LITMIR.BIZ

       Scouting

      From St. Paul it took Scott three days to make the trip across Minnesota to Dakota Territory, since the train traveled only during the day. In Fargo he borrowed a boat and spent a couple of days hunting ducks and prairie chickens. From Fargo to Bismarck, where the Great Northern Railroad came to an end, was another day’s journey. Scott found Bismarck, mainly board shanties, to be very crude. He was struck there by the thought that “one might go a thousand miles west or travel north to the Arctic Circle with the probability of not seeing a human being.”¹ This was pure fancy on Scott’s part, of course. However remote it might have felt to a young man coming from the East, the region he was entering was not an empty land devoid of people. Quite the contrary, as he was about to discover.

      No doubt Scott received some kind of advice and orientation from those he met at each of his stops on his journey west, though there is no record of what this might have been. Perhaps as important as any counsel he received as he journeyed to take up his first army assignment was the influence of a guide who had accompanied him through West Point, and who, even earlier, had interpreted for him the mysteries and majesties of Indian Country. As he would throughout his life, Scott carried with him a favorite work by the man he called “the great historian of the North,” Francis Parkman. For ten thousand miles, wherever he went on the plains he took with him Parkman’s Conspiracy of Pontiac in his pack basket. Even in the Philippines and Cuba, he reread Parkman’s works “with perennial pleasure.” Before he saw the “wild Missouri” with his own eyes, Parkman’s prose had fired his imagination with an image of that mythic river. “Nowhere,” Scott thought, had it been described so fitly and so beautifully as by Francis Parkman.”² The historian’s descriptions added interest—and meaning—to everything Scott was encountering in the country he had dreamed of since boyhood.

      In fact, though born a generation apart, Scott and Parkman had much in common. Both came from genteel East Coast families in which clergymen figured prominently. Boyhood enthusiasm for the strenuous life out of doors led to unusually ambitious hunting expeditions in the remote West. While still young men, both moved in the social circles of leading scholars and scientists of their day. A generation earlier, also in his early twenties, Parkman’s first foray west had taken him through the frontier posts of New York and Pennsylvania where he sought the historical detail, but above all, the authentic atmosphere of wild America with which to color his early works, such as Conspiracy of Pontiac.³

      As he waited on the banks of the Missouri for the ferry to carry him across the river so that he could take up his post at Fort Abraham Lincoln, Parkman’s prose had predisposed Scott to see in the landscape before him the primitive America he sought. With Parkman as his literary guide, he had in fact been prepared to arrive at the threshold of wild America with “a spirit attuned to understand it and to rejoice in becoming a part of its life.”⁴ For Parkman, and no less for Scott, the destinies of this “savage scenery” and the “savage men” who lived there were intertwined, one and the same. And both were doomed. “The Indian is a true child of the forest and the desert,” wrote Parkman, “The wastes and solitude of Nature are his congenial home, his haughty mind is imbued with the spirit of the wilderness, and civilization sits upon him with a blighting power. His unruly mind and untamed spirit are in harmony with the lonely mountains and cataracts, among which he dwells, and primitive America, with her savage men and savage scenery, present to the imagination a boundless world, unmatched in wild sublimity.”⁵ Besides equipping the younger man with a romantic reading of Indian Country and an epic historical context in which to frame his own experience for the part he would play in its conquest, Parkman served as a kind of guide for Scott in two other important respects as well. His work served as an example of ethnological writing as a way of making sense of the world that mattered to literate men of the East. In addition to conducting his research among the documents he found in French and British archives and even traveling to defeated Richmond in 1865 to take possession of Confederate documents for the Boston Athenaeum, Parkman wrote in a way that conflated the natural historical writing of explorers like Henry Schoolcraft with the literary appeal of writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Fenimore Cooper. At the same time, Parkman was perceptive enough to recognize that politics, not just savage nature, played a role in Indian actions, something that was overlooked in most contemporary accounts of Indian life and warfare.

      More importantly than the impact of Parkman’s prose on the young man’s imagination, Parkman suggested the rudiments of an ethnographic method that the young Scott admired and could emulate. In his preface to Conspiracy of Pontiac, Parkman explained his methodology (and personal predilection) for obtaining knowledge of “primitive life” through what would later come to be regularized by various ethnographically oriented sciences as participant-observation, in which “knowledge of a more practical kind has been supplied by the indulgence of a strong natural taste, which at various intervals, led me to the wild regions of the north and west. Here, by the camp-fire, or in the canoe, I gained acquaintance with the men and scenery of the wilderness. In 1846 I visited various primitive tribes of the Rocky Mountains, and was, for a time, domesticated in a village of the western Dhcotahh, on the high plains between Mount Laramie and the range of the Medicine Bow.”⁶ Entering the region whose scenery had been so romantically rendered by Parkman thirty years earlier, Scott, too, sought out opportunities to visit and “domesticate” himself in Indian villages and scout camps as a way of pursuing an interest in the language and customs of the various tribes among whom he lived and campaigned for the next quarter century. The habits of observation he developed on the plains he later employed as military governor of Sulu and also in Cuba and on the border with Mexico. His own observations of native Americans led him to modify Parkman’s essentialist constructions of primitive men to a degree. Scott’s intimacy with Native Americans complicated the proposition that Indians were fundamentally different from white men. From his close contact and dependence on scouts

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