Francis Parkman was the first scholar to take the colonial frontier seriously as a subject, and his multivolume history, France and England in North America (1865-1892), shaped the conventions for writing colonial, frontier, and Native American history until World War II. His writing illustrated the continuity between Americas attempt to subdue the area west of the Mississippi and England's efforts at taming the American continent east of the Mississippi a century earlier. The ingenuity, toughness, and fortitude of the California migrants Parkman observed were manifested in his characters. The reaction of the peoples of the Plains to the migrants passing through their land had already been played out in Pontiac's Rebellion. Parkman's focus on the environment set the tone for western scholarship in the years to come. Nature forced his characters to adapt, survive, triumph, or fail. His strength as a writer lay in his ability to convey...