of the slaughter of defenseless white men, women, and children at Fort William Henry by the Indians allied with the French. At the end of the second half we hear “the shrieks and cries of hundreds of women and children” when Delaware Indians loyal to Uncas destroy “the whole community” of a neighboring Iroquois tribe in a failed attempt to rescue Cora. But perhaps the most chilling scene in the novel is the one that follows this battle: the depiction of these Delawares at the funeral ceremony they hold for Uncas and Cora. In a series of descriptions the narrator suggests that these Indians are already dead, more a cemetery than a living tribe: Their grief “seemed to have turned each dark and motionless figure to stone,” and “even the inanimate Uncas appeared a being of life, compared with the humbled and submissive throng by whom he was surrounded.” In the novel’s final paragraph, Tamenund, the aged patriarch of this people, explains what they are submitting to: the will of God, or as he puts it, “the anger of the Manitto.” “The pale-faces are masters of the earth,” he adds, and it is time for the Indians to “go.” The story Cooper tells about Uncas, then, opens with the epitaph that Chingachgook prematurely hangs on his son and ends with Tamenund’s valedictory consent to the disappearance of his race, putting a frame around the erasure of the Indians that keeps it entirely in the past, where the only responsibility white readers have is to shed a tear for a tragedy they had nothing to do with. Of course, in 1826 most of the worst crimes against the Native American population—President Jackson’s “Indian Removal” policy and the Trails of Tears, for example, or the western “Indian Wars” of the last third of the nineteenth century—were still to come. A “narrative of 1829,” as John McWilliams reminds us in his book-length study of Cooper’s novel, would include Jackson’s use of the myth Cooper created to justify the removal legislation that, in 1838, allowed his successor, Martin Van Buren, to use 7,000 federal soldiers to force 15,000 nonconsenting Cherokee to “go,” to leave the land guaranteed them by treaty and undertake the thousand-mile march across the Mississippi on which more than 4,000 of them died. Reading the novel and mourning the noble but providentially doomed “last Mohi can” allowed contemporary Americans to affirm their compassion while ignoring the real victims of their national policies. That is the self-serving fiction we must not read uncritically.

Having said that, however, it is equally crucial to note that the novel itself is not simply an endorsement of white American history. Mohicans is the second of Cooper’s so-called Leatherstocking Tales, the five novels that he published between 1823 and 1841 featuring Natty Bumppo (called Hawkeye most of the time in this novel, and also referred to as Leather stocking throughout the five novels). The novels were not written in chronological order: Natty is an old man in the first of them, The Pioneers, and is youngest in the fifth, The Deerslayer, which is set a dozen years before the events of Mohicans. And Natty’s role is not the same in all the novels: In the last two, Cooper tries to involve him more directly in the romance plot by depicting him as in love and beloved. But Natty remains profoundly single, a liminal figure whose relationship to both white and Indian cultures is saturated with ambivalence. For example, at the end of this novel every other surviving white character retreats “far into the settlements of the ‘pale-faces,‘ ” goes back from the wilderness to civilization and the rules of the society that the colonists are building in the new world. But Natty, who has lived most of his life among the Delaware, chooses to remain in the woods with Chingachgook. Yet as readers of the novel have many opportunities to note, Natty does not identify himself with the Indians either: His insistent (and, for many readers, annoying) refrain about being “a man without a cross” does not mean he isn’t a Christian, but rather that, as he puts it in his first scene in the novel, “I am genuine white”; that is, both of his parents were white. In his actions as a “warrior,” Natty most commonly serves the interests of the other white characters in the Tales, and reviewers and readers from the start have perceived him as the American equivalent of an epic hero. But in