In the spring of 1848 he began to write the "History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac." He did this partly because he felt that to have a strong purpose, and to keep his mind occupied, would help him partly to forget his troubles. In view of his condition it was a great task to attempt. His eyes were so extremely weak that he could not write his own name except by closing them. His brain would not permit him to work for more than a few minutes at a time. Every effort he made cost him a good deal of pain. He caused a wooden frame to be constructed of the same size and shape as a sheet of paper. Stout wires were fixed horizontally across it, half an inch apart, and a movable back of thick pasteboard fitted behind them. The paper for writing was placed between the pasteboard and the wires, guided by which, and using a black lead crayon, he could write fairly well with closed eyes. He made notes for his book with eyes closed, and these were afterwards read to him until they had become thoroughly fixed in his memory. But under such terrible handicaps did he work, that for a year and a half he only averaged six lines of writing each day. The fact that he could not use his eyes in writing made his work very slow indeed. He had to depend upon the eyes of others. Often he would go to a public library with some educated person and for hours listen to passages from books which were likely to help him. If he had been well he could have seen at a glance what books were worth spending his time over. As it was he had to listen to a great many unimportant and tedious details. Even when he was fairly well his condition was such that he could not listen to any person reading for more than an hour or two each day and that with frequent intervals of rest. It was all painfully slow and tedious work and it is not hard to believe what he wrote in the following words: "Taking the last forty years as a whole, the capacity for literary work which during that time has fallen to my share has, I am confident, been considerably less than a fourth part of what it would have been under normal conditions." In 1851 Francis Parkman published "The Conspiracy of Pontiac" in two volumes. Fourteen years later he published "The Pioneers of France in the New World". Then followed, "The Jesuits in North America", "LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West", "The Old Regime", "Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV", "Montcalm and Wolfe" and "A Half Century of Conflict".