Parkman, came up this river, the Little Medicine Bow River. The scouts had
gone ahead and found the herd; they surrounded the herd and they were on the opposite slopes
of hills signalling with blankets; they surrounded the herd; and Parkman himself, who was too sick
to stay on horseback, said that he could not resist the excitement of the hunt. His horse had been
bitten by a snake or eaten a poison plant, and yet the horse too was intoxicated by the
excitement.“

FRANCIS PARKMAN: “We were among them in an instant. Amid the trampling and the yells I
could see their dark figures running hither and thither through clouds of dust. There was uproar
and confusion, the buffalo scattering as from a common center, the Indians lashing their horses to
furious speed, and yelling as they launched arrow after arrow into their sides. Here and there
wounded buffalo swayed, and large black carcasses littered the ground.”

In the late summer of 1846, Parkman returned down the Oregon trail, leaving behind his so-called
“savage companions”. He had never fully understood them – they remained in his eyes something
mysterious, something exotic. But what he did understand all too well was the fate that awaited
them.

FRANCIS PARKMAN: “Great changes are at hand in that region. With the stream of emigration to
Oregon and California, the buffalo will dwindle away, and the large wandering communities who
depend on them for support will be broken and scattered. The Indians will soon be corrupted by
the example of the whites, abased by whisky, overawed by military posts. In a few years the
traveler will pass in safety through their country. But its danger and its charm will have
disappeared together.”