The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

publishes Notions of the Americans, a reflection on his native land and one of six books he writes while living abroad.

1833 Cooper returns to the United States.

1834 Cooper writes A Letter to His Countrymen, in which he criticizes Ameri can provincialism and announces his retirement from writing fiction. He publishes Sketches of Switzerland, one of his many travel narratives.

1837 In response to hostile treatment in the Whig press, Cooper instigates a series of libel suits, in which he remains entangled for years to come.

1838 Feeling financial strain, Cooper resumes fiction writing with Home as Found and Homeward Bound, which combine adventure with reflec tions on American society. On the so-called Trail of Tears, thousands of Cherokee Indians die during their removal from ancestral lands in Georgia.

1839 Cooper publishes The History of the Navy of the United States of America. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is published.

1840 The Pathfinder, the fourth Leatherstocking book, appears; it takes place in 1760 during the French and Indian War.

1841 Cooper publishes The Deerslayer, the last of the Leatherstocking Tales; it describes Natty Bumppo’s youth, when Natty and his friend live with the Delaware Indians and fight the Hurons.

1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, written by Dou glass, appears.

1846 Cooper publishes Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers.

1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is published.

1851 James Fenimore Cooper dies in Cooperstown on September 14, 1851.

INTRODUCTION

We must not fall for the fiction Cooper uses to organize the story he tells in The Last of the Mohicans. There has never been a “last” Mohican. The tribe Cooper refers to by that name survives to this day, on a small reservation in Wisconsin. According to Cooper’s version of the Mohicans’ story, the death of Uncas in the middle of the eighteenth century is the last act in the tragedy of a once-mighty nation. There are a number of tragic elements in the real history of the people who, when they learned to write English, referred to themselves as the Muhheakunnuk or Moheakunnuk, but the story they have written with their actions is that of a people who, while remaining true to key elements of their heritage, made great efforts to adapt to and earn a place in the new world that descended on them with the arrival of the traders and settlers from Europe.

As Patrick Frazier recounts that story in The Mohicans of Stockbridge, the tribe accepted Christianity about two decades before the events Cooper dramatizes in the novel; two decades after the supposed death of the last Mohican, they fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War. When the tribe relocated from Massachusetts to the vicinity of NewYork’s Oneida Lake in the mid-1780s, just a few years before the infant James Cooper was carried to Cooperstown on the banks of nearby Lake Otsego, they took with them a letter from George Washington attesting that the Muhheakunnuks “have fought and bled by our side ... as our friends and brothers ... [and] as friends and subjects to the United States of America.” No efforts could stop the tide of white pioneers from diminishing their population and driving them farther west, but like nearly all the original Native American tribes, they survive despite the centuries of cultural loss, economic dispossession, white aggression, discrimination, and neglect.

That true story, however, is one the United States is still reluctant to tell, and repressed almost completely throughout the nineteenth century as the pioneers moved westward across the continent. On the other hand, Americans loved the story Cooper tells in Mohicans. Published in 1826, it was Cooper’s sixth novel; he was already America’s most successful novelist, a position he held through most of his career, and among the thirty-two novels he wound up writing before his death in 1851 were a number of best-sellers. The Last of the Mohicans was first among them all: his most popular book, and one of the most widely read American novels ever. Like most of Cooper’s novels, especially those he wrote in the first half of his career, it derives from the model of the historical romance that Walter Scott established in Waverley ( 1814) . The subtitle of Cooper’s novel—A Narrative of 1757—echoes Waverley’s subtitle, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since, and in his preface to the book’s first edition Cooper warns mere novel readers that by “narrative” he means historical fact, not imaginative fancy. But the project of The Last of the Mohicans is myth making, not history writing,