Exercising sympathetic imagination means withholding judgment, extending charity, allowing – either by stepping forward or by not retreating – the gap that separates us from others to close at least a little bit. Sympathetic imagination, for me, is the ability to put oneself in another person’s place, to imaginatively enter into someone else’s mind and perspective. In my little book reviews I’m always coming back to this idea of sympathetic imagination. I'd had some of the same difficulty with Osborne Russell's contemporary account Journal Of A Trapper: Nine Years in the Rocky Mountains, 1834-1843 that I read a few weeks ago, but, I think, there are still reasons to read it. While there are some observations of immigrants on the Oregon Trail and descriptions of nature (translated especially as the hunting of buffalo), there are many many long-winded descriptions of treacherous, motley, ugly snake-eyed squalid uncouth brutish savages with their 'strange, unbridled impulses.' The hordes of Indians pass in front of Parkman's eyes as 'agents or villainy' or as a diseased scourge on land that they seem to have no right to occupy. He called this 'an admirable state of mind.' However, given Parkman's biases, how can anything he wrote about Indians be trusted? I was astonished when he described the decent behavior of some Indians, but put it to the fact that they had been threatened with extermination. I know this is considered an important historical work, but it was difficult to appreciate much about this account.

The blight Parkman speaks of has nothing to do with how American Indians were killed or pushed off their land.

This quote about the 'sons of civilization' reflects the tone in Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail. 'The sons of civilization, drawn by the fascinations of a fresher and bolder life, thronged to the western in multitudes which blighted the charm that had lured them.'

The oregon trail 4th edition review