The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper

First published:The Pioneers: Or, The Sources of the Susquehanna, 1823; The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, 1826; The Prairie: A Tale, 1827; The Pathfinder: Or, The Inland Sea, 1840; The Deerslayer: Or, The First Warpath, 1841

Type of work: Historical fiction

Themes: Coming-of-age, nature, and religion

Time of work: The mid-to late eighteenth century

Locale: Otsego Lake, Lake George, Lake Ontario, and Cooperstown, New York; Iowa; and Missouri

Principal Characters:

• Natty Bumppo, the series’ central protagonist, always a moral paragon in service to others
• Henry “Hurry Harry” March, a handsome, muscular, and immoral young man whose rash actions endanger Natty
• Chingachgook/John Mohegan, the Mohican chief and Natty’s blood brother, who is Natty’s major companion
• Uncas, Chingachgook’s son, who aids his father and Natty in rescuing the Munro party and is later slain by Magua
• Magua, the treacherous Huron chief and guide who kidnaps the Munro party and is Natty’s chief antagonist
• Jasper Western, a freshwater seaman and companion of Natty, who falls in love with Mabel
• Mabel Dunham, the only woman who captures Natty’s heart, who is really in love with Jasper
• Marmaduke Temple, founder of Templeton and a judge who must reluctantly prosecute Natty
• Oliver (Edwards) Effingham, the son of Judge Temple’s former business partner and in love with the judge’s daughter
• Duncan Uncas Middleton, army captain, who is the grandson of Natty’s friends, Duncan Heyward and Alice Munro Heyward

The Story

The Leatherstocking Tales is the name given to the quintet about the maturation of Natty Bumppo. To follow the development of James Fenimore Cooper’s hero, the five novels need to be read not in the order they were published, but in tune with the aging of Natty Bumppo. In The Deerslayer (1841), Cooper introduces his youthful protagonist. Natty Bumppo, a young man in his twenties, has come to Otsego Lake/Glimmerglass in upper New York State to help his blood brother, Chingachgook, rescue the Delaware chieftain’s betrothed. During this adventure, set in the 1740’s, Natty is given the name Hawkeye and must kill his first man.

The Last of the Mohicans (1826) chronicles Natty in his mid-thirties. The action takes place in 1757 during the French and Indian War at Lake George. Natty, Chingachgook, and Uncas guide a British officer and two women through hostile territory to Fort William Henry. The Pathfinder (1840) occurs two years later. Natty, now called Pathfinder, is a scout for the British. Although filled with the usual exciting chases and rescues, the story focuses on Natty’s courtship of Mabel Dunham, the only woman he ever actively pursues.

By The Pioneers (1823), forty years have passed. Natty, now called Leather-stocking, is in his mid-seventies. He has grown into a tired old man who recounts stories of his past glory. Chingachgook, now known as John Mohegan, has degenerated into an alcoholic basketweaver. Both heroes reside in Templeton, a frontier settlement like Cooperstown, and constantly come in conflict with the encroachment of civilization and its laws on their frontier and freedom. The Prairie (1827) records the last years of Natty. Now called Trapper or Old Man, he is in his eighties and living in the Great Plains. The story centers on the pros and cons of America’s westward migration and the legend of Natty.

Context

The Leatherstocking Tales are Cooper’s best-known fiction. His other twenty-seven novels, many of them about social issues, were not as well received or influential. In the 1820’s, American fiction was scorned by the European community. One British critic went so far as to ask the sarcastic question, “Who reads an American book?” Cooper supplied the resounding answer with his tales of Natty Bumppo and his companions. In fact, the Leatherstocking Tales made Cooper the Father of the American Novel and earned for him international fame.

Perhaps as important, Cooper’s series helped settle a great literary debate. Up until Cooper’s time, the majority of American writers borrowed their subjects, characters, themes, and forms from European writers, especially the British. A serious doubt existed as to whether America could provide original forms and native materials for its writers. By dealing with the previous century of American history— specifically the French and Indian War as well as the great westward migration—The

Leatherstocking Tales represent a declaration of American literary independence. Moreover, Cooper became so popular that he proved an American could make a living as a full-time writer. First, Cooper capitalized on a growing sense of nostalgia. In the first half of the nineteenth century, America was transforming itself from an agrarian economy to an industrial society. Discouraged by the new technology and the exploitation of land in the name of progress, Cooper set his stories in a simpler time, a period when America was still in the act of becoming a country. Natty Bumppo embodies the American spirit of what would later be labeled rugged individualism. Natty calls to mind an earlier day when an individual could be self-sufficient rather than at the mercy of machines, tax collectors, and the other “benefits” of civilization. Cooper’s hero is a rebel who refuses to give in to advancing civilization.

Equally important to his popularity is Cooper’s description of nature. He is a romantic and in his writing captures the majesty and grandeur of natural phenomena. Otsego Lake is glamorized into Lake Glimmerglass, which mirrors the purity of the heavens. Another reason for Cooper’s success is that he taps into the deep vein of religion that runs throughout early American history. The majority of the original colonies were founded for religious reasons, especially in the Northeast, also the country’s literary center during the early nineteenth century. America’s wilderness had long been envisioned as the New Eden. Fittingly, Cooper describes his wilderness in Edenic terms. Natty Bumppo is essentially the American Adam, and the novels’ conflicts are placed in the eternal context of good fighting evil.

Cooper also had a strong sense of the nineteenth century American literary marketplace. Legend has it that the author, a voracious reader, began his writing career on a dare from his wife because he claimed he could write better novels than he was reading. After a couple of early efforts, Cooper hit his stride with The Pioneers. In England, Sir Walter Scott was enjoying success with historical novels that looked back on his country’s glorious past. Cooper rightly reasoned that a chivalric romance set in America’s heroic past might capture the public’s interest. In one sense, Natty Bumppo becomes a knight in buckskin, and with Chingachgook, his Indian squire, he roams the American countryside defeating the forces of evil (the French and the evil Indians) and rescuing damsels in distress, such as the Hutter and Munro sisters.

The Leatherstocking Tales continue to be popular, especially with young readers, because they are great adventure stories following the classic pursuit-capture-escape pattern. Natty always seems simultaneously to be rescuing beleaguered victims and being chased by the forces of evil. In the great network of American popular literature, Cooper is the vital link between the Indian captivity narratives of people such as John Smith and the dime novels and Western tales of the latter nineteenth century. Furthermore, Natty Bumppo—with his eye for detail, his survival skills, his tracking ability, and his individualism—is the prototype for the distinctive twentieth-century invention, the hardboiled private investigator. Even in an increasing technological era, the myth of the rugged pioneer free from social constraints and false icons holds an immense appeal.

For all his popularity, Cooper has certainly had his detractors. One of the most famous was Mark Twain, who criticized the novels for inaccurate details, wooden characters, flowery speeches, and amazing episodes. Cooper’s quintet is loaded with improbabilities, coincidences, and contradictions. In The Deerslayer, for example, Natty’s speech ranges from that of a scholar to that of a backwoods yokel, and the ending, with Hurry Harry arriving in the nick of time, is difficult to believe. Cooper, however, never claimed he was writing realism. In fact, in his famous preface to an 1850 edition of the tales, he emphasized that he aspired “to the elevation of romances, to present the beau-ideal of their characters to the reader.” Despite its detractors, Cooper’s reputation has not been diminished with his readers, especially the young. For them, Natty Bumppo represents the essence of the American hero, the self-sufficient individual who fights bravely against overwhelming odds. The Leatherstocking Tales present a simpler version of American history, a reality where good and evil are sharply defined and a place where heroic action is not only possible but rewarded.

Bibliography

Barker, Martin, and Roger Sabin. The Lasting of the Mohicans: History of an American Myth. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

Clark, Robert, ed. James Fenimore Cooper: New Critical Essays. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1985.

Darnell, Donald. James Fenimore Cooper: Novelist of Manners. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993.

Dyer, Alan Frank, comp. James Fenimore Cooper: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Fields, W., ed. James Fenimore Cooper: A Collection of Critical Essays. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.

Frye, Steven. Historiography and Narrative Design in the American Romance: A Study of Four Authors. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001.

Long, Robert Emmett. James Fenimore Cooper. New York: Continuum, 1990.

McWilliams, John. The Last of the Mohicans: Civil Savagery and Savage Civility. New York: Twayne, 1995.

Newman, Russell T. The Gentleman in the Garden: The Influential Landscape in the Works of James Fenimore Cooper. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003.

Peck, H. Daniel, ed. New Essays on “The Last of the Mohicans.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Ringe, Donald A. James Fenimore Cooper. Updated ed. New York: Twayne, 1988.

Verhoeven, W. M., ed. James Fenimore Cooper: New Historical and Literary Contexts. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993.