7 (p. 8) There was one man, however, who ... formed a marked exception: In this way Cooper introduces David Gamut, who combines two characters with whom his readers would have been familiar. The “bore” was invariably present as comic relief in Walter Scott’s novels, and Washington Irving introduced the comic Yankee as Ichabod Crane in his story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” published in 1819. As the representative of art and Christianity in the savage wilderness, David also has thematic significance for the novel.
8 (p. 10) two females ... prepared to encounter the fatigues of a journey in the woods: While it might strike many modern readers as unbelievable that two young ladies would enter the wilderness to join their father in the middle of a war, Cooper and his contemporaries all knew the story of Jane McCrea: In 1777, during the Revolutionary War, she left Fort Edward to join her beloved in the army of British General John Burgoyne and was scalped by pro-British Indians.
9 (p. 11) fair golden hair, and bright blue eyes: Alice and Cora’s characters are derived from the familiar romance categories of “light” and “dark” heroines. Their physical differences—Alice’s blond hair and blue eyes, Cora’s black hair and dark eyes—correspond to well-established moral and temperamental distinctions: Alice, for example, is pure and modest, while Cora is passionate and proud.
Chapter II
1 (p. 12) six allied nations: There existed for a long time a confederation among the Indian tribes which occupied the northwestern part of the colony of New York, which was at first known as the “Five Nations.” At a later day it admitted another tribe, when the appellation was changed to that of the “Six Nations.” The original confederation consisted of the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Senecas, the Cayugas, and the Onondagas. The sixth tribe was the Tuscaroras. There are remnants of all these people still living on lands secured to them by the State; but they are daily disappearing, either by deaths or by removals to scenes more congenial to their habits. In a short time there will be no remains of these extraordinary people, in those regions in which they dwelt for centuries, but their names. The State of New York has counties named after all of them by the Mohawks and the Tuscaroras. The second river of that State is called the Mohawk. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
2 (p. 13) her Narragansett: In the State of Rhode Island there is a bay called Narragansett, so named after a powerful tribe of Indians, which formerly dwelt on its banks. Accident, or one of those unaccountable freaks which nature sometimes plays in the animal world, gave rise to a breed of horses which were once well known in America by the name of Narragansetts. They were small, commonly of the color called sorrel in America, and distinguished by their habit of pacing. Horses of this race were, and still are, in much request as saddle-horses, on account of their hardiness and the ease of their movements. As they were also sure of foot, the Narragansetts were greatly sought for by females who were obliged to travel over the roots and holes in the “new countries.” (Cooper’s note, 1831)
3 (p. 18) “this gifted work”: The collection of psalms David carries is an edition of The Bay Psalm Book, the first book to be printed in the American colonies. David is probably the first character in a popular American novel to take a hymnal with him wherever he goes, but he is by no means the last. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, for example, carries one with him, and so does another popular character from the mid-nineteenth century, Ellen, the protagonist of Susan Warner’s best-seller The Wide, Wide World.
Chapter III
1 (p. 22) scalping tuft: The North American warrior caused the hair to be plucked from his whole body; a small tuft, only, was left on the crown of his head in order that his enemy might avail himself of it, wrenching off the scalp in the event of his fall. The scalp was the only admissible trophy of victory. Thus, it was deemed more important to obtain the scalp than to kill the man. Some tribes lay great stress on the honor of striking a dead body. These practices have nearly disappeared among the Indians of the Atlantic States. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
2 (p. 22) faded yellow: The hunting-shirt is a picturesque smock frock, being shorter, and ornamented with fringes and tassels. The colors are intended to imitate the hues of the wood with a view to concealment. Many corps of American riflemen have been thus attired; and the dress is one of the most striking of modern times. The hunting-shirt is frequently white. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
3 (p. 22) a rifle of great length: The rifle of the army is short; that of the hunter is always long. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
4 (p. 23) the big river: The Mississippi. The scout alludes to a tradition which is very popular among the tribes of the Atlantic States. Evidence of their Asiatic origin is deduced from the circumstances, though great uncertainty hangs over the whole history of the Indians. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
Chapter IV
1 (p. 31) Major Effingham: Original readers of Mohicans would have recognized this name from Cooper’s earlier novel The Pioneers. Major Effingham appears briefly at the end of that novel, and his grandson Edward is the story’s hero. Hawkeye also appears in The Pioneers and, known as Natty Bumppo and Leatherstocking, is a “servant” of the Effingham family.
2 (p. 34) his light: The scene of this tale was in the 42d degree of latitude, where the twilight is never of long continuance. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
Chapter V
1 (p. 43) “You are at the foot of Glenn‘s”: Glens Falls, on the Hudson River, was a popular scenic attraction in Cooper’s day. In the summer of 1824, Cooper visited the falls and its caverns with a party of English noblemen on a tour of the United States. According to Cooper’s daughter Susan, the idea for the novel was born when one of the visitors remarked that “here was the very scene for a romance.”
2 (p. 44) the Hollanders: The reader will remember that New York was originally a colony of the Dutch. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
3 (p. 45) the castle: The principal villages of the Indians are still called “castles” by the whites of New York. “Oneida castle” is no more than a scattered hamlet; but the name is in general use. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
Chapter VI
1 (p. 49) “a relish too”: In vulgar parlance the condiments of a repast are called by the American “a relish,” substituting the thing for its effect. These provincial terms are frequently put in the mouths of the speakers, according to their several conditions in life. Most of them are of local use, and others quite peculiar to the particular class of men to which the character belongs. In the present instance, the scout uses the word with immediate reference to the salt, with which his own party was so fortunate as to be provided. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
2 (p. 50) Glenn’s: Glenn’s Falls are on the Hudson, some forty or fifty miles above the head of tide, or the place where that river becomes navigable for sloops. The description of this picturesque and remarkable little cataract, as given by the scout, is sufficiently correct, though the application of the water to the uses of civilized life has materially injured its beauties. The rocky island and the two caverns are well known to every traveller, since the former sustains a pier of a bridge, which is now thrown across the river, immediately above the fall. In explanation of the taste of Hawkeye, it should be remembered that men always prize that most which is least enjoyed. Thus, in a new country, the woods and other objects, which in an old country would be maintained at great cost, are got rid of, simply with a view of “improving,” as it is called. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
3 (p. 51) his deep, guttural voice: The meaning of Indian words is much governed by the emphasis and tones. (Cooper’s note, 1826)
Chapter VII
1 (p. 64) “a Maqua”: Mingo was the Delaware term for the Five Nations. Maquas was the name given them by the Dutch. The French, from their first intercourse with them, called them Iroquois. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
Chapter X
1 (p. 95) The medal: It has long been a practice with the whites to conciliate the important men of the Indians, by presenting medals, which are worn in the place of their own rude ornaments.
Those given by the English generally bear the impression of the reigning king, and those given by the Americans that of the president. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
Chapter XII
1 (p. 111) The Hurons stood aghast at this sudden visitation of death on one of their band: According to Susan Fenimore Cooper, her father dictated an outline of the extremely violent events that transpire here while bedridden with a high fever. His wife, who wrote down his ideas, thought Cooper was delirious, but when Cooper recovered he turned the notes into this account.
2 (p. 117) “Book! What have such as I ... to do with books? I never read”: Hawkeye is illiterate, and throughout the Leatherstocking Tales expresses his pride in being so. His scorn for the people who make and read books makes him the first in an impressive line of American fictive heroes who are defined by their antipathy to reading. Others include the hero of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn.
3 (p. 123) the licks: Many of the animals of the American forests resort to those spots where salt springs are found. These are called “licks” or “salt licks,” in the language of the country, from the circumstance that the quadruped is often obliged to lick the earth, in order to obtain the saline particles. These licks are great places of resort with the hunters, who waylay their game near the paths that lead to them. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
4 (p. 123) silent spring: The scene of the foregoing incidents is on the spot where the village of Ballston now stands; one of the two principal watering places of America. (Cooper’s note, 1831. The other “watering place,” or mineral springs to which fashionable ladies and gentlemen resorted in the warm months, was nearby Saratoga Springs.)
Chapter XIII
1 (p. 125) the surrounding scenery: Some years since, the writer was shooting in the vicinity of the ruins of Fort Oswego, which stands on the shores of Lake Ontario. His game was deer, and his chase a forest that stretched with little interruption, fifty miles inland. Unexpectedly he came upon six or eight ladders lying in the woods within a short distance of each other. They were rudely made, and much decayed. Wondering what could have assembled so many of these instruments in such a place, he sought an old man who resided near for an explanation. During the war of 1776 Fort Oswego was held by the British. An expedition had been sent two hundred miles through the wilderness to surprise the fort. It appears that the Americans, on reaching the spot named, which was within a mile or two of the fort, first learned that they were expected, and in great danger of being cut off. They threw away their scaling ladders, and made a rapid retreat. These ladders had lain unmolested thirty years, in the spot where they had thus been cast. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
Chapter XIV
1 (p. 135) “here is the ’bloody’ pond... to the setting sun”: Hawkeye refers to a set of battles that took place during the first year of the French and Indian War. French forces (including Indian allies) under the command of General Lud wig Dieskau fought colonial American forces (with their Indian allies) under Major General William Johnson, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for British North America.
2 (p. 135) the Dutch-Frenchman: Baron Dieskau, a German, in the service of France. A few years previous to the period of the tale, this officer was defeated by Sir William Johnson of Johnstown, New York, on the shores of Lake George. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
3 (p. 138) “the natur’ of an Indian”: Despite Hawkeye’s association of scalping with “Indian nature,” all three of the European colonial powers in North America (England, France, and Spain) encouraged and sponsored the practice by paying their Indian allies and, in some cases, white settlers bounties on Indian scalps (from men, women, and children). Note that when the novel describes Chingachgook in chapter III, the scalping knife he carries is “of English manufacture” (see p. 22).
Chapter XV
1 (p. 148) a statesman: Evidently the late De Witt Clinton, who died governor of New York, in 1828. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
Chapter XVII
1 (p. 180) the crimson tide: Cooper’s depiction of “the massacre at Fort William Henry,” as the event was called, is based on accounts in a number of sources, including contemporary newspaper reports (especially the New York Mercury, August 22, 1757) and first-person memoirs (especially Jonathan Carver’s Three Years Travel Through the Interior Parts of North America, 1784). On the whole, Cooper follows his sources carefully.
2 (p. 183) the triumphant savages: In the United States at this time, novels were published in two volumes. In the first American editions of The Last of the Mohicans , volume one ends here. (In England, on the other hand, novels appeared in three volumes, so volume one of John Miller’s 1826 London printing ended with chapter XII, and volume two, with chapter XXII.)
Chapter XVIII
1 (p. 190) he examined it: Cooper’s sources—in particular, John Heckewelder’s Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania (1819) and Jonathan Carver’s Three Years Travel Through the Interior Parts of North America—offered examples of the Indians’ skill at tracking and interpreting physical clues. In turn, Cooper’s representation may have influenced the creators of detective fiction: Both Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes behave much like Chingachgook and Uncas at the crime scenes to which they are called.
2 (p. 192) the first catbird: The powers of the American mockingbird are generally known. But the true mockingbird is not found so far north as the state of New York, where it has, however, two substitutes of inferior excellence; the catbird, so often named by the scout, and the bird vulgarly called ground-thresher. Either of these two last birds is superior to the nightingale, or the lark, though, in general, the American birds are less musical than those of Europe. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
Chapter XX
1 (p. 209) the narrows of the lake: The beauties of Lake George are well known to every American tourist. In the height of the mountains which surround it, and in artificial accessories, it is inferior to the finest of the Swiss and the Italian lakes, while in outline and purity of water it is fully their equal; and in number and disposition of its isles and islets much superior to them all together. There are said to be some hundreds of islands in a sheet of water less than thirty miles long. The narrows which connect what may be called, in truth, two lakes, are crowded with islands to such a degree as to leave passages between them, frequently of only a few feet in width. The lake, itself, varies in breadth from one to three miles. The state of New York is remarkable for the number and beauty of its lakes. One of its frontiers lies on the vast sheet of Ontario, while Champlain stretches nearly a hundred miles along another. Oneida, Cayuga, Canandaigua, Seneca, and George, are all lakes of thirty miles in length, while those of a size smaller are without number. On most of these lakes, there are now beautiful villages, and on many of them steamboats. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
Chapter XXV
1 (p. 264) the animal had suddenly changed: Cooper derives this account of the beast from John Heckewelder’s description of an Indian conjuror. The many metamorphoses in this section of the novel evoke the classical association of the greenwood with transformation, which would have been familiar to Cooper’s readers from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Chapter XXVII
1 (p. 292) the Prince of Darkness: Magua’s villainy probably owes something to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (in which Satan’s demagogic skills as an orator are similar to those of Magua) as well as to the comparison that Cotton Mather and other seventeenth-century New England Puritans made between Native Americans in the woods and the forces of evil in the howling wilderness.
2 (p. 293) so renowned: These harangues of the beasts are frequent among the Indians. They often address their victims in this way, reproaching them for cowardice, or commending their resolution, as they may happen to exhibit fortitude or the reverse in suffering. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
Chapter XXVIII
1 (p. 296) “succo
tash”: A dish composed of cracked corn and beans. It is much used also by the whites. By corn is meant maize. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
2 (p. 303) the name of “Tamenund”: Sometimes referred to as Tammany or Tamenay, Tamenund was a seventeenth-century Delaware chief who had assumed legendary status as a wise governor by the late eighteenth century, when the St. Tammany Society was formed to celebrate the synthesis of European and Native American cultures. Not long after Cooper wrote Mohicans “Tammany Hall” became associated with big city political corruption.
Chapter XXIX
1 (p. 307) “prove which is the man”: By having Hawkeye prove himself in a marksmanship contest, Cooper connects his character not only to American frontier figures like Davy Crockett, but also to Robin Hood, a major character in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1817).
2 (p. 315) Minquon: William Penn was termed Minquon by the Delawares, and, as he never used violence or injustice in his dealings with them his reputation for probity passed into a proverb. The American is justly proud of the origin of his nation, which is perhaps unequalled in the history of the world; but the Pennsylvanian and Jerseyman have more reason to value themselves in their ancestors than the natives of any other State, since no wrong was done the original owners of the soil. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
3 (p. 316) “the curse of my ancestors”: When Tamenund notes that white men only marry women with blood “the color of snow,” it becomes clear that Cora thinks of her mother, who was “descended, remotely,” from African slaves. Cora accepts her mixed racial identity as the “curse” she cannot escape and is the first example in American literature of the “tragic mulatta” figure, a culturally significant revision of the “dark heroine.”
Chapter XXX
1 (p. 321) Unamis:Turtle. (Cooper’s note, 1826)
Chapter XXXI
1 (p. 330) blazed: A tree which has been partially or entirely stripped of its bark is said, in the language of the country, to be “blazed.” The term is strictly English; for a horse is said to be blazed when it has a white mark. (Cooper’s note, 1831)
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