Chapter XXXII
1 (p. 343) “horse”: The American forest admits of the passage of horse, there being little underbrush, and few tangled brakes. The plan of Hawkeye is the one which has always proved the most successful in the battles between the whites and the Indians. Wayne, in his celebrated campaign on the Miami, received the fire of his enemies in line; and then causing his dragoons to wheel round his flanks, the Indians were driven from their covers before they had time to load. One of the most conspicuous of the chiefs who fought in the battle of Miami assured the writer that the Red Men could not fight the warriors with “long knives and leather stockings”; meaning the dragoons with their sabers and boots. (Cooper’s note, 1831. He is referring to the Battle of Fallen Timbers, in Ohio, in 1794.)
Chapter XXXIII
1 (p. 361) “without distinction of ... color”: While the taboo on interracial marriage that Hawkeye and the narrator subscribe to was the conventional opinion of their times, it was in fact not uncommon for young white women carried off from settlements by Native Americans to marry into the tribes. Other American novels from the 1820s, including Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok and Catherine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, feature such marriages.
INSPIRED BY THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS
Not surprisingly, given the novel’s enormous popularity, The Last of the Mohicans has been made into more than a dozen films. Hollywood’s infatuation with this American classic can be traced to 1909, when D. W. Griffith brought out Leather Stocking, a one-reeler starring his wife. The novel also inspired what is considered to be one of the best silent films ever made, director Maurice Tourneur’s The Last of the Mohicans (1920). Tourneur cast Wallace Beery as Magua and Albert Rosco as Uncas, and Boris Karloff had an uncredited walk-on as a looting Indian. Unlike most other directors, Tourneur remained quite faithful to the plot of the novel, and his film culminates with a vivid massacre sequence.
Director George B. Seitz found inspiration in Cooper’s works twice: once in 1924, with The Leather Stocking Tales, and again in 1936, with The Last of the Mohicans. Starring the muscular Randolph Scott as Hawkeye in perhaps the performance of his career, Seitz’s Mohicans offers brutal depictions of the French and Indian War, exciting chase sequences complete with ambushes by the intensely wicked Magua (Bruce Cabot), and twin tales of gripping romance, although the one between Hawkeye and Alice takes center stage.
Using the screenplay from Seitz’s film as a point of departure, Michael Mann directed a lavish production of The Last of the Mohicans in 1992. Mann’s film is a feast of sumptuous cinematography (with the verdant forests of North Carolina as a backdrop), nonstop action and chase scenes, and booming sound (which won the film an Oscar), but it bears so little resemblance to Cooper’s work that fans of the novel will probably find it difficult to recognize the plot. Many of the story twists are invented or borrowed from other Cooper works, and the characters—Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Hawkeye, supported by Madeleine Stowe as Cora, and Wes Studi as the menacing Magua—are, to say the least, romanticized versions of those created by Cooper. Even so, it’s hard not to fall under the spell of the film’s now-famous under-the-waterfall scene, in which the swashbuckling Hawkeye tells Cora, “No matter what happens, I will find you,” a classic if campy celluloid moment.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
W. H. GARDINER
The greatest fault of [Last of the Mohicans] upon the whole is a little overdoing of the very thing which constitutes its chief excellence. The incidents are too crowded; there are too many imminent dangers and hair breadth escapes; far too much of the same sort of excitement; too many startling sights, and unearthly sounds, and amazing accidents. We scarcely set out ere we meet some shaggy monster thwarting our path; and as we advance ‘on Horror’s head horrors accumulate,’ so that there is not a moment’s feeling of ease and security, and comfortable recreation from one end of our journey to the other. If a horror is not actually going on before our eyes we know at least that it is in preparation and not far off. There is a sort of perpetual consciousness that we are seated upon a barrel of gunpowder; and after one grand explosion is past, instead of finding a fit occasion for thanking our stars that the danger is all over, we have only time to wonder what the conjurer will do next, before we find ourselves again up in the air. This results in part from the nature of the subject, scenes of war in a wilderness and among savages. But these might have been relieved, and their effect consequently heightened, by the mixture of a little quiet domestic life, if our author had any turn that way; a few in-door pictures something above those at the quarters of Colonel Munro, and a few strokes of humor, a little better, we should hope, than David’s intolerable psalmody, would have been a prodigious improvement. At any rate, without the introduction of new characters, or material alterations of the scene, we might have been horrified, and alarmed, and astonished less frequently than we are, to great advantage.
—from the North American Review (July 1826)
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
Leatherstocking is ... a philosopher of the woods, ignorant of books, but instructed in all that nature, without the aid of science, could reveal to the man of quick senses and inquiring intellect, whose life has been passed under the open sky, and in companionship with a race whose animal perceptions are the acutest and most cultivated of which there is any example. But Leatherstocking has higher qualities; in him there is a genial blending of the gentlest virtues of the civilized man with the better nature of the aboriginal tribes; all that in them is noble, generous, and ideal is adopted into his own kindly character, and all that is evil is rejected. But why should I attempt to analyze a character so familiar? Leatherstocking is acknowledged, on all hands, to be one of the noblest, as well as most striking and original, creations of fiction.
—from Prose Writings of William Cullen Bryant (1884)
MARK TWAIN
Cooper’s gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of a moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was the broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred other handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can’t do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leatherstocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series....
If Cooper had been an observer his inventive faculty would have worked better; not more interestingly, but more rationally, more plausibly. Cooper’s proudest creations in the way of “situations” suffer noticeably from the absence of the observer’s protecting gift. Cooper’s eye was splendidly inaccurate. Cooper seldom saw anything correc
tly. He saw nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly. Of course a man who cannot see the commonest little every-day matters accurately is working at a disadvantage when he is constructing a “situation.” ...
Cooper’s word-sense was singularly dull. When a person has a poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he does not say it. This is Cooper. He was not a word-musician. His ear was satisfied with the approximate words.
—from Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences (1895)
D. H. LAWRENCE
[The Leatherstocking books] form a sort of American Odyssey, with Natty Bumppo for Odysseus.
—from Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)
CARL VAN DOREN
Nature in America is no longer so solitary, and no longer so ennobling, but much of this older simplicity, downrightness, courage, competence, unsophistication, and virgin prejudice still marks the national type. Generation after generation of American boys has read these romances as they have read no others. Boys of other nations and races have admired in Leather-Stocking qualities generously transcending merely national ones.
—from The American Novel (1940)
Questions
1. Though W H. Gardiner (see above) criticizes The Last of the Mohicans for its sustained suspense and urgency, doesn’t Cooper’s style predict modern thrillers? Do novelists like Tom Clancy and John Grisham come from an American tradition that Cooper began with his Leatherstocking Tales?
2. Some critics have complained that Cooper’s prose is clunky, his plots derivative, his knowledge of woodcraft slight, his depiction of Native Americans based on rumor, fantasy, and prejudice. Are charges of this sort just?
3. The Last of the Mohicans was popular when published and continues to be widely read. What is it about the novel that has pleased so many readers for so long a time?
4. Hawkeye moves back and forth between civilization, represented by the whites, and the wilderness, represented by the Native Americans. Where does Cooper position the reader?
5. Among Hawkeye, civilization, and the wilderness, which is more attractive? Why?
6. What interesting and true points can you make about Cooper’s women characters?
FOR FURTHER READING
Other Works by James Fenimore Cooper
Precaution (1820)
The Spy (1821)
The Pilot (1823)
The Pioneers (1823)
Lionel Lincoln (1825)
The Prairie (1827)
The Red Rover (1827)
Notions of the Americans (1828)
The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829)
The Water-Witch (1830)
The Bravo (1831)
The Heidenmauer (1832)
The Headsman (1833)
The Monikins (1835)
The American Democrat (1838)
Homeward Bound (1838)
Home as Found (1838)
The Pathfinder (1840)
The Deerslayer (1841)
Satanstoe (1845)
The Chainbearer (1845)
The Redskins (1846)
Biography
Beard, James Franklin, ed. The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper. 6 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960-1968.
Dekker, George. James Fenimore Cooper: The American Scott. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967.
Grossman, James. James Fenimore Cooper. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1949.
Railton, Stephen. Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Spiller, Robert. Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Time. New York: Minton, Balch, 1931.
Studies of the Leatherstocking Tales
Barker, Martin, and Roger Sabin. The Lasting of the Mohicans: History of an American Myth. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion Books, 1960.
Kelly, William P. Plotting America’s Past: Fenimore Cooper and the Leatherstocking Tales. Carbon-dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923. Reprint: New York: Viking, 1964.
McWilliams, John. “The Last of the Mohicans”: Civil Savagery and Savage Civility. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.
Peck, H. Daniel, ed. New Essays on “The Last of the Mohicans.” Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Rans, Geoffrey. Cooper’s Leather-stocking Novels: A Secular Reading. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Historical Contexts for The Last of the Mohicans
Frazier, Patrick. The Mohicans of Stockbridge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.
Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.
Maddox, Lucy. Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Rogin, Michael. Fathers and Children:Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950.
VanDerBeets, Richard, ed. Held Captive by Indians: Selected Narratives, 1642-1836. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973.
a The reference is to Lake George, named for George II, king of England from 1727 to 1760.
b New London and New Haven, Connecticut.
c Gamut is citing the Bible, Job 39:21-25.
d From The Merchant of Venice (act 5, scene 1).
e An easy canter or gait.
f On one side only (Latin).
g Three-cornered hat made of beaver skin.
h Greek god of music.
i Psalm 133:1-2.
j George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), a German composer who lived in England.
k From the poem “An Indian at the Burial-Place of His Fathers” (1824), by American poet and editor William Cullen Bryant.
l Alcoholic drinks.
m “Sagamore” typically means “chief,” but Cooper seems to use it to refer to a clan; see p. 127, “a chief of the great Mohican Sagamores.”
n The colt is nursing from the mare.
o “The subtle fox,” as Magua is called by the French in Canada.
p Psalm 135:8-9.
q From “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” (1785), by Scottish poet Robert Burns.
r Natty’s malapropism for “mahogany.”
s Beer made from the leaves and buds of the spruce tree.
t Troops raised by the Connecticut colony.
u From “The Bard” (1756), by British poet Thomas Gray.
v From “The Bard” (1756), by British poet Thomas Gray.
w From Agrippina, a Tragedy (1741) , by British poet Thomas Gray.
x Regional form of a language, in this case Canadian French.
y “The long rifle,” as the French and their allies call Hawkeye.
z French for Chingachgook, or “Big Snake” in English.
aa French for “Nimble Deer,” another name for Uncas.
ab Spirits of the dead in ancient Rome.
ac Superintendent of Indian Affairs for British North America from 1756 to 1774.
ad From William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (act 1, scene 3).
ae Quebec.
af Lake Ontario.
ag The look of the
basilisk, a lengendary reptile, is supposedly deadly.
ah The colony of Connecticut.
ai From “Night-piece on Death,” by Irish poet Thomas Parnell (1733).
aj Stephen Van Rensselaer (c. 1580-1644), a Dutch colonial patroon, or manorial lord.
ak Gate in the wall of a fort.
al Area around the outer walls of a fort that has been cleared of growth.
am Fort at the northern end of Lake George.
an General John Burgoyne commanded Britain’s troops during the American Revolution.
ao Small mountain overlooking Fort Ticonderoga.
ap The Erie Canal, opened in 1825 to connect the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.
aq Member of the Scottish nobility.
ar The Duke of York, a son of King George II.
as The English Royal Arsenal.
at John Campbell, who at the time of the novel’s action commanded all British troops in North America.
au The French general Montcalm died in the fighting against the British outside Quebec in 1759.
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