Francis Parkman recorded his travels through the Berkshires as young man while researching what would become a seven-volume history of Colonial America. The youthful historian had an eye for the scenery, and for the ladies.
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The swell of populace in these hills in the summer season has come to be regarded as the normal state of affairs for near to 2 1/2 centuries, since the first inns and lodging taverns went up along the early stagecoach roads in towns like Savoy and Sandisfield.
In addition to the obvious economic benefits, the region has made even more significant intangible gains from this flow of pilgrimage; fine yields of literature, art, and other cultural and social capital have been harvested from seasonal resident and passing traveler alike. In assessing the life of this region, much of value is to be found in the view of the visitor.
This would seem especially so when the visitor is a historian, as in the case of Francis Parkman, who toured the Berkshires extensively in the summer of 1844.
Parkman — who would come to be celebrated as one of the most important literary historians of the 19th century, albeit a controversial one — was 21 at the time, and just graduated from Harvard. The son of a distinguished Boston family, he had previously only passed through the Berkshires on a train ride to Albany in July 1842. His first impression is preserved in his journal.
"High mountains began to rise around us," he writes. "We dashed by them; dodged under their cliffs; whirled around their bases; only seeing so much as to make us wish to see more."
At the time, he was on a research mission to Lake George, where he continued to explore the history of French, English, and Native American interaction in Colonial-era America that had sparked his passion during his second year at Harvard. It was unlikely subject matter for the scion of an old money family, at a time when academic men of affluent background tended to dabble in ancient history, or the study of the Spanish Empire that was very much en vogue at the time of Parkman's education. The study of woodland wars and alliances with "savages" was considered vaguely ungentlemanly, and Parkman's family still anxiously hoped he would abandon his pursuit.
His eventual seven-volume work on France and England in North America was long considered the definitive work on this period of early American history, and despite historical biases of his times, is still widely regarded as an important source as well as a key example of literary historical writing.
It was in search of information about this subject that Parkman visited the Berkshires, though the list of personal belongings he gives in his journal for the trip suggest he packed with the intent of spending some time on those mountains he'd seen from the train window two summers before. A knapsack with "three shirts, two stockings, flannel drawers, fishing apparatus, powder and shot," and a copy of David Dudley Field's "History of Berkshire" comprised his baggage for the excursion.
Other passages from his journal suggest that other things besides history and nature hiking also occupied the 21-year-old's attention during his tour. Following a bumpy coach ride through Hampshire County, Parkman notes his first on-the-ground impressions of Berkshire in an entry that borders on too much information.
"Lee is full of factory girls. The very devil beset me there," Parkman jotted. "I never suffered so from certain longings which I resolve not to gratify, and which got me into such a nervous state that I scarcely slept all night."
He notes being similarly distracted by a pretty girl he encountered on the road to Monument Mountain, from which he proceeds to explore Mount Washington and Bash Bish Falls, recalling the latter fondly in his notes.
Between all of the bedevilment, Parkman did manage to get some work done. In Stockbridge, he interviewed 85-year-old Agrippa Hull, former aide to Tadeus Kościuszko and the town's oldest surviving Revolutionary War veteran.
"He was very philosophical, and every remark carried the old patriarch into lengthy orations on virtue and temperance," remembered Parkman.
Also while in Stockbridge he met with 93-year-old Dr. Oliver Partridge, whose father had been a decorated colonel during the French and Indian Wars. A colorful scholar and physician, Partridge regaled him with a barrage of tales that Parkman found "rather doubtful."
Moving into North Berkshire, Parkman traced the site of Fort Massachusetts, and sat down with Captain Edmund Badger, whose own legendary exploits searching for gold in the Berkshires we will leave for another day.
While in North Adams he takes note of two more local women he met along the road, who decidedly did not strike his fancy.
"One of them was a mixture of all the mean qualities of her sex, with none of the nobler. She was full of the pettiest envy, spite, jealousy, and malice, singularly impudent and indelicate."
With greater fondness he recalls a rough countrywoman living near Mount Greylock, Mrs. Comstock, who upon seeing his expensive clothes and gentlemanly appearance apologized profusely for being in bare feet.
His description of The Hopper is as apt and accurate as that put down by any Berkshire native of his era.
"A great mountain rises before me, covered with trees — birch, beech and fir; and near the top and down its sides light vapors are resting among the tree tops — now sinking below them, now rising up and obscuring them; sometimes a line of firs will be relieved against the white cloud, turning nearly black by the contrast. A ridge beyond is black with firs, with a few light green birches dotted among them, and a rough, bare avalanche slide. They are stiff and erect all along the top of the ridge.
"The stream makes a loud noise below. The hillside where I sit is scattered with the remnants of large pines — lying with their branches tangled and twisted together — and numberless dead ones stand erect, burnt about the roots by fire. The living pines above raise their arms out toward the light — opposite the declivity they stand on. The little brown wren hopping among the pine trees."
With this account his observations of the Berkshire Hills essentially draws to a close, as Parkman moves on to upstate New York to observe the brewing Anti-Renter War at an event in Canaan, N.Y.
Gleanings from his Berkshire trip later inform "A Half Century of Conflict," the sixth volume of his French and English colonial history.
He ultimately succumbed to certain longings five years later, marrying Catherine Scollay Bigelow in 1851.
Sagas of the Shire is born out of an attempt to break new ground, or at least break out of a certain habitual mold of local history storytelling. While the Berkshires have enjoyed many great historians and much outstanding historical writing, it is my belief that there is a great deal that may have fallen by the wayside in its attempt to hammer out a unified narrative in its vision (and marketing) of itself.
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Francis Parkman recorded his travels through the Berkshires as young man while researching what would become a seven-volume history of Colonial America. The youthful historian had an eye for the scenery, and for the ladies.
