James Fenimore Cooper: The Last ofthe Mohicans

Legend of a very different kind was the work of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851). If any single person was the creator of the myth of the American West, and all its spellbinding contradictions, then Cooper was. But he was far more than that. He was the founding father of the American historical novel, exploring the conflicts of American society in a time of profound change. He also helped to develop and popularize such widely diverse literary forms as the sea novel, the novel of manners, political satire and allegory, and the dynastic novel in which over several generations American social practices and principles are subjected to rigorous dramatic analysis. And Cooper did not begin writing and publishing until his thirties. Before that, he had served at sea, then left to marry and settle as a country gentleman in New York State. His first novel, Precaution (1820), was in fact written after his wife challenged his claim that he could write a better book than the English novel he was reading to her. A conventional novel of manners set in genteel English society, this was followed by a far better work, The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821). Set in Revolutionary New York State, on the “neutral ground” of Westchester County, its hero is Harvey Birch, who is supposed to be a Loyalist spy but is secretly in the service of General Washington. Birch is faithful to the Revolutionary cause but a convoluted plot reveals his emotional ties to some of the Loyalists. What the reader is presented with here, in short, is a character prototype that Cooper had learned from Sir Walter Scott and was to use in later fiction, most notably in his portrait of Natty Bumppo, the hero of the Leatherstocking novels. The hero is himself a “neutral ground” to the extent that he, his actions and allegiances, provide an opportunity for opposing social forces to be brought into a human relationship with one another. The moral landscape he negotiates is a place of crisis and collision; and that crisis and collision are expressed in personal as well as social terms, as a function of character as well as event. The Spy was an immediate success. One reviewer hailed Cooper as “the first who has deserved the appellation of a distinguished American novel writer.” And it was followed, just two years later, by the first of the five Leatherstocking Tales, The Pioneers (1823). Set in 1793 in Otsego County in the recently settled region of New York State, The Pioneers introduces the reader to the ageing figure of Natty Bumppo, known here as Leatherstocking. The reader also meets Chingachgook, the friend and comrade of Natty from the Mohican tribe; and, in the course of the story, Chingachgook dies despite Natty’s efforts to save him. The other four Leatherstocking Tales came over the next eighteen years. The Last of the Mohicans (1826) presents Bumppo, here called Hawkeye, in his maturity and is set in 1757 during the Seven Years’ War between the French and the British. In The Prairie (1827), Bumppo, known simply as the trapper, has joined the westward movement; he is now in his eighties and, at the end of the novel, he dies. The Pathfinder (1840) is set soon after The Last of the Mohicans, in the same conflict between the French and Indians and the British colonials. Here, Bumppo is tempted to think of marriage. But, when he learns that the woman in question loves another, he nobly accepts that he cannot have her. Like the many Western heroes for which he was later to serve as prototype, he recognizes that, as he puts it, it is not according to his “gifts” to love and to marry. The last novel to be written, The Deerslayer (1841), is, in fact, the first novel in chronological order of events. It takes the reader Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 49 back to upstate New York in the 1740s. A young man here, Natty Bumppo begins the action known as Deerslayer. In the course of the story, though, he kills an Indian in a fight that approaches the status of ritual; and, before he dies, the man he has killed gives him a new name, Hawkeye. So the series ends with the initiation of its hero into manhood. It does not quite begin with his death; nevertheless, there is clearly a regressive tendency at work here. The Leatherstocking Tales, as a whole, move back in time, back further into the American past and the youth and innocence of the hero. As they do so, they move ever further away from civilization, in terms of setting and subject, and ever further away from social realism, in terms of approach. At work here, in short, is an Edenic impulse common in American writing that drives the imagination out of the literal and into romance and myth – and out of a world where the individual is defined in relation to society and into one where he or she is more likely to be situated outside it. As the conception of him alters over the course of the five Leatherstocking Tales, Natty Bumppo gravitates more and more towards the condition of an American Adam: in his comradeship with another man, his virginity, as much as in his reliance on action and instinct rather than thought and reasoning – and in his indebtedness, too, not to education or convention but to natural wisdom and natural morality. Natty Bumppo is more than just an American Adam, however, as his recollection of earlier figures set on “neutral ground” suggests, as well as his anticipation of later Western heroes. And the Leatherstocking Tales are far more than types of the American pastoral, resituating Eden somewhere in the mythic past of the country. They are densely textured historical narratives using contrasts and conflicts both within and between characters to explore the national destiny. The Prairie illustrates this. The characteristically convoluted plot involves a series of daring adventures, raids, and rescues, during the course of which Bumppo saves his companions from both a prairie fire and a buffalo stampede. Woven through that plot is a close examination of human nature and its implications for human society. The original inhabitants of America, for example, are taken as instances of natural man but, the reader soon discovers, the instances are ambiguous. On the one hand, there are the Pawnees, who are “strikingly noble,” their “fine stature and admirable proportions” being an outward and visible sign of their possession of such “Roman” virtues as dignity, decorum, and courage. On the other, there are the Sioux, a race who resemble “demons rather than men” and whose frightening appearance is matched only by their treachery and savagery. Nature, in turn, is represented variously, as benevolent, the source of Natty’s natural wisdom (“Tis an eddication!” he is wont to declare, while gazing at his surroundings), and the scene of a desperate internecine battle that reinforces the account of Indians as both Rousseauistic noble savages and imps of the devil. The issue of whether human beings are good, originally innocent, or evil, steeped in original sin, is sounded here. So is the issue of whether America is an Eden or a wilderness. And both those issues, Cooper realized and intimates, feed into the question of what kind of society was needed, particularly in the New World. This was a question fundamental to the infant republic, and The Prairie offers a fascinatingly ambivalent answer. At his best, as in The Prairie, Cooper explores the basic tensions at work in American culture and history in a way that allows free play to the opposing forces. At the same time, he creates mythic figures, of whom Natty Bumppo is easily the most notable, who offer a focus for debates about the character of American democracy – and also possess 50 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 the simplicity and stature required of any great epic hero. The first time we see Bumppo in The Prairie is typical. He appears to a group of travelers, and the reader, standing in the distance on the great plains with the sun going down behind him. “The figure was colossal, the attitude musing and melancholy,” the narrator observes, and “embedded as it was in its setting of garish light, it was impossible to distinguish its just proportions or true character.” Larger than life, romantic and mysterious, Natty Bumppo here anticipates a whole series of Western and American heroes. And a similarly heroic closure is given to the story of our hero. At the end of The Prairie, Natty dies with his gaze “fastened on the clouds which hung around the western horizon, reflecting the bright colours and giving form to the glorious tints of an American sunset.” With that grand, ultimate entry into nature, Cooper may be suggesting the passing of the democratic possibilities Natty Bumppo represents. The Prairie certainly has an autumnal mood: it is set firmly in the past, and there are constant references to the way immigration and cultivation, the destruction of the wilderness and the scattering of the Indians have changed the West – and, quite possibly, America – between then and the time of writing. Perhaps; and, if so, the novel is as much a new Western as a traditional one, mapping out the destructive tendencies of the westward movement as well as its place in a heroic tale of national expansion. One further layer of complexity is then added to a narrative that is, in any event, a debate and a mythic drama, a great historical novel and an American epic in prose, that explores the different routes a democratic republic might take, the conflict between law and freedom, the clearing and the wilderness, communal ethics and the creed of self-reliance. Over the three decades when the Leatherstocking series was written, many other attempts were made to translate experience in the West into literature. Notable among these were two novels, Logan: A Family History (1822) and Nick of the Woods; or, The Jibbenainesay (1837), and an autobiographical narrative first serialized in The Knickerbocker Magazinein 1847 and then published in 1849, The Oregon Trail. Logan: A Family History was one of the several novels and many publications of John Neal (1793–1876). It is an essentially romantic account of a noble savage, the Indian chief who gives the book its title.The reverse side of the coin is suggested by Nick of the Woods. An immensely popular tale in its day and also Robert M. Bird’s (1806–1854) best work, it has a complicated plot involving Indian raids and massacres, a romantic heroine taken into captivity but eventually rescued, and an eponymous central character who is bent on revenge against the Indians for the slaughter of his family. Throughout all the plot convolutions, however, what remains starkly simple is the portrait of the Indians. As Bird depicts them, they are violent, superstitious, and treacherous. They may be savages but they are very far from being noble. The Oregon Trail is another matter. For a start, it was written by someone, Francis Parkman (1823–1893), who went on from writing it to become one of the most distinguished historians of the period. Parkman was one of a generation of American historians who combined devotion to research with a romantic sweep of imagination, and a scholarly interest in the history of America or democratic institutions or both with dramatic flair and a novelistic eye for detail. Apart from Parkman himself, the most notable of these romantic historians were John Lothrop Motley (1814–1877), George Bancroft (1800–1891), and William Hinckling Prescott (1796–1859). Published before his histories, The Oregon Trail is an account of a journey Parkman took along Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 51 the trail of the title in 1846. His purpose in taking the trip was twofold: to improve his frail health and study Indian life. Skilled in woodcraft and a decent shot, he survived the hardship of the trek, but only just: the strain of traveling eventually led to a complete breakdown in his health, rather than the recovery for which he had hoped. Incapable of writing, he was forced to dictate his story to a cousin and traveling companion. The result has been described as the first account of a literary white man who actually lived by choice for a while among Native Americans. What emerges from this account is, like the other work of Parkman and the romantic historians, an intriguing mix of fact and fiction. It is also, and equally intriguingly, double-edged. As the narrator of The Oregon Trail, a Harvard graduate and a member of a prominent Boston family, encounters the landscape and peoples of the West, his tone tends to hover sometimes between condescension and disgust, the style verges on the mandarin. Yet, for all that, Parkman remembers that he found much to admire, or even cherish, in the West. The two scouts who accompanied him are portrayed in frankly romantic terms. One has the rough charm of the prairie, and an indefatigable “cheerfulness and gayety,” the other a “natural refinement and delicacy of mind”; the both of them, in their different ways, are true knights of the wild. Native American life, too, is celebrated for its color and occasionally chivalric touches. “If there be anything that deserves to be called romantic in the Indian character,” Parkman explains, “it is to be sought in ... friendships ... common among many of the prairie tribe.” Parkman himself, he discloses, enjoyed just such an intimacy, becoming “excellent friends” with an Indian he calls “the Panther”: “a noble-looking fellow,” with a “stately and graceful figure” and “the very model of a wild prairie-rider.” This is the homoerotic romance across the line between white and Indian that Cooper imagined, replayed here in however muted a key. Parkman is framing his recollections within a literary tradition that includes the author of the Leatherstocking Tales and, before him, Sir Walter Scott. Parkman is drawn to the romance of the West, what he sees as its primitive beauty, its bold colors and simple chivalry, even while he is also repelled by its rawness, its lack of refinement. So he ends up decidedly at odds with himself, when he eventually returns from the trail. “Many and powerful as were the attractions of the settlements,” Parkman concludes, “we looked back regretfully to the wilderness behind us.” That was a broken, uncertain note to be sounded in many later stories about going West, negotiating what the traveler sees as the borderline between civilization and savagery. Parkman was playing his part, in The Oregon Trail, in inaugurating the frontier as a site of imaginative adventure: with the West perceived as it was precisely because it was seen through the eyes of the East – as a place destructively, but also seductively, other. A year after the publication of The Last of the Mohicans, in 1827, a very different story about the relationship between white people and Native Americans appeared, and one different in turn from the accounts of Neal, Bird, and Parkman: Hope Leslie by Catharine Marie Sedgwick (1789–1867). Sedgwick had already produced two bestsellers, A New England Tale: Sketches of New-England Character and Manners (1822) and Redwood (1824). She was to go on to publish many other books. The main figures in her novels tend to be women, and often women of independence and courage. Hope Leslie, too, focuses on the destiny of women, but in even more interesting ways than Sedgwick’s other novels. There is a white heroine, whose name gives the book its title. There is also a Pequod woman, Magawisca, who saves a white man, Everell Fletcher, 52 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 from execution at the hands of her father, the chief, in the manner of Pocahontas. Her act involves considerable physical, as well as emotional, courage, since she offers her body to the weapon aimed at Everell’s neck and, as a result, loses her arm. Hope Leslie herself shows similar heroism when, on not one but two occasions, she frees Indian women from what she considers unjust imprisonment. And Magawisca resumes her status as an evidently “superior being” towards the end of the narrative, when she is captured by the whites. At her trial for “brewing conspiracy ... among the Indian tribes,” she is defended by the historical figure of John Eliot, whom Sedgwick identifies as the “first Protestant missionary to the Indians.” Magawisca, however, insists that she needs no defense, since the tribunal has no authority over her. Clearly, their heroism makes Magawisca and Hope Leslie doubles. Their primary allegiance is to conscience: what Magawisca calls “the Great Spirit” that “hath written his laws on the hearts of his original children.” Obeying those laws, they defy those set in power in their respective societies, who are determinately male: Magawisca defies her father, of course, and both she and her white double Hope defy the authority of the Puritan fathers. What is equally notable about this rewriting of Western tropes is the intimacy that evidently exists in Hope Leslie between white and Indian characters. Unlike Cooper, Sedgwick is perfectly willing to contemplate marriage between the two races. Faith Leslie, the sister of Hope, is carried into captivity while still a child; she marries Oneco, the brother of Magawisca; and she then refuses the chance offered her to return to the Puritan community. Sedgwick is also willing to countenance signs of kinship between women of the two races. In one narrative sequence, Hope Leslie resists the prejudices of the age and the conventions of female behavior by liberating an Indian woman called Nelena from prison. Nelena has been condemned as a witch, after she cured a snakebite with the help of herbal medicine; and she repays the debt by arranging for Magawisca to meet Hope with news of Faith. The two women, Hope and Magawisca, meet secretly in a cemetery where both their mothers are buried, and plot a way for Hope to meet her sister even though this would violate colonial law. The entire scene subtly interweaves intimations of debt and intimacy. The graves of the mothers of the two women lie side by side, the women recall how Magawisca rescued Everell Fletcher and Hope saved Nelena as they talk about the marriage between the brother of one and the sister of the other. It is a celebration of a sisterhood of the spirit and the blood. A word of caution is perhaps necessary here. Sedgwick did not question the prevailing contemporary belief in the manifest destiny of the white race. For that matter, she did not seek to challenge the conventional notion that marriage was a woman’s proper aim and reward. Within these constraints, however, Sedgwick did find a place for female integrity and for intimacy between the races; and one need only compare Hope Leslie with the Leatherstocking Tales to measure the difference. It is partly a matter of reversal: male transgression and bonding are replaced by, yet reflected in, their female equivalents. It is partly a matter of rewriting, radical revision: here, the connections between the races are what matter rather than the conflicts – and, whatever else may be present, there is an intensely felt sense of community and continuity. Cooper was a powerful creator of frontier myths but he was not, by any means, the only one: the legends figured in Hope Leslie also had a significant impact on how later Americans imagined the movement of their nation west.

Preview questions:

1. What is the background of the story, The Last of the Mohicans?

2. Who is the last of the Mohicans? What does the fate of the Mohicans imply about Cooper's idea on racial relationship?