slept on the earth without blankets." The result was that his
intense energy carried him beyond his strength, and while his
muscles strengthened and hardened, his sensitive nervous
organization began to give way. It was not merely because he led
an active outdoor life. He himself protests against any such
conclusion, and says that "if any pale student glued to his desk
here seek an apology for a way of life whose natural fruit is
that pallid and emasculate scholarship, of which New England has
had too many examples, it will be far better that this sketch had
not been written. For the student there is, in its season, no
better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the
rifle or the oar."

The evil that was done was due to Parkman's highly irritable
organism, which spurred him to excess in everything he undertook.
The first special sign of the mischief he was doing to himself
and his health appeared in a weakness of sight. It was essential
to his plan of historical work to study not only books and
records but Indian life from the inside. Therefore, having
graduated from college and the law-school, he felt that the time
had come for this investigation, which would enable him to gather
material for his history and at the same time to rest his eyes.
He went to the Rocky Mountains, and after great hardships, living
in the saddle, as he said, with weakness and pain, he joined a
band of Ogallalla Indians. With them he remained despite his
physical suffering, and from them he learned, as he could not
have learned in any other way, what Indian life really was.

The immediate result of the journey was his first book, instinct
with the freshness and wildness of the mountains and the