1803 ‘The letter that bought a continent’, as they called the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, was signed on this day in Paris – and it did turn the United States into a continental power with the stroke of a pen. Oddly enough, though, territorial aggrandisement was the least of President Thomas Jefferson’s motives in doing the deal. He was more interested in securing the port of New Orleans. All that ideology about the ‘manifest destiny’ of the Americans to expand to the Pacific would come later.
Later, even, than James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘Leatherstocking Tales’, a series of five prose fictions tracing the European settlement of America, the equivalent of those medieval romance sequences involving Roland, or King Arthur or Sir Gawain. ‘Leatherstocking’ is one of several epithets that his Native American admirers apply to Nathaniel (Natty) Bumppo, the transcendent figure in all five of the tales, because of his deerskin leggings. Natty appears in other books of the series under different sobriquets, like ‘Deerslayer’, ‘Pathfinder’ and ‘Hawkeye’, depending on his age and the story’s setting.
The five books were written and published in the order: The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841). Their order in the overriding plot of the series is: Deerslayer, Mohicans, Pathfinder, Pioneers, and Prairie. The grand survey runs from the 1740s through to 1804, just a year after the Louisiana Purchase. So the sequence takes its readers from the disorderly struggles between European powers – and between shifting groups of ‘white’ man and ‘red’ – over the still unsettled frontier lying just west of New York and New England, through to the settlement of Templeton, where in The Pioneers the old aristocratic (and Indian) use of the land is confronted by the claims of the new townspeople – finally to run out in The Prairie.
The Prairie is far from optimistic about the coming expansion into the new territory. The story opens in an atmosphere of death and degeneration. ‘The harvest of our first year of possession had long been passed’, says the narrator in Chapter 1, ‘and the fading foliage of a few scattered trees was already beginning to exhibit the hues and tints of autumn’. Now the American landscape has passed through its spring and summer, and the hunters of bear and deer have become hunters of bees. Natty still has his faithful carbine by his side, but he now traps beaver. He will die, aged 90, at the end of the book.
This time the Natives are not defeated by brave men in close combat, but sold by foreign governments 6,000 miles away. ‘“And where were the chiefs of the Pawnee Loups when this bargain was made?” suddenly demanded the youthful warrior. … “Is a nation to be sold like a skin of beaver?” “Right enough, right enough [answers Natty helplessly], and where were truth and honesty also. But might is right according to the fashions of the ’arth; and what the strong choose to do, the weak must call justice.”’
And as the settlers stream onto the prairie, he says to Paul Hover and Captain Duncan Middleton: ‘“What the world of America is coming to and where the machinations and inventions of its people are to have an end, the Lord only knows. How much has the beauty of the wilderness been deformed in two short lives! … and I, miserable and worn out as I seem, have lived to see it all.”’