Parkman's famous ride in 1846, with a handful of companions, took him westwards from Missouri to Fort Laramie in Wyoming, from where he, returned by the Santa Fe trail through Colorado and Kansas.
It was a dangerous journey, beset with hostile Indians, deserts, badmen, storms and snowfalls, and the constant risk of going without food and water. On the way he shot numerous buffalo, narrowly avoided parties of raiding Redskins, and met people of all sorts ranging from "fanatic" Mormons to bands of newly enlisted men going to fight in Mexico. Parkman was a professional historian, and he writes coolly and "descriptively" of the Great Plains and the rawness of life on the frontier - a first hand chronicle of a largely vanished world.