The Importance of the Oregon Trail

Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail of 1849 is justly regarded as a particularly detailed, if highly selective, account of life "on the frontier." But what frontier is Parkman, the narrating "I" in this text, actually exploring? This narrative can be read, in its obsessions and its evasions, as one of the best examples of the male Anglo-American ego confronting an environment that threatens to break it apart, but that also gives it a space in which to act out its masculinity. (Jehlen, 7) The "I" here wants both to gain "strength" from a masculinized landscape defined ...