September 16, 1823

Francis Parkman Jr. (September 16, 1823 to November 8, 1893) was a 19th century American writer, whose volumes on the history of our country cover the period until 1763.  Here is a graceful introduction to the scholar who wrote "an epic saga of North America’s discovery, exploration, and settlement":

'....Born into the topmost ranks of Bostonian society, Parkman was the son of a prominent Unitarian minister who set him on the conventional path to Harvard (Class of 1844, LL.B. ’46) in order that he be trained in a respectable profession, having observed that the young man showed signs of eccentricity. While still a boy, Parkman had become fascinated with nature. (He later served a year as professor of horticulture at Harvard.) He loved the life of the forest, and in particular the lives of the forest’s people—the American Indians.

'During two summer vacations from college, Parkman and Harvard friends headed for the deep woods of northern New Hampshire and western Maine, camping, canoeing, bushwhacking, hunting, and living among woodsmen and Indians. In that near-wilderness, Parkman was not simply a tourist. As a college sophomore, he had formed a grand ambition: to write the history of the 200-year contest between France and England for dominance in North America, from the earliest voyages of Cartier and Champlain to the final defeat of the French at the Battle of Quebec in 1759. This work inspired and directed his entire life.

'[Before he could] further his long-range plan ...Parkman found himself in need of all the toughness and stoicism he could muster. His health had long been uncertain. He suffered from insomnia and poor digestion, his eyesight sometimes failed for months on end, and an arthritic knee often confined him to a wheelchair. He was also the victim of obscure depressive symptoms, what he called a “whirl in the brain,” a nonspecific anxiety or agitation that made concerted mental work impossible. .... For nearly 20 years—essentially the middle of his life—he was a virtual invalid.

'Even so, Parkman summoned the will and the patience to advance his work. Unable to write, he composed long passages of prose in his head and dictated them to secretaries. He used readers and copyists. He published The Oregon Trail, his famous account of his Western travels and always his best-known book, in 1849.

'Through the 1850s and ’60s, sometimes slowly and painfully, he pushed ahead on his major work, France and England in North America, comprising eight separate books. He thought of it as “the history of the American forest.” When his health permitted, the tireless and super-meticulous researcher traveled to Canada, Florida, Paris (at least three times), and London to consult original documents. Reference materials for one volume ran to 6,000 pages.

'More remarkable than his research, however, was the vitality and color of his writing. His history, for all its scholarship, is never dry. The major figures—the explorers Champlain and, especially, LaSalle; Frontenac, the royal governor of New France in Canada; Braddock, Howe, and Wolfe, the doomed British generals—are brought memorably to life, as are their settings: the dark Canadian wilderness, the vast grasslands of the Plains with their endless herds of buffalo, the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico. Parkman had an ability unsurpassed among writers for putting the reader in the scene.

'Nor was he only a painterly romantic. His passages of straight narrative and of analysis and exposition are invariably lucid and graceful. Much of their energy comes from a pervasive irony related to the contrast between the human actions described and the scale of the continent that is their stage. In LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West, he tells of the explorer’s arrival at the mouth of the Mississippi River and his vainglorious proclamation that half North America was now, henceforth, and forever the property of Louis XIV:

'"On that day, the realm of France received on parchment a stupendous accession. The fertile plains of Texas; the vast basin of the Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of the Gulf; from the woody ridge of the Alleghenies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains—a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts, and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the scepter of the Sultan of Versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile."

'Parkman’s health improved in the 1870s and ’80s. He had been bringing out the main volumes of his history since 1865 and published the final one in 1892. At his death, he was recognized, according to one biographer, as “a great historian, the greatest perhaps who had ever appeared in the country.” ....

We quote from the great man's work, (The Works of Francis Parkman, Volume 3, 1897) his explanation of the Cat Nation. After -- we glance at certain observations about the religion of some tribes: 

'[The indian sacrificed] to the powers he wished to propitiate, whether his guardian spirit, the spirits of animals, or the other beings of his belief. The most common offering was tobacco, thrown in solemnity, a white dog, the mystic animal of many tribes, was tied to the end of an upright pole, as a sacrifice to some superior spirit, or to the sun, with which the superior spirits were constantly confounded by the primitive Indian. In recent times, when
Judaism and Christianity have modified his religious ideas, it has been, and still is, the practice to sacrifice dogs to the Great Spirit. ....

'[...Their] mystic ceremonies, extravagant, puerile, and often disgusting, [were] designed for the cure of the sick or for the general weal of the community. Most of their observances seem originally to have been dictated by dreams, and transmitted as a sacred heritage from generation to generation. They consisted in an endless variety of dances, masqueradings, and nondescript orgies; and a scrupulous adherence to all the traditional forms was held to be of the last moment, as the slightest failure in this respect might entail serious calamities. If children were seen in their play imitating any of these mysteries, they were grimly rebuked and punished. In many tribes secret magical societies existed, and still exist, into which members are initiated with peculiar ceremonies. These associations are greatly respected and feared. They have charms for love, war, and private revenge, and exert a great, and often a very mischievous influence. The societies of the Metai and the Wabeno, among the Northern Algonquins, are conspicuous examples; while other societies of similar character have, for a century, been known to exist among the Dahcotah.'

Such generalizations one assumes applied to most of the Indian tribes. Two of these tribes actually, were called The Nation of the Cat, or Cat Nation. This descriptor applied to the Neutral Nation and the Eries. Below the quotes explain why

.... the forest traveller reached the border villages of the Attiwandarons, or Neutral Nation. As early as 1626, they were visited by the Franciscan friar, La Roche Dallion, who reports a numerous population in twenty-eight towns, besides many small hamlets. Their country, about forty leagues in extent, embraced wide and fertile districts on the north shore of Lake Erie, and their frontier extended eastward across the Niagara, where they had three or four outlying towns. Their name of "Neutrals" was due to their neutrality in the war between the Hurons and the Iroquois proper.

...The Niagara was then called the " River of the Neutrals..." The hostile warriors, meeting in a Neutral cabin, were forced to keep the peace, though, once in the open air, the truce was at an end. Yet this people were abundantly ferocious, and, while holding a pacific attitude betwixt their warring kindred, waged deadly strife with the Mascoutins, an Algonquin horde beyond Lake Michigan. Indeed, it was but recently that they had been at blows with seventeen Algonquin tribes....They burned female prisoners, a practice unknown to the Hurons...Their country was full of game, and they were bold and active hunters. In form and stature they surpassed even the Hurons, whom they resembled in their mode of life, and from whose language their own, though radically similar, was dialectically distinct. Their licentiousness was even more open and shameless; and they stood alone in the extravagance of some of their usages. They kept their dead in their houses till they became insupportable; then scraped the flesh from the bones, and displayed them in rows along the walls, there to remain till the periodical Feast of the Dead, or general burial. In summer, the men wore no clothing whatever, but were usually tattooed from head to foot with powdered charcoal.

'Southward and eastward of Lake Erie dwelt a kindred people, the Eries, or "Nation of the Cat." Little besides their existence is known of them. They seem to have occupied southwestern New York, as far east as the Genesee, the frontier of the Senecas, and in habits and language to have resembled the Hurons. They were noted warriors, fought with poisoned arrows, and were long a terror to the neighboring Iroquois.'

Parkman put the answer to our question, why name a tribe "the nation of the cats," in a footnote:

'* Le Mercier, Relation, 1654, 10. "Nous les appellons la Nation Chat, u cause qu'il y a dans leur pais vne quantite prodigieuse de Chats sauuages." — Ibid. The Iroquois are said to have given the same name, Jegosasa, Cat Nation, to the Neutrals. — Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 41.'

Which is to say, "We call them the Cat Nation, because there is a prodigious quantity of Savage Cats in their own soil."

(There's a story about cats here, with Parkman's putting the answer in a footnote, but that is a different blog post.)