Could Natty Bumppo have turned out to be something different, if only events had gone differently? No, neither history nor fiction allows for “might-have-beens.” Natty’s fate has been predetermined in the other Leatherstocking novels. However, in The Deerslayer the larger events seem more hazy, the personalities more in the foreground, the outcomes more contingent, and the play of circumstance and human will more the decisive factors. Cooper has achieved his greatest literary effects in this last of the series, and we can now with profit revisit the other stories in light of what we know of Deerslayer’s youth.
Natty’s notions of “elements” and the fitness of things do not, unfortunately, resolve fundamental issues for himself or for Judith. Natty was born of white parents but was raised by missionaries and spent much of his youth with the Delaware Indians. He may speak Indian dialects better than he does English (at least we can wonder whether he mangles the syntax and mispronounces words as frequently as he does in English). He works as a kind of contractor for the military Where, then, does he fit in the social pecking order? Judith, who has suffered from being considered the daughter of the reclusive ex-pirate Tom Hutter, but who turns out to be the illegitimate child of a senior British officer and an educated white woman, belongs by rights above the rank that society has assigned her. Her intelligence, beauty, and courage alone should have earned her a better fate, but as it is she is only a hanger-on around the military base and a cast-off lover of a British officer.
But to return to the action of The Deerslayer, we find that Natty, although he has refused to participate in Hutter’s and March’s scalping scheme, nonetheless agrees to protect Judith and Hetty during the men’s absence. He becomes indirectly complicit in the odious plan when he agrees to collect the canoes that Hutter has hidden around the lake in order to keep them out of the hands of the Indians. Deerslayer realizes that in doing this he is involved indirectly in this repellent plan; he is not a fool. This self-consciousness on his part and Judith’s self-awareness help bring them to life as characters.
In contrast, Hurry Harry does not learn anything about himself and does not change. He remains boorish, graceless, and vulgar. Similarly, old Tom Hutter remains the reclusive buccaneer to the end, but is less boastful than Harry and mercifully spares us any effort at self justification. His is purely an amoral survival ethic. When the Indians finally scalp him without the courtesy of killing him first, he does not appear particularly surprised and proceeds to die with a certain degree of courage and perhaps even a touch of dignity Before dying, he tells Judith that he is not her real father, directing her to the trunk he has kept locked in the castle in an act that may be intended as malice, or atonement of some sort, or merely a matter-of-fact deathbed confession. Old Tom and Harry, in their scheme to attack the Indian women and children, are not men “likely to stick at trifles in matters connected with the right of the aborigines, since it is one of the consequences of aggression that it hardens the conscience, as the only means of quieting it” (p. 78).
The wily Iroquois Rivenoak is the principal foe on the Indian side. Although he seems at times almost a mirror image of a rapacious white settler bent on his own version of plunder, he is capable of growth and self-understanding, like Judith and Natty. He transforms himself, after his capture in the final battle in chapter XXX, into the noble defeated warrior who will live out the remainder of his life in captivity and dignified despair, a symbol of one of history’s losers, and a reminder of the loss of American innocence.
When Harry and Hutter’s scalping expedition fails and the Rivenoak-led Indians capture the two of them, the novel’s major action is set in motion. Deerslayer is compelled to keep his word and to protect the two sisters. The pace of the action may not be quite to the taste of someone accustomed to the brisk movement of a modern thriller like The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth, but there are plenty of twists and turns and derring-do escapes as Deerslayer matches wits with the wily Rivenoak. Deerslayer negotiates for the release of his companions, the would-be scalpers, using his linguistic skills and the adroit trade of chess pieces as wampum, a feat on a par with the Dutch purchase of the island of Manhattan for a few trinkets. Deerslayer, with Judith’s help, meets up with his “good” Indian friend, Chingachgook, and the two men plan and execute the rescue of Hist, Chingachgook’s fiancé who has been kidnapped by the Iroquois. Deerslayer is, however, captured in the process because he does not kill and silence the old Indian woman who is guarding Hist. The historical romance formula that Cooper learned from Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) and used so often in his earlier novels is present here as well—only this time the separated lovers who reunite are Chingachgook and Hist, the Native Americans.
Hetty wanders freely in and out of the Indian camp trying first to secure her father’s release. Her recitation of biblical passages calling for mercy and forgiveness does not impress Rivenoak and his braves. They politely point out that the Christian message evidently did not get through to Harry and Tom Hutter in light of their efforts to scalp Indian women and children. Nevertheless, the Indians listen to Hetty politely enough and make no effort to interfere with her comings and goings. This is a sign of the Indians’ respect for the mentally retarded. Deerslayer is furloughed after his capture on his promise to return at noon the following day. He paddles out to the castle for a farewell visit with his friends. Judith, by now in love with Deerslayer, suggests that they attempt a getaway. Natty, of course, cannot do such a thing—it being both dishonorable and impractical. He returns as promised, and is duly tortured, until, mirabile dictu, the British army arrives to rescue him and to slaughter the Indian women and children in the process.
Several episodes in this chain of events are worthy of attention for the light they shed on Deerslayer’s character and on Cooper’s artistic intentions. While in the castle during his furlough, Judith gives Deerslayer her father’s expensive and finely crafted rifle, the Killdeer of future Leatherstocking fame. To try out the weapon, Natty gives a demonstration of his sharpshooting skills by downing a high-flying eagle. When the luckless bird nose-dives onto the platform at their feet, shot through the breast, Deerslayer immediately is overcome with shame and mortification. His vanity has cost the life of an innocent creature. Judith notices his sense of shame and loves him the more for it; she had harbored some doubts about the macho act in the first place. Hetty openly, but mildly, reproaches Deerslayer for the whole un-Christian business. Deerslayer, later in the evening, feeling sure he will die the next day, makes an informal will and leaves the rifle to Hist. Why Hist? Does he wish to show his support for the Delawares with whom he has grown up? He assumes that if Chingachgook survives, he will get the rifle anyway.12 Natty certainly does not want to leave Harry anything.
Deerslayer returns to the Iroquois at noon the following day, the appointed hour, just as the sun breaks through the haze. Impressed by his punctuality and his general manliness, Chief Rivenoak offers Deerslayer a deal that he believes any right-thinking man should jump at. Deerslayer, with his knowledge of the Indian dialects, is fully aware of what the chief is trying to do: offer him a deal that is good for the Iroquois and good for Natty, a nicely calibrated diplomatic move that saves face all around. The chief almost winks at Deerslayer as he lays out the plan for his braves (the Indian women are not in the decision-making loop but can cheer or jeer from the sidelines). The deal is this: Natty will join the tepee of the Sumach, the widow of the warrior that Deerslayer has slain in chapter VII, thus caring for her and her children, in return for having his life spared. The chief is aware that Deerslayer might escape at some later date, but the deal will solve the chief’s immediate problem of asserting his own leadership against the hotheads who want Deerslayer tortured right then and there. It will also provide for the widow and equip the tribe with a skilled shooter and scout for the arduous trek back home to Canada through enemy territory. Rivenoak also seems to have a humanitarian streak in that he wishes to avoid any unnecessary shedding of blood.
Deerslayer turns him down flat, and none too diplomatically at that. Critics and reviewers have been puzzled by what Natty (and Cooper) were up to here. Is Deerslayer against miscegenation, a racist at heart, notwithstanding all his talk of white gifts and Indian gifts and of the ostensible importance he attaches to living together and respecting each other? Or is it a case of sexual infantilism and a deep-seated fear of women, resulting from Deerslayer having lived too long in the woods? Does the man prefer death to life? Surely any sane man would take the deal and feel pretty darn lucky. But Deerslayer is a purist at heart. He does not believe in an instrumental morality: Good is good; no compromise, no slippery slope for him. The widow is described in terms that are not endearing, but Natty’s refusal has deeper roots. He is simply a fighter, not a lover; he is alone in the world and likes it that way. He will not bend or budge an inch. We may also surmise that Deerslayer fears that, if the British were to arrive in time, he might be placed in the morally untenable position of having to fight on behalf of the Indians against the British. Enraged by the rebuff to the chief and the insult to his sister, one of the chief ’s principal lieutenants—a brave and fierce warrior known as the Panther, who is really a co-chief along with Rivenoak—decides to take matters into his own hands, and flings his tomahawk at Deerslayer. This is a mistake. He wouldn’t have done it had he known the whole story of what happened in the engagement between Deerslayer and his (the Panther’s) late brother-in-law. For Deerslayer, with his quick hand-eye coordination, simply follows the arc of the tomahawk as it sails through the air toward him, catches it by the handle at the crucial moment, and throws it right back at the Panther, killing him.
Now Rivenoak has no choice. Deerslayer will have to undergo the full range of tortures culminating in his being burned alive. Cooper was often scrupulous in describing Indian customs and ceremonies, but when it came to torture scenes, he let his imagination roam freely. The tortures here include a preliminary singeing by fire while Deerslayer is tied to a tree, the tossing of tomahawks at his head (not actually hitting him, if possible), and the firing of rifles to nick him around the head and ears and make him flinch. When he does flinch, thus discrediting himself, the Indians will move on to the final act of roasting him alive. As the torture proceeds, Deerslayer’s only salvation is to keep from moving at all, thus delaying his death in the hope that the British will arrive in time to save him. And yet Deerslayer also hopes one of the Indians will miss and finish him off, getting the whole thing over with once and for all.
As the bullets are thudding into the tree centimeters from his head, an apparition suddenly appears on the scene that astounds everybody It is Judith, clad in the magnificent red gown she found at the bottom of Thomas Hutter’s trunk; she is pretending to be an emissary of the Queen and calling on the Indians to release Deerslayer. Her speech is a trifle vague as to her credentials, for she doesn’t want to strain the chief ’s credulity, nor does she want to depart too radically from the truth and provoke Deerslayer to disavow her. She knows full well his dislike of lying. The chief smells a rat in the whole business and is not about to be conned again. He has apparently had some second thoughts about the probity of his earlier release of hostages in exchange for two chess pieces. Rivenoak calls on Hetty, who is sitting with the other woman onlookers, and invites her opinion, knowing that she is guileless enough to tell the truth. Hetty ingenuously identifies Judith as her sister, and—to boot—botches a scheme to slip a knife into Deerslayer’s hands behind the tree trunk to which he is tied. Deerslayer is strangely cold to Judith’s gallant ef fort to save him. She has risked her life to save his neck (and scalp), has shown extraordinary courage and daring, and she doesn’t even get a kind thought from him. He wishes she hadn’t tried the caper in the first place, seeing it perhaps as a display of her earlier vanity and desire to be at the center of attention. In any event, it was ill-conceived because it risked the chief ’s ire by a scheme that would insult his intelligence. The chief has had enough by now: He orders his warriors to get on with the torture, and he ponders taking Judith back with him to the north. At this point, first Chingachgook and then the British arrive. There is a final mystery that the text does not explicitly resolve: How far does Natty participate in the final battle? He is active in the fighting at first, shooting two Indians, but could not have participated in the massacre of women and children. Could he have somehow prevented it? Cooper leaves us in the dark on this point.
Natty and Judith have a final poignant encounter a day later in a canoe after they have buried Hetty next to her mother in the lake. Judith asks Deerslayer to stop his paddling and spend a few moments with her apart from the other canoes. Here, in a scene that has not received the critical attention it deserves, Judith pours out her soul to Deerslayer. It is clear how much she has grown as a person; her tender affection and love for Deerslayer are obvious; her anxiety but yet her courage in facing the future are unmistakable. At first Deerslayer plays dumb, hoping to get by without directly answering her. She is at last forced to make a direct appeal, a straight-out proposal of marriage to him. He rebuffs her. Then, painfully, she asks him if it is something Hurry Harry has said about her that has poisoned his attitude toward her. Deerslayer is at his most eloquent; for once, he is silent. He lets the small lie stand, knowing it will hurt her less than the full truth: He doesn’t love her, doesn’t respect her enough, and doesn’t want to live out his life with her. Nor does he trust her steadfastness, and he sees that her nature is at bottom to want the spotlight or at least the comforts of the settlement and the other good things of civilized life that he cannot give her. They cannot live a life on the lake, in the castle; it won’t work. Perhaps he doesn’t want to tell her the deeper truth: that he knows he has been condemned by his (novelistic) creator to live out his life alone as the archetypical rootless American, without ever experiencing love. He will be an isolate—cast out by society, his values trampled upon—and will die on the barren plains, his bones bleaching in the sun, far from the graves of his parents near the sea and far from his beloved forests.
The novel ends, in a shift of perspective, fifteen years later when Deerslayer, Chingachgook (Hist has died in the meantime), and Uncas, the son of Hist and Chingachgook, revisit the scene of the previous action. They are stirred by memories and experience feelings of melancholy They find the ark wrecked and the castle in ruins, but Deerslayer finds a ribbon of Judith’s attached to the wreckage of the ark and ties it to his rifle. Deerslayer has a pang as he thinks of Judith. She is still on his mind when he inquires about her at a nearby garrison, and a soldier “who had lately come from England, was enabled to tell our hero, that Sir Robert Warley [the British officer of fifteen years before] lived on his paternal estates, and that there was a lady of rare beauty in the lodge, who had great influence over him, though she did not bear his name” (p. 522). Natty “never knew” whether this was Judith or some other victim of that officer, nor “would it be pleasant or profitable to inquire.” The friends make their way in silence toward the Mohawk “to rush into new adventures, as stirring and as remarkable as those which had attended their opening career on this lovely lake.” But lest we miss the larger point of this dark narrative, Cooper begins his final sentence with the admonition: “We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true....”
Bruce L. R. Smith is a fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University He previously was a professor of government at Columbia University (1966-1979), a deputy assistant secretary in the U. S. Department of State (1779-1880), and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. (1980-1996). He is the author or editor of sixteen scholarly books, and he continues to lecture widely in the United States and abroad. He annotated and wrote the introduction for Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove in the Barnes & Noble Classics series.
Notes
1 On Cooper’s influence and his role in generating an audience for
fiction, see James D. Wallace, Early Cooper and His Audience, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
2 Mark Twain forcefully expressed his views on the American Indian in Roughing It ( 1872). He also began a sequel to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), in which Huck and Tom, after reading a Cooper novel, go into the Indian territory to befriend the benevolent Indians portrayed in the novel, only to discover that the Indians were drunks, rapists, and criminals, and were generally treacherous.
3 Nina Baym disputes the whole notion that there was a unique American form, the romantic or the American Gothic style, and finds that America, in the antebellum period produced readers, reviewers, and authors similar to what prevailed in Britain during the period. See Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.
4 Leslie Fiedler, “Introduction” to The Deerslayer, New York: Modern Library, 2002.
5 “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Defenses: Twain and the Text of the Deerslayer,” in Joel Myerson, ed., Studies in the American Renaissance (1988), pp. 401-417.
6 Seven of the thirteen children lived into adulthood. Between 1813 and 1819. all of James Cooper’s older brothers died, leaving him with the responsibility of caring for a number of widows and orphaned children and for settling his father’s debt-ridden estate.
7 The story of this remarkable figure is told in Alan Taylor’s excellent William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (see “For Further Reading”), which also includes much valuable material on James Cooper’s early life.
8 Alan Taylor disputes the legend in William Cooper’s Town (pp. 363-370) . He argues that the attack, if it actually occurred as the legend suggests, did not bring about the pneumonia.
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