Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/373

Rh and all heavy supplies were to be received, lay the carrying-place around the Falls of Niagara, — the most rough and dangerous of all portages, in which was the trap well called “the Devil's Hole.” While all supplies had to be carried in hand or on packs over this interval of precipices and maddened waters, the batteaux and the armed vessels for the lakes had to be constructed above it to receive the freight.

It is to this harrowing period of our colonial warfare with the savages, after the conquest of Canada and before our Revolutionary struggle, that Mr. Parkman devotes his marvellously skilful pen, in his “Conspiracy of Pontiac.” Though the theme of this work, wrought with such graphic power in its absorbing interest, properly closes the history of New France, in his series of volumes it was the first to be given to the public; and the author has since, in successive publications, been dealing with the periods and incidents preceding it. It was this, his first historical publication, that engaged for the author the highest appreciation of his readers, as one who had been long looked and waited for as competent, gifted, and inclined to give to the most characteristic and thrilling themes and scenes of our history a treatment worthy of their grand materials and actors. The wilderness opens its depths, its grandeur, its solitudes, and all its phenomena of scenery and adventure to his eye and thought, to his rare genius of description and interpretation. His delineation of the “Indian Summer” at Detroit is more a painting than a piece of writing. His portraiture of the savage on the war-path — in his fierceness and rage, in his weapons of hand and passion, in his weak as well as his strong qualities, in his inconstancy as in his resolve — is the most faithful that has ever been drawn in all literature. His relation of sieges, ambushes, stratagems, and fights, his details of the vigils of the imperilled in garrisons and in lonely cabins, and of the desolations and woes of victims amid scenes of horror, are relieved of actual