Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by James Fenimore Cooper

  Truth was the Deerslayer’s polar star. He ever kept it in view; and it was nearly impossible for him to avoid uttering it, even when prudence demanded silence. Judith read his answer in his countenance; and with a heart nearly broken by the consciousness of undeserving, she signed to him an adieu, and buried herself in the woods. For some time Deerslayer was irresolute as to his course; but in the end, he retraced his steps and joined the Delaware. That night, the three “camped” on the headwaters of their own river, and the succeeding evening they entered the village of the tribe; Chingachgook and his betrothed, in triumph; their companion honored and admired, but in a sorrow that it required months of activity to remove.

  The war that then had its rise was stirring and bloody. The Delaware chief rose among his people, until his name was never mentioned without eulogiums; while another Uncas, the last of his race, was added to the long line of warriors who bore that distinguished appellation. As for the Deerslayer, under the sobriquet of Hawkeye, he made his fame spread far and near, until the crack of his rifle became as terrible to the ears of the Mingos, as the thunders of the Manitou. His services were soon required by the officers of the Crown, and he especially attached himself, in the field, to one in particular, with whose afterlife he had a close and important connection.

  Fifteen years had passed away, ere it was in the power of the Deerslayer to revisit the Glimmerglass. A peace had intervened, and it was on the eve of another, and still more important war, when he and his constant friend, Chingachgook, were hastening to the forts to join their allies. A stripling accompanied them, for Hist already slumbered beneath the pines of the Delawares, and the three survivors had now become inseparable. They reached the lake just as the sun was setting. Here all was unchanged; the river still rushed through its bower of trees; the little rock was wasting away by the slow action of the waves in the course of centuries; the mountains stood in their native dress, dark, rich, and mysterious; while the sheet glistened in its solitude, a beautiful gem of the forest.

  The following morning the youth discovered one of the canoes drifted on the shore, in a state of decay. A little labor put it in a state for service, and they all embarked, with a desire to examine the place. All the points were passed, and Chingachgook pointed out to his son the spot where the Hurons had first encamped, and the point whence he had succeeded in stealing his bride. Here they even landed; but all trace of the former visit had disappeared. Next they proceeded to the scene of the battle, and there they found a few of the signs that linger around such localities. Wild beasts had disinterred many of the bodies, and human bones were bleaching in the rains of summer. Uncas regarded all with reverence and pity, though traditions were already rousing his young mind to the ambition and sternness of a warrior.

  From the point, the canoe took its way towards the shoal, where the remains of the castle were still visible, a picturesque ruin. The storms of winter had long since unroofed the house, and decay had eaten into the logs. All the fastenings were untouched, but the seasons rioted in the place, as if in mockery at the attempt to exclude them. The palisades were rotting, as were the piles; and it was evident that a few more recurrences of winter, a few more gales and tempests, would sweep all into the lake, and blot the building from the face of that magnificent solitude. The graves could not be found. Either the elements had obliterated their traces, or time had caused those who looked for them to forget their position.

  The ark was discovered stranded on the eastern shore, where it had long before been driven, with the prevalent northwest winds. It lay on the sandy extremity of a long, low point, that is situated about two miles from the outlet, and which is itself fast disappearing before the action of the elements. The scow was filled with water, the cabin unroofed, and the logs were decaying. Some of its coarser furniture still remained, and the heart of Deerslayer beat quick as he found a ribbon of Judith’s fluttering from a log. It recalled all her beauty, and we may add, all her failings. Although the girl had never touched his heart, the Hawkeye, for so we ought now to call him, still retained a kind and sincere interest in her welfare. He tore away the ribbon and knotted it to the stock of Killdeer, which had been the gift of the girl herself.

  A few miles farther up the lake another of the canoes was discovered ; and on the point where the party finally landed, were found those which had been left there upon the shore. That in which the present navigation was made, and the one discovered on the eastern shore, had dropped through the decayed floor of the castle, drifted past the falling palisades, and had been thrown as waifs upon the beach.

  From all these signs, it was probable the lake had not been visited since the occurrence of the final scene of our tale. Accident or tradition had rendered it again a spot sacred to nature; the frequent wars, and the feeble population of the colonies, still confining the settlements within narrow boundaries. Chingachgook and his friend left the spot with melancholy feelings. It had been the region of their First Warpath, and it carried back the minds of both to scenes of tenderness as well as to hours of triumph. They held their way towards the Mohawk in silence, however, to rush into new adventures, as stirring and as remarkable as those which had attended their opening career on this lovely lake. At a later day they returned to the place, where the Indian found a grave.

  Time and circumstances have drawn an impenetrable mystery around all else connected with the Hutters. They lived, erred, died, and are forgotten. None connected have felt sufficient interest in the disgraced and disgracing, to withdraw the veil; and a century is about to erase even the recollection of their names. The history of crime is ever revolting, and it is fortunate that few love to dwell on its incidents. The sins of the family have long since been arraigned at the judgment seat of God, or are registered for the terrible settlement of the last great day.

  The same fate attended Judith. When Hawkeye reached the garrison on the Mohawk, he inquired anxiously after that lovely, but misguided creature. None knew her—even her person was no longer remembered. Other officers had again and again succeeded the Warleys and Craigs and Grahams; though an old sergeant of the garrison, who had lately come from England, was enabled to tell our hero that Sir Robert Warley 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. Whether this was Judith, relapsed into her early failing, or some other victim of the soldier’s, Hawkeye never knew, nor would it be pleasant or profitable to inquire. We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true; though happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned, are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating, if not excusing its crimes.

  ENDNOTES

  These notes reflect the work of many previous Cooper scholars on whom I have drawn freely. In particular, I wish to thank Hugh C. MacDougall, Secretary, James Fenimore Cooper Society, Cooperstown, New York, for sharing his extensive knowledge of Cooper with me.

  1 (p. 3 ) “and Solitude behind”: The significance of this epitaph on the title page is analyzed cogently by Hugh C. MacDougall, Secretary, James Fenimore Cooper Society, in “Peeling the Onion: Looking for Layers of Meaning in The Deerslayer,” a paper presented at the 2003 Cooper Conference, State University of New York, Oneonta, New York, pp. 9-13. The paper is available on the James Fenimore Cooper Society Web site: www.oneonta.edu/external/cooper, in a section called “Articles and Papers,” along with all papers presented at the Cooper conferences held regularly over the past decade. MacDougall describes Gray’s poem as the fulfillment of a curse against King Edward I of England, who conquered Wales in 1284 and massacred all the Welsh bards in an effort to extinguish the Welsh ethnic identity. The verse applies as well to Edward I’s descendants; in this case the specific lines refer to Edward III, who died in misery. The poem goes on to tell how the Welsh are avenged when Henry Tudor, Henry VII, conquers England and defeats the last of Edward’s
descendants in 1485. Cooper was using this epitaph, says MacDougall, as an indictment of and a warning to the whites for their “Indian removal” policies.

  Preface to The Leatherstocking Tales [1850]

  1 (p. 5) Tales [1850]: Cooper wrote this preface for the Putnam’s Author’s Revised Edition of 1850 of the five Leatherstocking Tales. The Deerslayer was the first volume to appear in this new edition of the tales, but the preface was intended to be a general one for all of the tales. The Deerslayer was first published in Philadelphia on August 2 7 , 1841, by Lea and Blanchard. Richard Bentley brought out the British edition in London on September 7, 1841. Cooper usually published first in Britain to protect his British copyright, but in this instance Bentley appears to have had no problem in maintaining the British copyright. The corrected holograph manuscript for The Deerslayer, from which the first American edition was set, is now in the Pier-pont Morgan Library.

  2 (p. 6) original in his mind for the character of Leatherstocking: The leading candidates that readers speculated on were Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, with perhaps a dash of Robin Hood from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) .

  3 (p. 8) “Indians of the school of Heckewelder”: The reference is to John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary and sympathetic observer of the American Indian tribes, on whom Cooper relied for his knowledge of Indian customs, mores, and history. Heckewelder was a kind of early anthropologist who greatly admired the Indian people he wrote about so knowledgeably. See John Heckewelder, An Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States, Philadelphia, Abraham Small, 1819; reprinted as Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. 12, Philadelphia: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1876; and reprinted most recently in New York by Arno Press and the New York Times in 1971.

  The unnamed critic from whom Cooper draws the quotation was probably Lewis Cass, governor of the Michigan Territory (1813-1831), who in 1828 said that Cooper “consulted the book of Mr. Heckewelder, instead of the book of nature.” Or it may have been Robert Montgomery Bird. Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837), a bestseller, was written to contest Cooper’s “poetical illusions” and “beautiful unrealities” by describing, as he says in his preface, “real Indians” who are in fact “ignorant, violent, debased, brutal.”

  Preface to The Deerslayer [1850]

  1 (p. 9) The Deerslayer [1850]: Cooper’s original 1841 preface to The Deerslayer is quite different in tone from the 1850 preface. Cooper states in the 1841 preface that “this book has not been written, without many misgivings, as to its probable reception.” The author hopes that if readers consider “this particular act not the best of the series,” they “will also come to the conclusion that it is not absolutely the worst.” The preface, which has an oddly defensive tone, even contains a reference to the temptation Cooper had “more than once to burn his manuscript, and to turn to some other subject.”

  This depression or sense of foreboding was not justified. The novel was well received, though it was not as successful as some of his earlier works. This may have been due in part to the fact that it was not as widely reviewed as the other works. The Whig press, having been forced to compensate Cooper for their earlier libels, now decided to ignore him. (See the Introduction.)

  Chapter I

  1 (p. 12) The incidents of this tale occurred between the years 1740 and 1745: This places the action around the time of, or a few years prior to, the start of the 1744 King George’s War, precursor to the French and Indian War. There were four wars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries involving the French, British, and Indians in North America, culminating in the major war of 1756-1763, known in the United States as the French and Indian War and in Britain and elsewhere as the Seven Years’ War. The Treaty of Paris (1763) ended French control of Canada and the hostilities in North America east of the Mississippi. French trappers, however, continued to operate farther west for a number of years.

  2 (p. 15) while Deerslayer was several years his junior: Deerslayer is usually considered to be between twenty and twenty-two at this time, which makes him about thirty-seven in The Last of the Mohicans, which takes place in 1757. The ages of the characters and the chronologies of the Leatherstocking Tales, however, do not always quite square. The action in the last section of chapter XXXII of The Deerslayer (pp. 520-522), when Natty, Chingachgook, and Uncas revisit Lake Glimmerglass, would have to occur early in 1757, because Uncas is still alive. He is killed in Mohicans, which takes place in 1757. In Mohicans Uncas is pictured as a mature warrior, not a boy Even if the action of The Deerslayer takes place as early as 1742, Uncas could be at most fifteen when he appears in the final scene at Lake Glimmerglass with his father and Deerslayer. Cooper did not always match up his characters’ ages in the different tales, but Natty more or less ages properly. It is about right for Natty Bumppo to be a “septuagenarian” in The Pioneers; if the novel takes place in 1793, then Natty would be seventy-three, provided he is thirty-seven in Mohicans. It might require a slight stretch for him to be still alive as an octogenarian in The Prairie; if we date his death as 1806, he would have been eighty-six at the time.

  3 (p. 16) “I have now lived ten years with the Delawares”: Presumably, Natty grew up with his foster parents, the Moravian missionaries, until he was about twelve or fourteen and then went to live fulltime with the Delawares, where he acquired his linguistic skills. Natty did know his mother because Hetty reminds him of his mother, so we might guess that his parents died when he was three or four. Why didn’t the missionaries teach him to read and write? Maybe he would have felt more connected to society if he had mastered these gentlemanly white-man’s skills.

  4 (p. 22) “we must be our own judges and executioners”: This exchange clearly contrasts Harry’s purely instrumental morality, which is based on power, with Natty’s “higher law” conceptions. Harry, a hulking brute of a man, personifies the notion that the stronger rule by might. Deerslayer does not accept this idea and believes in a universal morality, but has some difficulty, as we shall see, in reconciling his universalism with his idea of “gifts,” in which elements of moral relativity are embodied.

  Chapter II

  1 (p. 32) “in one affray with the redskins he lost his only son”: This history that Cooper gives us may help to explain Hutter’s willingness later to attack Indian women and children.

  2 (p. 36) He bethought him of his mother ... with a saddened mien: This is one of the rare passages in which Natty thinks back on his childhood. He has suffered a terrible loss. We do not get a similar tender recollection of his foster parents, the Moravian missionaries, but we know that Natty meets Chingachgook when both are very young, and the two are like brothers.

  Chapter III

  1 (p. 42) “A white man’s gifts are Christianized, while a redskin’s are more for the wilderness”: Natty argues initially that there is a moral distinction between whites and Indians by virtue of the whites being Christianized. However, in his subsequent reply to Harry in this scene (several paragraphs down), he seems to make a more finely grained distinction by pointing out that, within the categories of whites and redmen, he does “not deny that there are tribes among the Indians that are nat‘rally pervarse and wicked, as there are nations among the whites.” The Mingos—Natty’s general descriptor for the Iroquois—belong in the wicked category, as do the French, perhaps. Natty would have some trouble with the Delaware or Mohicans—tribes he likes—inasmuch as they converted to Christianity in an ef fort to become assimilated into white society. But we do not encounter a discussion of this issue. Natty has no objection to Chingachgook taking scalps in Mohicans. Uncas in Mohicans, however, is more interested in seeing how the rescued ladies are doing than in taking the scalps of dead enemies. Natty is less solicitous than Uncas is; he is more interested in chasing and killing the fleeing enemies than in checking on the condition of the ladies.

  2 (p. 43) “A law can no more be onlawful, than truth can be
a lie.... law coming from a higher authority”: Harry appears to have Natty trapped by a neat syllogism. The definition of “law” is that which is promulgated by the authorities. Natty’s response is again to refer to the “higher law” background of the American constitution. See Edward S. Corwin, The “Higher Law” Background of American Constitutional Law, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1955.

  3 (p. 47) an artist would have delighted in ... sight of his light-minded beauty: Cooper is here contrasting Natty’s sensibility with Harry’s. Natty has the aesthetic sense to appreciate the scene, but Harry is unmoved. All he can think of is his sexual desire for Judith. This seems not quite fair to Harry; after all, unlike Deerslayer, he has seen Judith and is aware of her attractions. What is wrong with feeling attracted to such a desirable woman? Cooper, who dearly loved his wife and seems never to have been attracted to another woman, seems too ready to condemn Harry in this passage and to celebrate artistic over physical pleasure. As Henry James once remarked of his friend William Dean Howells, his work suffered from the fact that he had known only one woman in his life: his wife.

  Chapter IV

  1 (p. 58) “a question more easily asked than it is answered”: Natty is irritating here; although he has a strong sense of self, he agonizes excessively about his identity. He is “much too humble to be called on for opinions” by either the Indians or whites. But we know that he is not really that humble because he goes on to recite with some pride (on the following pages) the various names the Indians gave him, each of which denotes a special virtue.

  2 (p. 68) “might well have alarmed a sentinel so young and inexperienced”: This is the scene that Mark Twain parodies in his 1895 review. (See the Appendix.) Note that Chief Rivenoak is not quite as inept as Twain contends. Natty calls out a warning to Tom and Harry to pull harder on their towline, causing Rivenoak to land on the deck rather than the roof of the ark. He was doubtless going to cross the roof and cut the line, thus causing the ark to be pulled back into the river by the current. Moreover, Judith’s heroics in quickly pushing him overboard should be noted. Her quick thinking should have impressed Deerslayer and the others more than it apparently did. According to Richard Vanderbeets, “Cooper and the ‘Semblance of Reality’: A Source for The Deerslayer,” American Literature 42 (1971), pp. 544-546, this scene may derive from a similar incident in an 1827 captivity narrative by Charles Johnston, A Narrative of the Incidents Attending the Capture, Detention, and Ransom of Charles Johnston ... , New York, 1827.