Francis Parkman is best remembered for The California and Oregon Trail: Being Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life (1849), a lively account of his adventures with Indians, pioneers, and buffalo in the Wild West of the 1840s. But he was no rugged frontiersman. He lived almost all of his life in Boston, the hub of New England culture, and his literary work reflects this intellectual milieu. He was imbued early with the attitude that colors all his writings: that white men (not women; he was opposed to woman suffrage) of good birth and good breeding have the only qualities that matter. While this outlook appears embarrassingly bigoted from a present-day standpoint, his wealth and social position made it possible for him to travel in the United States and abroad, to acquire the education that gave polish to his literary style, to procure copies of documents necessary to his...