James Fenimore Cooper is a more honest writer than Mark Twain

The fact that while these books were being written and published, the people they were about were being ethnically cleansed from New York—that is a very uncomfortable fact. But these books do not ignore that fact. That fact is what the books are about.

I've been reading James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales recently, and I've been enjoying them so much that I'm starting to wonder if they might actually be good.

I find myself a bit hesitant to come out categorically and say, "Yes The Leatherstocking Tales are good!" Because in the prevailing imagination, these books—a series of early 19th-century adventure novels about a virtuous hunter named Natty Bumppo—are not considered very good anymore. When it comes to 19th-century American literature, there are certain writers we agree are good (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe) and certain writers we no longer think are good (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe).¹ We understand that once upon a time, James Fenimore Cooper was highly respected, but the prevailing consensus is that the people who respected him were incorrect, and actually he’s a bad writer.

I don't know how these decisions get made. Surely very few people have actually read enough 19th-century American writers that they can confidently make a judgement. But I've been posting on Substack Notes about Cooper and have gotten maybe two or three responses from people who've actually read his books (and I think only one from someone who enjoyed them). In contrast, I got eighty responses when I posted about Twain. So...there's a definite discrepancy here in reputation that's not just in my own head.

What I can say confidently about the five novels of Cooper's that I've completed (Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, The Pioneers, The Pathfinder, and The Prairie) is that they gave me a lot of pleasure. Probably more pleasure, if I'm being honest, than I got from reading Walter Scott several years ago. I also think Cooper's novels have a lot of literary merit—the sort of merit that would lead me to discuss them on my blog—but that their literary merit is of a form that's not particularly fashionable these days.

These books are about Natty Bumppo—a person who's most frequently described as a hunter or tracker. He lives in New York in the 18th century. All of these five novels, which are collectively called The Leatherstocking Tales, are historical novels, they are set between twenty and seventy years prior to the time in which they were published.

The first of these books (The Pioneers) was published in 1823. The last (The Deerslayer) was published in 1841. The Indian Removal Act, which uprooted many of the same tribes mentioned in these novels, happened in 1830. By the time these books were published, New York was no longer the frontier. All of this stuff was the past. The Last of the Mohicans is about the War of 1757 (which I learned about in school as The French and Indian War). That is almost seventy years before the book was published (in 1826). As remote as the Korean War is to us.

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The book that's both the best and the most famous is The Last of the Mohicans. This novel is told in a third-person, omniscient point of view, so the book starts off with a description of this somewhat-remote time and place:

It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet...

It goes on for a few pages, describing the political and geographic situation. The book was written, in part, for European audiences who know nothing about America, which means it’s also very accessible for equally-ignorant people living 200 years after it was written. As in this passage describing the progress of the war, the text largely assumes we know nothing about the historical or social system in this time and place:

The imbecility of her military leaders abroad, and the fatal want of energy in her councils at home, had lowered the character of Great Britain from the proud elevation on which it had been placed by the talents and enterprise of her former warriors and statesmen. No longer dreaded by her enemies, her servants were fast losing the confidence of self-respect. In this mortifying abasement, the colonists, though innocent of her imbecility, and too humble to be the agents of her blunders, were but the natural participators.

The book proceeds to describe a military detachment traveling through the forests of New York, attempting to reach a nearby fort.

This detachment runs into three people: the hunter Natty Bumppo and his two companions, the Indians known as Chingachgook and Uncas. And Natty Bumppo tells the commander that their Indian guide (who is known as Magua) might be trying to lead them into a trap.

Natty Bumppo isn't sure this is the case! But he definitely suspects it might be true. He says where you guys think you are is so far away from where you actually are that whoever you're listening to must be trying to trick you. Also, the guide is a Huron, and Natty Bumppo hates the Huron. Natty was raised by the Delaware, and to him the only good Indians are Delaware, like his friends Chingachgook and Uncas.

Bumppo realizes that if they're being led into a trap, then there must be a band of Huron nearby trying to assault them, so he takes charge, and there's all kinds of adventures. I found it very engaging. Quite frequently I thought, "How can they possibly get out of this situation!" But then they do. Some things taxed my patience a bit, particularly in the second half, when a bear costume makes a strong appearance. But generally I was quite entertained, to a degree that's unusual for me, when I read these books. I know it's not literally true that a twelve year old would enjoy the story, but I certainly felt much the same as when I was twelve, reading Lord of the Rings.

I don't know that the story of Last of the Mohicans is really any more far-fetched than Huckleberry Finn. If a twelve-year old started to raft down the Mississippi for any length of time, they would die. What gives the narrative of Huckleberry Finn its forward propulsion is that this enterprise is so iffy. Where are they going? How are they going to get food? How will they escape the slave-catchers? They're trying to hide out on the river, which is somewhat doable, but it's only possible because the river itself is so dangerous.

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Okay, so the story is one thing. But the real question is this idea of literary merit. I personally don't really buy into prevailing ideas about literary merit, where it inheres, like magic, into the structure and syntax of the writing, and the content supposedly has nothing to do with it. That to me is a cop-out, that's not really how people experience literary merit. It's just mystification, which turns literary merit into something that only some special priesthood can assess.

I think what many critics have found difficult about Last of the Mohicans is the character of Natty Bumppo, Uncas, and Chingachgook. These are good, decent people. They are moved by the plight of two women, Cora and Alice, who are accompanying this detachment. And they want to help these women, even at the expense of their lives. To what extent, a critic might ask, can we really believe in the idea of these men, with their spirit of noble self-sacrifice?

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Cooper definitely interrogates this vision of frontier nobility. I think what's clear in the broader context of this series of tales is that Nathaniel Bumppo is exceptional. In The Deerslayer, which is a prequel to Last of the Mohicans, there is a character named Hurry Harry, and this guy doesn't have much respect for Natty, thinks he's a bit effeminate, and condescends to him a bit, because Bumppo doesn't want to kill people. Bumppo is a great hunter, a much better shot than Harry, but he's not anxious to kill people.

It's been so fascinating, for me, to see the evolution of this character. The first-written of the books, The Pioneers, takes place in a very different, much more settled civilization. It presents Bumppo as being grizzled and hardened, somewhat bitter because this land which he has hunted for years, is now owned by Marmaduke Temple, a local dignitary who condescends somewhat to Bumppo. In that novel, Bumppo talks about what he did in the '57 war, but that time seems extremely remote from the time of this book.

These two later novels, Last of the Mohicans and Deerslayer, are prequels to The Pioneers. They are an attempt to fill out some idea of what world might've given rise to this man.

I think it's fair to say that the vision here isn't necessarily fully coherent, because Natty Bumppo is, at least in two of these books, The Pioneers and Last of the Mohicans, presented as an archetypal frontiersman and the voice of the wilds—an heir to these Indians, Chingachgook and Uncas. But we see in The Deerslayer that actually most of the other frontierspeople were suspicious of the Indians—the action of the story begins when Harry and Hutter try to kill a band of Huron to scalp them and collect a bounty offered on Indian scalps by the colonial government.

That's really the question that's at stake in James Fenimore Cooper's work, which is...was our presence good? Was colonization and settlement good? Is the spread of Western Civilization good?

That's not just something I'm reading into the book. It seems like there's a very clear grappling there. At the end of The Last of the Mohicans, Uncas dies trying to save a British girl, Cora (who also dies). At the end, there's a funeral, where some Indian women who are from a different, but related tribe, imagine an afterlife for these two people.

Then, in a wild burst of their chant they sang with united voices the temper of the Mohican’s mind. They pronounced him noble, manly and generous; all that became a warrior, and all that a maid might love. Clothing their ideas in the most remote and subtle images, they betrayed, that, in the short period of their intercourse, they had discovered, with the intuitive perception of their sex, the truant disposition of his inclinations. The Delaware girls had found no favor in his eyes! He was of a race that had once been lords on the shores of the salt lake, and his wishes had led him back to a people who dwelt about the graves of his fathers. Why should not such a predilection be encouraged! That she was of a blood purer and richer than the rest of her nation, any eye might have seen; that she was equal to the dangers and daring of a life in the woods, her conduct had proved; and now, they added, the ‘wise one of the earth’ had transplanted her to a place where she would find congenial spirits, and might be forever happy.

In the text, during their life, there's really not much suggestion that Uncas and Cora had any romance, by the way. Cora is drawn to Uncas, but the idea that they could be together romantically is not present. This is mostly a fantasy that these Indian women (who didn't know Uncas particularly well) are reading into his story—something the above paragraph makes clear, if you read closely.

The book is called Last of the Mohicans. That's the whole question here: was it actually good for Uncas to get enrolled into this adventure? At the end of the book, Uncas is reunited with a sister tribe and they encounter a legendary chieftain Tamenzund—a real figure in American history who became legendary, under the name "Tammany", at some point in the 19th-century as a figure of American and Indian comity--and Tamenzund has been driven from his homeland, in Pennsylvania, and now he's up north and enrolled in this war, fighting alongside the Huron, who are typically the enemy of his people, and fundamentally...he's resisting colonization. Resisting the white people. That's how he understands it.

Keep in mind, this is a figure who in 1826 was legendary amongst white people for being friendly to settlers. Cooper is making a pretty explicit statement here by bringing in this real figure.

Because he's friends with Bumppo, Uncas is on the side of white maidens who are in trouble. But Tamenzund isn't necessarily on that side! The evil chief, Magua, really wants to marry Cora. It's not good, everyone understands that, because he wants to do it as punishment against Cora's father, who whipped Magua once. Magua keeps being offered all kinds of rewards in order to give up Cora, and he keeps saying no. But the other Indians also don't fully understand Cora's reluctance, because...you know...her resistance is based fundamentally on the idea that she is higher and better than they are—she would rather die than live amongst them.

Natty Bumppo in The Deerslayer also puts off the Indians who capture him in the same way. They respect his skills as a warrior, and they offer to let him live if he'll marry the widow of the person he killed.

Throughout the series, Bumppo talks in very sententious speeches that other characters have varying degrees of patience for. And you can very much imagine how he's trying the patience of this Indian chief here:

"I fear’d this, Rivenoak,” answered Deerslayer, when the other had ceased speaking “Yes, I did dread that it would come to this. Howsever, the truth is soon told, and that will put an end to all expectations on this head. Mingo, I’m white and christian born; a’t would ill become me to take a wife, under red-skin forms, from among heathen. That which I wouln’t do, in peaceable times, and under a bright sun, still less would I do behind clouds, in order to save my life. I may never marry; most likely Providence in putting me, up here, in the woods, has intended I should live single, and without a lodge of my own; but should such a thing come to pass, none but a woman of my own colour and gifts shall darken the door of my wigwam."

But you don't actually have to imagine how this speech would be received, because the narration tells you. In fact you get Rivenoak's thoughts in response:

This grim chief had thought it a degradation to permit his sister to become the wife of a pale face of the Yengeese, at all, and had only given a reluctant consent to the arrangement— one by no means unusual among the Indians, however—at the earnest solicitations of the bereaved widow; and it goaded him to the quick to find his condescension slighted, the honor he had with so much regret been persuaded to accord, contemned.

In general, the Indians in these books seem very fully imagined. They act in the ways you'd expect a human being to act. Yes, they often speak in a very elevated way, but quite frequently they're speaking in their own native tongue, which is being translated by the narration.

I really appreciated the effort by Cooper to imagine how life might work amongst these very different people. For instance, he's quite careful in Last of the Mohicans to describe how power and leadership work amongst these bands, and the climax of the book is a long discussion about whether or not the Delaware should punish Bumppo, Chingachgook and Uncas. Yes, these books have a lot of discussions and tribunals, but do we think the Indians didn't have those things? That they didn't gather to carefully weigh right and wrong?

The details of the practices amongst these people might be inaccurate, but Cooper is also careful to note that the people themselves are in flux. The Delaware and the Huron are often enemies: they're being forced by this war into an alliance. This particular branch of the Delaware used to live in Pennsylvania, they've been forced far from their usual home. All of these societies are changing a lot.

I personally really like Natty Bumppo and Uncas and Chinghchachgook. I like their nobility, and the fact that they try to do what is right. They exist in a world where a lot of people don't act well, but they're doing their best. They have a code that they live by. And I think Cooper does a good job of showing that there are standards of decency that both the Indians and white people are able to respect, even if they're usually disobeyed. For instance, in Deerslayer, the Indians who've captured him grant Bumppo some parole, and they're surprised he actually comes back. They understand that in these situations, people usually don't come back, but that the good thing to do is to actually return. The fact that they offer to spare his life by letting him marry into the tribe—this offer only occurs after he comes back. It's a reward for not breaking his parole, and it's a recognition of the fact that it would be morally wrong to kill someone who refused to break their parole.

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The fact that while these books were being written and published, the people they were about were being ethnically cleansed from New York is a very uncomfortable fact. But these books do not ignore that fact. That fact is what the books are about.

Bumppo himself identifies with white civilization—he's constantly making these speeches about how white things are for white people and injin things are for injin people. But his chosen family is Chingachgook, who's his brother. Bumppo isn't able to fully identify with the Indian cause or to see himself as an agent of white civilization, because...he's just a guy. He's a hunter. He has no family. He's illiterate for god's sake.

I think it would be quite disingenuous of these books to pretend that all Indian people are good, or to have a hero that advocates whole-heartedly for the Indian cause. That's the thing that Cooper grapples with very explicitly, in all of these books. The Pioneers, the first of these books, is about a town modeled on Cooperstown, which is the town Cooper's own father founded. And the plot of this book hinges on a prosecution against Natty Bumppo for shooting a deer out of season. They put Bumppo in the stocks. He's been shooting deer here for fifty years, and suddenly it's illegal? That's just not right.

It'd be very glib and facile to say, oh, Bumppo took the land from the Indians. But...did he? It's true that in some larger way, Bumppo was part of the socio-historical process that resulted in this town being settled. But that's exactly what the book is about! That complexity. Bumppo never really owned this territory, but he belonged here somehow, and he possesses some rights that are not really accounted for by the law. And in that book, you have the character of Indian John, who is Chingachgook, and the text explicitly brings up the parallel between him and Natty.

The fact that there's no broader, easily-digestible, glib message about colonization and settlement? That's exactly why Cooper's work is good.

Cooper's work is difficult in the best possible way. It's easy to read, but hard to digest. You read the story, you're so entertained, but at the end, you're like, "What was this trying to say? So...were the Indians good or bad? Was settlement good or bad?" There's no easy answer in the text.

Most American writers just ignore this problem. Mark Twain did a hatchet job on Cooper by saying his work is poorly-written and unbelievable. The specific things he says against these books are unbelievably unfair. He hardly discusses The Last of the Mohicans, which is the best of the books. Reading his essay, I honestly don't even recognize the portrait he's painted of Cooper's novels. They do not hinge on twigs snapping, for instance—that is not a major or frequent plot point. It's just a lazy caricature of his style, characterization, and plotting.

I think the real reason he hated Cooper is revealed in a different collection of his. In Roughing It, Mark Twain has a famous passage about an Indian tribe, the Goshoots. He paints this tribe as vile and dirty. And then he goes on to say the following:

The disgust which the Goshoots gave me, a disciple of Cooper and a worshipper of the Red Man—even of the scholarly savages in the “Last of the Mohicans—who are fittingly associated with backwoodsmen who divide each sentence into two equal parts: one part critically grammatical, refined and choice of language, and the other part just such an attempt to talk like a hunter or a mountaineer, as a Broadway clerk might make after eating an edition of Emerson Bennett’s works and studying frontier life at the Bowery Theatre a couple of weeks—I say that the nausea which the Goshoots gave me, an Indian worshipper, set me to examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been over-estimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance. The revelations that came were disenchanting. It was curious to see how quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filthy and repulsive—and how quickly the evidences accumulated that wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found Goshoots more or less modified by circumstances and surroundings—but Goshoots, after all. They deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have mine—at this distance. Nearer by, they never get anybody’s.

This is very convenient for Twain. By dismissing Indian people as savages and dismissing Cooper—who served in the Navy for four years and lived his whole life in the area that he wrote about—as "a Broadway clerk", he's able to avoid dealing with the questions that Cooper's work raises.

What's clear to me is that this very effort to invest Indian people with some level of dignity—this is the thing that Mark Twain (and many other critics) hate about Cooper's work. They say it's unrealistic. But...is it really unrealistic? I don't think it's unrealistic to imagine that Indian people might often have spoken in a dignified way or behaved in a thoughtful manner.

Cooper refuses to traffic in convenient myths that the Indians either noble savages or were uncivilized Goshoots. His Indian characters are very complex, engage in lots of different practices, and have their own ways. They have their own mores, but people like Magua often violate (or at least push against) those mores.

Yes Natty Bumppo himself is somewhat unrealistic. But he is an ideal. He's an attempt to answer the extremely difficult questions posed by colonization—an attempt to imagine some fitful continuity of values between Indian and white civilization.² The fact that he's unrealistic is just a testament to the fact that...this continuity didn't necessarily exist. It wasn't real. What happened was ethnic cleansing: one people violently replaced another. There was no inheritance.

That's something that Cooper himself understands, to some extent, but it's very hard to deal in an intellectually honest way with that fact. You can't just write a novel about how your father wiped out another people! And you live on their stolen land! If you're writing a novel, then either those people need to be evil or uncivilized, in which case the theft was justified, or...you need to find some sense in which it wasn't really theft. Natty Bumppo is an attempt to imagine some way in which, maybe, colonization wasn't simply a crime.

If frontierspeople had all been like Bumppo, and their relations with Indians had all been like the relations between him and Chingachgook, then the moral calculus behind colonization would have been different. That is the alchemy of the book. On that level, I am certainly able to believe very strongly in these characters and in the literary merit of Last of the Mohicans in particular.

Afterword

As always, it's very easy to make a book sound good when you write about it, but it's another thing to actually spend ten or twenty hours reading it. Last of the Mohicans is definitely the place to start. With Cooper, I often switched between text and audio versions. I found audio especially suited to Last of the Mohicans, because there's so many discussions that it's almost like listening to a play.

It's worth noting that The Pioneers is very different, both structurally and in how it's written, from Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, The Prairie, and The Pathfinder. I enjoyed The Pioneers the least, because there's a slice of life quality—lots of meandering about this little town. What I haven't mentioned much is that the other four books have adventure plots that made them, to me, extremely enjoyable.

But that seems a point in their favor, no? It's so silly how when talking about a book's literary merit, you have to apologize for the fact that it might also be entertaining because it has some suspense factor! You can't just be interested and engaged, you have to be interested for the right reasons. The Last of the Mohicans, in particular, is well-structured in a way that's quite different from either Huckleberry Finn or from many of Walter Scott's narratives. In Last of the Mohicans, there is always something clearly at stake, and there's always a clear objective and clear antagonists. To me, that's a good thing.

Huckleberry Finn certainly could've benefited from that kind of structural clarity, and the reason it doesn't have that clarity is because...well...if it did, then the book would've fallen apart. If Jim had seriously pursued his own freedom, then Huck would've had to choose much sooner how much and to what degree he was really willing to help Jim. It would've raised a lot of questions that Twain wasn't really willing to answer.

Last of the Mohicans is, like Huckleberry Finn, a novel about people of varying races thrown together in an adventure plot. But because of its attention to structure, Last of the Mohicans treats its non-white characters with much more respect. Uncas and Chingachgook are willing to help Cora because they really have nothing to lose. They are the last of their people. But other Indians, who haven't yet given up hope, have a very different perspective, and that brings them naturally into conflict with these two and provides a source of much of the book's drama.

1. I think Uncle Tom’s Cabin is also quite good! Haven’t read Irving and Longfellow.

2. In one of his prefaces, Cooper describes Bumppo in the following way:

In a moral sense this man of the forest is purely a creation. The idea of delineating a character that possessed little of civilization but its highest principles as they are exhibited in the uneducated, and all of savage life that is not incompatible with these great rules of conduct, is perhaps natural to the situation in which Natty was placed…. Removed from nearly all the temptations of civilized life, placed in the best associations of that which is deemed savage, and favorably disposed by nature to improve such advantages, it appeared to the writer that his hero was a fit subject to represent the better qualities of both conditions, without pushing either to extremes.