Last of the Mohicans (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

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, and the myth it makes served contemporary readers precisely by replacing history as the nation was enacting it with a story about the fate of the Indians that both moved and reassured the whites who were in fact (but not in Cooper’s fiction) the agents of that fate.

As Cooper tells the story, the first person to label Uncas “the last of the Mohicans” is actually his own father. Chingachgook himself is still a vigorous warrior, and the narrative repeatedly refers to Uncas as “young” and “youthful”—that such a father would be anticipating the death of such a son rather than looking forward to his eventual marriage and children seems to violate the truths of the human heart, but as Cooper tells the story, even Uncas accepts his ominous title. In fact, he enters the narrative exactly at the moment in chapter III when Chingachgook tells Hawkeye that when Uncas dies the whole tribe will be extinct, “for my boy is the last of the Mohicans.” “Uncas is here!” is the next line, as “a youthful warrior” steps out of the woods to join the conversation. “Here,” this introduction to him implies, “but not for long”—Uncas will figure throughout the novel as a character with an expiration date. As a rescuer of the story’s two white heroines and as the lost prince of the Delaware nation, Uncas is regarded by both the narrator and the white characters with considerable admiration. His head may be naked except for its “scalping tuft,” but the narrative calls it “noble.” Alice looks upon him as a heathen, “a being partially benighted in the vale of ignorance,” but she also associates his “graceful,” “dignified,” “pure,” and “proud” form with classical ideals, “some precious relic of the Grecian chisel.” Cora goes further: “Who that looks at this creature of nature, remembers the shade of his skin!” To her, that’s a rhetorical question, but her companions’ “short and embarrassed silence” in reply keeps the line between races firmly in place. Combined with the epithet “the last,” that racial boundary lets readers know that all the sympathetic admiration they bestow on Uncas is extended provisionally. Within those limits, the narrative allows Uncas to grow increasingly heroic. After the first rescue scene, for example, while his father scalps the Mingoes they’ve slain, Uncas hurries with Duncan, the white officer and gentleman, to the side of the two white maidens. Duncan is not ashamed to cry at the sight of their deliverance. Uncas doesn’t go that far, but his eyes nonetheless “beam with a sympathy that elevated him far above the intelligence and advanced him probably centuries before the practices of his nation.”

While that sentence doubtless sounds patronizing, if not racist, to most twenty-first century readers, Cooper’s books display more respect and admiration for Indian characters like Uncas than was the norm in his culture. Indeed, his depiction of Uncas as so noble a savage came under attack from a number of critics. A novel like Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837), also a best-seller, was written expressly to contest Cooper’s “poetical illusions” and “beautiful unrealities” by describing instead what Bird in his preface calls “real Indians,” who are unrelievedly “ignorant, violent, debased, brutal.” Mark Twain made the same argument in Roughing It (1872), and began a sequel to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) that takes Huck and Tom into the Indian Territory so he can debunk Cooper’s romances by exposing the boys to a series of atrocities committed by treacherous Indians. In 1851, shortly before Cooper’s death, the Chippewa chief and activist George Copway publicly thanked the novelist for having created Uncas as a “hero” who “possesses all the noble traits of an exalted character,” an Indian whom Native Americans could read about with pride. Yet although Cooper advances Uncas centuries ahead of his tribesmen, he is careful never to suggest that the last Mohican could progress to the point where he belongs inside American civilization. He lifts Uncas high enough to make his passing tragic—but readers mourn for him at the end, as they admire him throughout, from within the safety of a world out of which he has already disappeared.

In its final chapter, the novel relieves white American readers from the burden of imagining a political and social future for the nation that includes Native Americans by linking Uncas’s death to the doom of his entire race. There are two massacres in the book. Neither involves whites killing Indians. The first half climaxes with the account 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 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 drink human blood “freely, exultingly, hellishly” ; more than once we witness the dark hand of a Mingo stroking the blond hair of a white woman as a prelude to scalping her, while during the first atrocity at William Henry a “savage” wantonly kills a white “infant,” then tomahawks the mother. The rescue mission in the novel’s second half actually takes the narrative into a Mingo village, which allows Cooper to give his white readers a chance to look closely at Native American culture on its own ground. But although Cooper read primary sources to research his Indian novels, especially the accounts of John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary who had both a Christian and a proto-anthropological respect for the customs of the tribes he lived among, the novel’s Mingo village is built out of white prejudice and exists only in the imagination of Cooper and his culture. Even Mingo women and children are “hags” and “dark spectres,” and the first time we are shown the whole village gathered together, the scene looks like this:

The five chapters that the novel spends inside the Mingo encampment (chapters XXIII-XXVII) are paired with two (chapters XXVIII and XXIX) that take us into the neighboring Delaware village. In a sense, this is even where the narrative leaves us in its last chapter, with Natty and Chingachgook at the Delaware funeral for Uncas and Cora. In his account of the Delawares and their social behavior, Cooper relies much more on Heckewelder, on both his facts and his spirit of cross-cultural respect. But while the Delaware community is shown to be dignified, just, ordered, devout, and willing to revere and serve white womanhood (which the novel consistently defines as the epitome of civilized grace), the members cannot transcend their historical fate. In the novel’s opening paragraphs the narrator talks about the futility of the French and Indian War, in which two European powers fought for “the possession of a country that neither was destined to retain.” At the end the fighting is between Mingoes and Delawares. The Mingo village is entirely destroyed, but in the first paragraph of the last chapter it is the Delawares who are described as “a nation of mourners,” and it is their own inevitable extinction as well as Uncas that they mourn for. England and France, Delawares and Mingoes all lose—but, of course, out of these losses Cooper’s United States of (white) America is being born. While some citizens of that new country protested loudly against Cooper’s sympathetic portrait of the Delawares, his decision in this novel to provide two antithetical types of “Indians” proved very popular with the mass of his readers. Because the tribe that adopts Hawkeye is so noble, white readers can grieve over their passing. Because the rest of the Indians, however, are so monstrous, they must be destroyed to make the continent safe for civilization, and while (in the novel at least) the work of their destruction is not done by white hands, white readers need have no compunctions about rejoicing at their extermination. History is made up of losses as well as gains, the novel says; the end of the Indians is an occasion for sorrow and celebration but not at all for guilt.

Thus, even as a fantasy, Cooper’s fiction arises from the brute facts of American history, although the colonial setting disguises the way the novel is a response to America’s own empire-building: the imperialist subjugation of the native population that became known, within a generation after the novel was published, as “Manifest Destiny.” Almost half of Cooper’s thirty-two novels are, in one way or another, about the process of civilizing the wilderness. Most of these are still well worth reading, for in their troubled dramatizations of one of our culture’s constitutive acts they hold up a mirror to our own deeply mixed feelings about the stories we tell about that process as well as the ones we continue to repress. As the “wildest” of Cooper’s dramas of the wilderness, however, The Last of the Mohicans projects a psychological as well as sociohistorical fantasy onto its dark woods and its “dusky savages.” In this respect it has a lot in common with The Heart of Darkness (1902), the novel about European powers in the African jungle that Joseph Conrad published at the start of the twentieth century. Conrad wrote very admiringly about Cooper’s sea fictions but may not even have recognized the relationship between his novel and this one. Heart of Darkness is often cited as one of the originating texts of Modernism, while Mohicans seems, to many readers at least, most “historical” in its own aesthetic: its prose style, its fussy and intrusive omniscient narrator, its reliance on literary conventions like “villain” or “light” and “dark” heroines. Thematically, however, Cooper’s novel verges on the same question that suggests “the horror” at the center of Conrad’s: whether “civilized” and “savage” are really not racial or ethnic or historical antonyms, but instead two interchangeable labels for all human beings. The darkness at the heart of Conrad’s “Africa” symbolically represents the deepest truth about human nature. Similarly, the “savage wilderness” into which Cooper’s novel plunges us can be interpreted as the realm of our dark passions.

The plot of Mohicans looks compulsively straightforward. Like most American novels in the 1820s, it was published in two volumes. In each volume the heroines are kidnapped, leading to a pair of rescue missions and ending with a pair of massacres. At the center the novel intersects history in its three-chapter account of the 1757 siege and surrender of Fort William Henry, but most of the story occurs in the archetypal, timeless world of villains who abduct heroines and heroes who rescue them. By casting Indians as the abductors, the novel aligns itself with the country’s first best-selling books: the “captivity narratives” written in the seventeenth century by Puritans like Mary Rowlandson and John Williams. The emphasis of these stories, however, is on captivity as a trial of faith in the wilderness. Through both its volumes and across hundreds of miles of woods, Cooper’s story keeps the focus on the threat to Cora and Alice’s virginity : Will they be restored to their father “spotless and angel like, as I lost them,” as he anxiously asks at one point, or will they suffer “a fate worse than death,” the euphemism by which rape is referred to by more than one character? This plot is launched at the very end of chapter II, when from behind the bushes appears an Indian’s face, “as fiercely wild as unbridled passions could make it,” watching “the light and graceful forms of the females” riding through the forest with a “gleam of exultation” in his eyes. Cooper keeps this apparent threat hanging over the heroines’ maidenheads so compellingly that the only major complaint reviewers made was that the novel was unbearably suspenseful, too painfully exciting to read. In their anxiety about the fate of the women, however, Cooper’s readers seem to have missed the moment when Hawkeye turns this story back on them. As the heroes begin their second rescue mission near the start of the second volume, Hawkeye tells Duncan that the threat of rape is all in his white imagination: “I know your thoughts, and shame be it to our color, that you have reason for them; but he who thinks that even a Mingo would ill-treat a woman, unless it be to tomahawk her, knows nothing of Indian natur” (p. 221).

In this amazing revelation, the novel exposes the ideological act of projection that projects “unbridled passions” onto dark savages and suggests that if, like Duncan, readers have been thinking about sex, they should probably revise their reading of both the story and themselves. From this vantage point we can see that the story really begins at the very end of chapter I, and not with the lustful gaze of a savage looking at white women, but with the “indescribable look” Cora bestows on a savage. This event is staged very suggestively, at the very moment the white characters leave Fort Edward’s protecting walls to enter the wilderness. Until this moment, a veil has covered Cora’s face, but just as the nearly naked Magua runs past her to take the lead of the party, “her veil was allowed to open its folds, and betrayed an indescribable look of pity, admiration and horror, as her dark eye followed the easy motions of the savage.” The Last of the Mohicans dramatizes what the conventional decorum of Cooper’s culture repressed as “indescribable.” Out of Cora’s ambiguous gaze across racial lines, her attraction to and repulsion from the movements of Magua’s body, erupts the novel’s fantasy of angelic virginity and demonic desire. And as Hawkeye tells Duncan, as a fantasy it betrays more about our thoughts, who we are outside the walls or behind the veil of civilization, than about Indian nature.

Unlike Conrad, Cooper does not require his readers to acknowledge this insight. In fact, as in his treatment of the theme of “Indian removal,” his dramatization of desire is framed in a way that allows white readers to keep their distance no matter how deeply it takes them into its jungle. When Cora’s veil opens, it reveals that “her complexion was not brown,” but “charged with the color of the rich blood, that seemed ready to burst its bounds.” Her blush we can immediately attribute to her gaze at Magua, but readers don’t learn why the narrator uses the strange locution “not brown” to describe her until the middle of the novel, when her father tells Duncan that not only do Cora and Alice come from different mothers, but also that Cora’s mother had progenitors who came from Africa, that she was “descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class who are enslaved.” Thus “not brown” means “partly black,” so that Cooper’s fantasy includes all three of the races that inhabited his America. Cora is one of Cooper’s greatest female characters: brave, resourceful, generous, high-minded, and passionate. Alice is a much more typical Cooper “female”: so white, so chaste, so helpless that she is not much more than an icon of innocence. But while it is impossible not to admire Cora, her father’s revelation of her heritage has two major implications. Like Cora’s “indescribable look” at Magua’s body, his marriage to Cora’s unnamed mother reminds us that desire can transgress all the lines, burst all the bounds, that Cooper’s culture believed should confine it. But at the same time it allows white readers to identify Cora’s sexuality with her “blackness” rather than their own humanity. Seen this way, she is not only a dark heroine, but that stereotypi cal figure American fiction kept coming back to throughout the nineteenth century: the tragic mulatta, as much an “Other” as the dark savages, and like them doomed, despite all her strengths, by her race.

The novel’s wilderness, like the greenwood in Shakespeare or folklore, is a place of transformation. In the last section, particularly, the narrative recounts a dizzying number of metamorphoses: People turn into beavers and vice versa, Hawkeye and Uncas turn into bears, an Indian turns into David Gamut who later turns into Uncas, even Duncan paints his face like a Mingo. But the novel refuses to endorse the possibility of racial change through intermarriage, and at the end the racial boundaries are enforced with a vengeance. Duncan carefully removes his paint before being reunited with Alice, who has never given anyone’s body a look with the least hint of ambiguity in it, and this untainted white couple is allowed to survive and marry and through their racially unmixed offspring inherit the future. All the characters who have gazed across racial lines—Cora at Magua, Magua at Cora, Uncas at Cora—come together at the novel’s climax, but only to die.

That scene has the feel of both a ritual sacrifice and a perversely intimate dance of death. One of Magua’s Mingo henchmen “sheathe[s] his knife in the bosom of Cora.” “Magua burie[s] his weapon in the back of the prostrate” Uncas. The final task of killing Magua is left to Hawkeye. The theological overtones in the passage describing Magua’s fall from the rocks are obvious: “his dark person was seen cutting the air with its head downwards.” But the sexual undertones in the description of the action with which Hawkeye kills him also need to be acknowledged. Like those knives sinking into Cora and Uncas’s bodies, Hawkeye’s rifle resembles and replaces the phallus at the moment of sexual climax: As he starts to take aim on Magua, Hawkeye’s “frame trembled so violently with eagerness, that the muzzle of the half-raised rifle played like a leaf fluttering in the wind,” but after he draws “the agitated weapon” to his body, “the piece [becomes as steady as the rocks] for the single instant that it poured out its contents” (p. 351). “Sex and violence,” according to the Hollywood cliché, is the most dependable recipe for feeding the appetite of the popular audience. The Last of the Mohicans not only follows this formula, but it helps us to appreciate why we never hear the order of those terms reversed—it’s not “violence and sex,” but always “sex and [then] violence.” At the start, the novel arouses readers with “indescribable looks,” “unbridled passions,” and “nearly naked” Indian bodies, but the only consummations the narrative provides are its repeated acts of violence, which culminate at that moment in which Hawkeye’s rifle ejaculates death. It’s not easy to see why this substitute satisfaction is so perennially attractive to so many people, what psychic need is fulfilled by this apparent cause-and-effect relationship between eros and violence. But as many other popular works besides Mohicans can testify, this dynamic works a powerful spell on audiences, and in this novel Cooper exploits it repeatedly, and always to great effect.

Eros and violence also define one context in which Hawkeye’s heroism can be understood. This man of action, alienated from conventional society but profoundly at home in the woods and among the people of another race, is Cooper’s greatest contribution to American, indeed world literature. As a mythic figure, the Leatherstocking can be identified with a variety of referents, from a legendary old world antecedent like Robin Hood to such quasi-legendary new world contemporaries as Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett. He has had many descendants in American literature and popular culture, from the late-nineteenth century’s “cowboy” hero through such twentieth-century film and TV avatars as the Lone Ranger (with Tonto in Chingachgook’s role). Looking at Natty Bumppo from a European point of view, the British novelist D. H. Lawrence, in Studies in Classic American Literature, concluded that Hawkeye is the quintessential American, and that “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer”: “What sort of a white man is [Natty] ? Why, he is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer.” The novel does repeatedly associate Hawkeye with killing. Half a dozen pages after we first meet him, he calls Uncas’s act of killing a deer “a pretty sight to behold!” Two chapters later he insists on killing a young colt. After leading the first rescue mission to victory, he doesn’t imitate Chingachgook’s example and scalp the fallen enemies (scalping, Natty says often, is an “Indian gift,” permissible for them but not lawful for a white man without a cross), but neither does he follow the examples of Uncas and Duncan and hasten to Cora and Alice’s side; instead, he makes sure his enemies are dead, “thrust[ing] his long knife [into their bodies], with as much coolness, as though they had been so many brute carcasses.” He also seems here at least as pleased to have recovered his rifle as to have rescued the females: “ ‘I have got back my old companion,’ ” he says, “striking his hand on the breech of his rifle”; as much as Cora and Alice’s father will worry later about their purity after they’ve been in the hands of the savages, Hawkeye worries about his gun here, “examining into the state of his rifle with a species of parental assiduity.” Tellingly, when at the Delaware camp there is a moment of doubt about which of two white men really is “La Longue Carabine,” Hawkeye’s Mingo name, the question is settled with that same “long rifle”: His identity is inseparably bound up with his ability to shoot and kill.

There can be no doubt, then, that Hawkeye is a killer, but that is only half of the story that Cooper is telling about him in the novel. At least as central to his character, and even more important in terms of the place he occupies in the larger fantasy, is the fact that Hawkeye is not a lover. Michael Mann’s 1992 movie adaptation of the novel drastically revises this aspect of his character, but Cooper’s text leaves no room for doubt on this score. The narrator, for example, tells us that, while Duncan carries Alice to safety in the Mingo camp, Hawkeye “had certainly been an entire stranger to the delicious emotions of the lover, while his arms encircled his mistress.” And Hawkeye himself confirms the “entire strange[ness]” of sex for him in an extraordinary speech to Duncan and Alice that begins: “I have heard that there is a feeling in youth, which binds man to woman.... It may be so. I have seldom been where women of my color dwell; but such may be the gifts of nature in the settlements” (p. 274). The urgings of desire, that fact of life that everyone else beyond the age of puberty knows viscerally, Hawkeye has only heard of, and he seems to have his doubts about it. From the start, when the veil is removed from Cora’s aroused face and the bushes part to reveal the apparently lustful gaze of the savage, the novel associates the wilderness with those desires, except in Hawkeye’s case. For him, life in the woods is a different and more invulnerable form of virginity than that of the novel’s two maidens; in the wilderness he lives outside the “feelings,” the passions that can be seen in the other characters’ eyes and are the cause of their abductions, captivities, and rescues, the large movements that carry them back and forth across the novel’s fantasy landscape. Natty stands apart from the bonds of desire that pull the others toward each other. As a rescuer, he is as selfless as any of the book’s lovers. He proves how much more there is to him than the “killer” when he risks his life to go back into the Mingo village to save Uncas, or when he offers Magua his own life in exchange for Cora’s. But note that he is equally willing to save Uncas or Cora, or, for that matter, probably anyone else. His sense of duty to other people, in other words, is absolutely uncompromised by any erotic longing. His sense of self, therefore, is inviolable.

Natty Bumppo’s autonomy is perhaps the most compelling reason Cooper and his readers kept coming back to him. Late in his career Cooper said he always intended to come back one more time and write a sixth Leatherstocking Tale depicting him amidst the events of the Revolutionary War. Given Natty’s status as an American archetype, the absence of a tale set in the 177Os leaves a conspicuous gap. Filling it, however, would have created problems for Natty’s biographer. In Mohicans, set in the 1750s, Natty as Hawkeye serves under Major Effingham of the British Army. In The Pioneers, set in the 1790s, Natty as Leatherstocking still serves Effingham. So if Natty fought in the 1770s it seems clear that, unlike the Muhheakunnuk, he would have been fighting against the American colonies. This ambiguity serves as a good reminder of just how estranged Hawkeye is as a hero from American society, or from any form of community. At the end of Mohicans, as Hawkeye and Chingachgook stand shaking hands “across the fresh earth” of Uncas’s grave, the narrator calls them “the two most renowned warriors of that region.” The note this strikes is an image of alienation that seems amazingly modern: Cut off from any future, unconnected to any tribe or society, divided even from each other by the racial line that Hawkeye keeps insisting cannot be “crossed,” these warriors are heroes without a cause. While Hawkeye stands there, Duncan and Alice are returning to civilization, where, like Cooper and his readers, they will define their life in terms of their relationships to others, including each other as husband and wife. The power of Hawkeye’s solitary character is to make that kind of “happily ever after” look like the inferior choice, the wrong way to escape the perils of the wilderness. As a myth, the story of Leatherstocking cannot tell us where we came from, nor help us with where, as a nation or as individuals, we must find ways to go. But it does give us an imaginative place of respite, from our past and our future. The novel’s wilderness setting is a realm of terror and bloodshed, because it is a screen onto which the facts of history and desire can be projected. But among the swirl of those horrors, Hawkeye stands strongly centered on what he doesn’t need—not land, not money, not social prestige, not even love.