fact he repeatedly rejects the values and aspirations of white society. As a series focused on this alienated hero, the Leatherstocking Tales are written from a perspective both inside and outside official history, and simultaneously affirm and challenge the American quest to settle and civilize the continent.

Hawkeye and Chingachgook are already deep in a discussion about the morality of that project when we first meet them in chapter III. As Natty says there, “every story has its two sides,” and he listens open-mindedly while Chingachgook protests the destruction of his people at the hands of superior force. Two chapters later, Natty himself rebukes Duncan as a representative of the race that has “driven [the] tribes from the sea-shore.” Cooper inherited the theme of civilizing the wilderness not just from his American society but also from his father, Judge William Cooper, the founder of Cooperstown, who claimed to have been responsible for settling more acres of American forest than any other man of his time. Given this relationship, it is not surprising that Cooper’s feelings and ideas about this theme are so conflicted. The unresolved tensions inside the Tales about the moral costs and individual consequences of building an imitation of European civilization on the ruins of both the Native American culture and the natural environment give the series much of its power. Set in the world of Cooper’s own childhood in Cooperstown, The Pioneers probably takes the most subversive stance toward the nation’s (and his father’s) official faith in progress. In that novel Chingachgook, though old and enfeebled by drink, is angrier about the extermination of his culture, and Leatherstocking is often prophetically eloquent in the judgments he pronounces against the “wicked and wasty ways” of white society. The Last of the Mohicans, on the other hand, puts considerably less pressure on America’s ideological status quo. While most of The Pioneers is set inside the raw forms of a new settlement, from which point of view the natural life embodied by the Indians and by Natty can be romanticized, nearly all of Mohicans takes place in the depths of a wilderness where terror seems to lurk behind almost every tree and bush; the worlds of nature and the Indians are aligned with the dangerous forces of Gothic fiction rather than the restorative virtues of Wordsworthian Romanticism.

Cooper’s decision in this second Leatherstocking Tale to pair Chingachgook and the Delaware/Mohicans with another group of Indians, Magua and the Mingoes/Iroquois, similarly tilts the novel’s ideological balance toward society. If the Mohicans can be aligned with the Romantic trope of the Noble Savage, Magua derives from a combination of the archetypal Gothic villain, Milton’s Satan, and the New England Puritans’ association of Indians with the powers of evil in the howling wilderness. But here, too, the novel is complex: Even Magua’s story has its other side. In the scene in chapter XI in which Magua informs Cora that he will spare her sister, Alice, if she will put herself at his mercy by becoming his wife, he makes a case for being seen as the real victim. Like the Indian nation Chingachgook describes for Natty in chapter III, Magua says he was once a good and happy man, until the coming of the whites, with their “fire-water” and other evils and injustices, turned him into a scarred exile with a righteous grievance. “Who made [Magua] a villain?” he asks. That is a question with enormous subversive potential, but Cooper’s narrative doesn’t give it much chance to resonate. Magua is so single-mindedly and ruthlessly determined to destroy the happiness of these two young women who have never harmed him, his eyes burn so steadily with his thirst for vengeance, that as the narrator says near the end, “it would not have been difficult to have fancied the dusky savage the Prince of Darkness, brooding on his own fancied wrongs, and plotting evil.”

It is significant that Cooper labels Magua a “dusky savage” and sees this term as a synonym for satanic. The white characters, including Hawk eye, and the narrator himself repeatedly describe the Mingoes in terms like these that deny them their humanity: “beasts of prey,” “hellhounds,” “devils,” “fiend,” “monster.” For much of the novel the Mingoes whoop far more often than they speak, and when they scream it sounds, the narrator says, “as if the demons of hell had possessed themselves of the air.” Most of their actions trace out a pattern of racially incendiary moments: They gorge themselves on raw food and even