The Last of the Mohicans (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By James Fenimore Cooper and Stephen Railton

The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.   During the fierce French and Indian wars, an adroit scout named Hawkeye and his companion Chingachgook weave through the spectacular and dangerous wilderness of upstate New York, fighting to save the beautiful Munro sisters from the Huron renegade Magua.

The Last of the Mohicans is the most popular of James Fenimore Cooper’s five Leatherstocking Tales. With its death-defying chases and teeth-clenching suspense, this American classic established many archetypes of American frontier fiction.

An engrossing “Western” by America’s first great novelist, The Last of the Mohicans is a story of survival and treachery, love and deliverance.

Stephen Railton, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, has written books on Cooper, Mark Twain, and the American Renaissance, and has created major websites on Twain, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and American culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411432512

James Fenimore Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper was born in 1789 in New Jersey, but later moved to Cooperstown in New York, where he lived most of his life. His novel The Last of the Mohicans was one of the most widely read novels in the 19th century and is generally considered to be his masterpiece. His novels have been adapted for stage, radio, TV and film.

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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, 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 place ... resembled some unhallowed and supernatural arena, in which malicious demons had assembled to act their bloody and lawless rites. The forms in the background looked like unearthly beings, gliding before the eye and cleaving the air with frantic and unmeaning gestures; while the savage passions of such as passed the flames were rendered fearfully distinct by the gleams that shot athwart their inflamed visages (p. 245).

If it’s not difficult to see Magua as Satan, it’s impossible not to recognize this Indian village as hell on earth.

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.

Stephen Railton teaches American literature at the University of Virginia. His books include Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination, Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance, and Mark Twain: A Short Introduction. Since 1996 he has spent much of his time in virtual reality, as the creator of two major electronic archives: Mark Twain in His Times (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (http: //jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc) .

COOPER’S INTRODUCTION¹

It is believed that the scene of this tale, and most of the information necessary to understand its allusions, are rendered sufficiently obvious to the reader in the text itself, or in the accompanying notes. Still there is so much obscurity in the Indian traditions, and so much confusion in the Indian names, as to render some explanation useful.

Few men exhibit greater diversity, or, if we may so express it, greater antithesis of character, than the native warrior of North America. In war, he is daring, boastful, cunning, ruthless, self-denying, and self-devoted; in peace, just, generous, hospitable, revengeful, superstitious, modest, and commonly chaste. These are qualities, it is true, which do not distinguish all alike; but they are so far the predominating traits of these remarkable people,² as to be characteristic.

It is generally believed that the aborigines of the American continent have an Asiatic origin. There are many physical as well as moral facts which corroborate this opinion, and some few that would seem to weigh against it.

The color of the Indian, the writer believes, is peculiar to himself; and while his cheekbones have a very striking indication of a Tartar origin, his eyes have not. Climate may have had great influence on the former, but it is difficult to see how it can have produced the substantial difference which exists in the latter. The imagery of the Indian, both in his poetry and his oratory, is Oriental—chastened, and perhaps improved, by the limited range of his practical knowledge. He draws his metaphors from the clouds, the seasons, the birds, the beasts, and the vegetable world. In this, perhaps, he does no more than any other energetic and imaginative race would do, being compelled to set bounds to fancy by experience; but the North American Indian clothes his ideas in a dress which is different from that of the African, and is Oriental in itself. His language has the richness and sententious fullness of the Chinese. He will express a phrase in a word, and he will qualify the meaning of an entire sentence by a syllable; he will even convey different significations by the simplest inflections of the voice.

Philologists have said that there are but two or three languages, properly speaking, among all the numerous tribes which formerly occupied the country that now composes the United States. They ascribe the known difficulty one people have in understanding another to corruptions and dialects. The writer remembers to have been present at an interview between two chiefs of the Great Prairies west of the Mississippi, and when an interpreter was in attendance who spoke both their languages. The warriors appeared to be on the most friendly terms, and seemingly conversed much together; yet, according to the account of the interpreter, each was absolutely ignorant of what the other said. They were of hostile tribes, brought together by the influence of the American government; and it is worthy of remark that a common policy led them both to adopt the same subject. They mutually exhorted each other to be of use in the event of the chances of war throwing either of the parties into the hands of his enemies. Whatever may be the truth, as respects the root and the genius of the Indian tongues, it is quite certain they are now so distinct in their words as to possess most of the disadvantages of strange languages; hence much of the embarrassment that has arisen in learning their histories, and most of the uncertainty which exists in their traditions.

Like nations of high pretensions, the American Indian gives a very different account of his own tribe or race from that which is given by other people. He is much addicted to overestimating his own perfections, and to undervaluing those of his rival or his enemy; a trait which may possibly be thought corroborative of the Mosaic account of the creation.

The whites have assisted greatly in rendering the traditions of the aborigines more obscure by their own manner of corrupting names. Thus, the term used in the title of this book has undergone the changes of Mahi canni, Mohicans, and Mohegans; the latter being the word commonly used by the whites. When it is remembered that the Dutch (who first settled New York), the English, and the French, all gave appellations to the tribes that dwelt within the country which is the scene of this story, and that the Indians not only gave different names to their enemies but frequently to themselves, the cause of the confusion will be understood.

In these pages, Lenni-Lenape, Lenope, Delawares, Wapanachki, and Mohicans, all mean the same people, or tribes of the same stock. The Mengwe, the Maquas, the Mingoes, and the Iroquois, though not all strictly the same, are identified frequently by the speakers, being politically confederated and opposed to those just named. Mingo was a term of peculiar reproach as were Mengwe and Maqua in a less degree.

The Mohicans were the possessors of the country first occupied by the Europeans in this portion of the continent. They were, consequently, the first dispossessed; and the seemingly inevitable fate of all these people, who disappear before the advances, or it might be termed the inroads of civilization, as the verdure of their native forests falls before the nipping frost, is represented as having already befallen them. There is sufficient historical truth in the picture to justify the use that has been made of it.

In point of fact, the country which is the scene of the following tale has undergone as little change, since the historical events alluded to had place, as almost any other district of equal extent within the whole limits of the United States. There are fashionable and well-attended watering places at and near the spring where Hawk-eye halted to drink, and roads traverse the forests where he and his friends were compelled to journey without even a path. Glenn’s has a large village; and while William Henry, and even a fortress of later date, are only to be traced as ruins, there is another village on the shores of the Horican. But, beyond this, the enterprise and energy of a people who have done so much in other places have done little here. The whole of that wilderness, in which the latter incidents of the legend occurred, is nearly a wilderness still, though the Red Man has entirely deserted this part of the state. Of all the tribes named in these pages, there exist only a few half-civilized beings of the Oneidas, on the reservations of their people in New York. The rest have disappeared,³ either from the regions in which their fathers dwelt, or altogether from the earth.

There is one point on which we would wish to say a word before closing this preface. Hawk-eye calls the Lac du Saint Sacrement, the Horican. As we believe this to be an appropriation of the name that has its origin with ourselves, the time has arrived, perhaps, when the fact should be frankly admitted. While writing this book, fully a quarter of a century since, it occurred to us that the French name of this lake was too complicated, the American too commonplace, and the Indian too unpronounceable, for either to be used familiarly in a work of fiction. Looking over an ancient map, it was ascertained that a tribe of Indians, called Les Hori cans by the French, existed in the neighborhood of this beautiful sheet of water. As every word uttered by Natty Bumppo was not to be received as rigid truth, we took the liberty of putting the Horican into his mouth, as the substitute for Lake George. The name has appeared to find favor and, all things considered, it may possibly be quite as well to let it stand, instead of going back to the House of Hanover for the appellation of our finest sheet of water. We relieve our conscience by the confession, at all events, leaving it to exercise its authority as it may see fit.

1850

CHAPTER I

"Mine ear is open, and my heart prepared:

The worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold:

Say, is my kingdom lost?"

SHAKESPEARE.¹

It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet. A wide and apparently an impervious boundary of forests severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England. The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict. But, emulating the patience and self-denial of the practised native warriors, they learned to overcome every difficulty; and it would seem that, in time, there was no recess of the woods so dark, nor any secret place so lovely, that it might claim exemption from the inroads of those who had pledged their blood to satiate their vengeance, or to uphold the cold and selfish policy of the distant monarchs of Europe.

Perhaps no district throughout the wide extent of the intermediate frontiers can furnish a livelier picture of the cruelty and fierceness of the savage warfare of those periods than the country which lies between the head waters of the Hudson and the adjacent lakes.

The facilities which nature had there

Reviews for The Last of the Mohicans (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

[drfuriosa · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

There were intriguing moments followed by overlong descriptions. Not my jam, overall.

[kabarnes-945075 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

An exciting story but so ponderously told. And if he mentioned either of the Munro women's "weakness of their sex" one more time, I was going to scream. The antiquated language made this a difficult and not entirely enjoyable read.

[amerynth · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I am totally in agreement with Mark Twain about James Fenimore Cooper's literary "offenses" ... why describe a man as tall and thin when you can spend pages describing every feature from their eyebrows to their toes. Nary a drop of water nor a tree gets by without a vivid, unneeded description. This book has a lot of action (though some problematic as a product of the time it was written in...) but it was hard to get past Cooper's writing style to really get into the story. This is one case where I could see how a movie version would be an improvement over the book.

[caslater83 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This is another classic that I will never read again. In fact, after the first 10-12%, I gave up on this book.

No offense to JFC fans, but he just doesn't cut it for me. I usually like authors to be descriptive in their writings, but I think Mr. Cooper got too carried away with it.

The next time I pick up a classic novel, I want to fall in love with it, not throw it in the fire.

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel is set in 1757 during the Seven Years War when Britain and France battled for control of North America. It is very well written, with evocative descriptions of the landscape, and portrays the multi-faceted life of the various tribes of North American "Red Indians", depicting Native American characters in way in a way that no significant American had done before. There are, of course, still examples of the language of the time (published in 1826) that we wouldn't use today ("savages" vs. "civilised men"), but he portrays a rich variety of characters, including the central character, the young and heroic Uncas and his dignified father Chingachgook, and the villainous Magua; compared to these, the white European-American characters are much blander, particularly the sisters Cora and Alice, who are depicted as beautiful bland ciphers, as young female characters so often were in 19th century literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Between them is the figure of Hawkeye/Natty Bumppo, a white man raised by Delaware Indians, able to act as a bridge between the two cultures. The action of the novel revolves around the rescue of Cora and Alice from the clutches of the Hurons who have kidnapped them, and contains some impressive and violent set pieces, involving much scalping. There were passages where my interest waned, nevertheless this is deservedly an early classic of American literature.

[nog_5 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I picked this up at the local library for $1, so I thought, what the heck. I typically don't choose to read early American literature, so this was about seeing how well someone who predated Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville did. Not terribly well, actually. I had some inkling ahead of time that this was going to be about as realistic as Walter Scott (I made it a little ways into Ivanhoe as a child and tossed it aside). It's actually not that bad for about the first half or so, despite some pretty unlikely events and behavior on both the part of the whites and the Indians But then, about 2/3 of the way through, it starts to be pretty preposterous. It's not without its merits, I guess, but ultimately at this stage of American letters, we don't have a lot to be proud of. Fortunately, that was about to change (Emerson, Whitman, etc.)

[justagirlwithabook · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I can't remember when I read this but it is a borderline "western" that I actually didn't hate, which is seriously saying something. This one provides an interesting perspective and I thought it was alright. I didn't love it and I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone, but it wasn't bad either.

[ramrak_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Very antiquated language. Too hard to read.

[electrascaife · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

No, I didn't care for this one much, I'm afraid. A main character who is white but lives among the Indians and so embodies the best of both worlds (the forest prowess of the natives but the moral and intellectual superiority of the white man), natives who are inherently lesser, but with two 'noble' exceptions, white soldiers who are brave but dumb and weak compared to that amazing main character, and two damosels in constant need of rescuing - blech. I will say that the ending was unexpectedly un-pat, which was a bit of a nice surprise, but not enough to save this one.

[fuzzy_patters · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Last of the Mohicans opens with the journey of British Colonel Munro’s two daughters, Alice and Cora, from Fort Edward to Fort Henry amid the backdrop of the French and Indian War. For their protection they are escorted by Major Heyward Duncan and a Huron Indian (native American) named Magua. On their journey they are joined by David Gamut, a Psalmist; Hawkeye, a white scout who travels with Indians; and Hawkeyes’ companions Chingachgook and his son Uncas, both of whom are members of the once great Mohican tribe. Their trip soon goes horribly wrong, and they will be left to undergo an epic journey that lasts for the rest of the novel.The first aspect of this novel that will strike the modern reader is the amount of racial stereotyping that is present. The Indians are presented as always having a larger sense of the sights and sounds of the world around them than their white companions are capable of possessing, and the white people have a better understanding of human relationships, more empathy, and more civilized refinement than the Native Americans. There is even stereotyping present among the individual groups within the races as the French are untrustworthy and the Hurons are portrayed as duplicitous. However, if the modern reader is able to keep in mind that Cooper was writing with the cultural knowledge and understanding of his time period, I feel that there is still a lot to be taken and enjoyed from this novel.One thing that I liked about the novel was the theme of characters revealing their hidden strengths. There are several times during their ordeals that they encounter that the sisters, portrayed as dainty, civilized women early in the novel, are able to show strength, cunning, and valor. Another example of this is the aforementioned David Gamut. Gamut is a very weak character throughout most of the novel and is more interesting in singing Psalms than in carrying out the traits that would make him successful in the environment that he is travelling in; yet, when given the opportunity, he shows himself to be cunning and brave when necessary. This depth of character and character development made this novel more enjoyable for me. Within this development of these characters, Cooper reveals a strong central theme of brotherhood that can develop among companions. Scout, Uncas, and Chingachgook make for a strong mixed-race family unit at the outset of the novel, and they work as a team to be successful at many times in the novel. However, as the novel progresses, we begin to see them grow closer and work more closely with Haywood, Gamut, Munro, and the two sisters until the final climax when it becomes apparent how much the dynamic of brotherhood between characters has changed over the course of the novel. For me, that was the most brilliant part of this novel, and it made me glad that I had read it.However, while I am glad that I read it, I still cannot say that it was particularly brilliant or great. The writing was clunky at times, the racial stereotypes were there, and there wasn’t much that made me really think deeply about the human condition. Overall, I thought that it was a flawed novel with some positive aspects that helped to redeem it. I recommend it provided that the reader’s expectations aren’t too high.

[joe73-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A wonderful story. So much better than it's siblings.

[juva_3 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

In the midst of the French and Indian War, two young women are on a dangerous journey to be reunited with their father. On the way, they are betrayed by their woods guide and must rely on the kindness of a strange scout who travels with a pair of Indians. This book is strange and I just couldn't appreciate it. I really wasn't sure why the two young women were being ferried into a war zone. And they are sent into the woods with only two men to protect them? What nonsense is this? Hawkeye is just plain annoying. Every time he opens his mouth he says something repetative that he's already said a number of times. Most commonly about the composition of his own blood (nothing but pure, unsullied Caucasian blood in this man!) but also charming racism and other tedious things. The book rambled on and on and eventually ended. I was relieved to be done.

[garrison0550 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Probably better to stick with the movie version on this one.

[leslie398 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Watch the movie! For once, I think the film versions (none of which are completely true to the book) are better than the original novel. Cooper has written an exciting adventure story in such a way that it is a struggle to read. It is tempting to blame that on the early date it was written (1826) except that Jane Austen wrote even earlier and in a much easier style!

This audiobook edition also has some problems. This digital audiobook from Recorded Books has chapter markers but they bear no relation to the chapters in the text! I suspect that they represent the sides of cassette tapes -- but at least there wasn't any "This is the end of..." bits. The narrator was okay. Unfortunately, his voice, instead of compelling my attention, caused my mind to wander. For some sections, I had to resort to reading my Kindle edition after repeated attempts to listen left me unable to comprehend what was happening.

[bookconcierge · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Book on CD performed by William Costello
3.5***

The second (and most popular) of the Leatherstocking Tales is set in 1757, during the French and Indian wars. It’s an adventure novel and romance, featuring Hawkeye (a/k/a Leatherstocking, Natty Bumpo or the Scout), a white man who has adopted Indian ways. His “brothers” are the Mohicans: Chingachgook and Uncas. They weave through the lush landscape of upper New York, fighting to save Cora and Alice Munro, the beautiful daughters of a fort commander, from a treacherous Huron renegade, Magua.

I’m sure this was assigned reading in high school, and am equally sure that I relied on the Cliff’s notes to get through the exam and didn’t actually read this classic American novel. As an adult I can appreciate the prose and the style of 18th-century writing, but it still frustrates me. For the modern-day reader Cooper includes way too much verbiage to get to the point.

But if the reader can persist, s/he will find a tension-filled adventure – the chases through the wilderness, and major fights/battles are very suspenseful in places. And there is a significant message about the clash of civilizations as the Europeans fought over territory while ignoring the rights, wishes, livelihoods of the indigenous population. Cooper’s historical romance gave us many of the elements so common in frontier fiction: a loner hero, “noble savage” trusted companion, lovely heroines in danger, and a plot full of chases and epic battles. Looked at it that way, I am reminded of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.

What surprised me most on this reading was Cora’s character. Her strength, intelligence, courage and willingness to sacrifice herself made her a much more complex character than the typical “helpless maiden in distress.”

William Costello does a fairly good job of reading the audio version, though his slow pace at the beginning made me reconsider whether I wanted to keep listening. I think, however, it was more due to Cooper’s style of writing, than to Costello’s skill as a performer.

I do have to admit, that the glorious cinematography and music score of the 1992 film, starring Daniel Day Lewis as Hawkeye, kept running through my mind as I read/listened. While that film has significant departures in plot from Cooper’s novel, it did make me think that I should probably actually read the book, so when our local university book discussion group announced this book in the lineup for fall, I immediately RSVP’d. I’m glad I finally read it, and am looking forward to the discussion.

[atimco-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I haven't read James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans since high school and thought it would interesting to revisit, especially after seeing the move starring Daniel Day-Lewis. It certainly kept me reading, but it won't become a favorite for several reasons. Cooper seems to have been a man with a chip on his shoulder; his preface is rather combative and if you wish to see a snub there, you may. I'm sure other reviewers have covered the racism angle of this story more thoroughly than I wish to. I'll just say, it's there but it's not unmitigated. Chingachgook and Uncas are certainly portrayed as heroes, and the rich figurative speeches Cooper puts in the mouths of all the Indian characters is simply beautiful. Not all the white characters are good, either; Montcalm comes in for some well-deserved reproach. But overall, if you want to enjoy this you have to overlook a lot. And it's not just the racist undertones that you have to overlook. The improbable disguises that our heroes assume, dashing in and out of hostile villages without being recognized, stretch credulity just a bit far and render the story awkward. The heroines are, of course, astonishingly beautiful and delicate females whose small feet are noted several times as a sign of pure breeding. Cora has some backbone, but she seems a little unreal. The movie is almost unrecognizable from its source. The love interests are thoroughly mixed up, people die who survived and survive who died, and by raising Hawk-eye to such prominence over his Delaware companions, the filmmakers caused the name of the film to no longer make much sense. And what a pity there was no room for the humor of David Gamut's character! In comparing the book to the film, there's some irony to be found in Cooper's preface, in which he says, "...it is a very unsafe experiment either for a writer or a projector to trust to the inventive powers of anyone but himself." How many other authors whose works have been adapted into films could say the same? At least it has a lovely soundtrack. I see why this tale is still read and enjoyed, and I wouldn't say no to reading more of Cooper's stories. But it's flawed.

[burnit99 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A classic adventure novel, set in young America in 1757 during the French and Indian War, published in 1826, this is the story of how a Scout, named Hawkeye by his Delaware tribe companions, helps to try to rescue the two daughters of an English colonel who has been forced to surrender his fort to the French forces. After their surrender, the English soldiers and the families are unharmed by the victorious French, but their Native American colleagues are less merciful and a massacre and kidnapping takes place. Hawkeye (aka Natty Bumppo), the Mohicans Chingachgook and his son Uncas, and Duncan Heyward, a British major, embark on a rescue mission to try to save Colonel Munro's daughters, Alice and Cora Munro, from a fate worse than death at the hands of the villainous Huron, Magua. This is an exciting adventure, with scattered episodes of shocking savagery by the Hurons who have sided with the French forces, and occasional acts of nobility and sacrifice by the Delaware and Mohicans of the story. My history is not strong enough to have a sense of how accurately the "Indian" characters are portrayed, but the even-handed way in which they are depicted seems unusual for a white author in 1826. The only thing that marred the story for me was the stiff and archaic language and sentence structure, but it may well be that this was entirely a product of the times and was well-received by readers at the time. It did make the reading of an exciting story a difficult slog for the most part. This particular copy is undated, but there is a handwritten name and probable date: Cleopatra Price, '13 (1913 of course).

[lukerik-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A perfectly good cheapo edition with two typos and no critical apparatus. The only reason you might want to read a scholarly edition is that regular notes will give you blessed breaks in the text of this appallingly awful novel.The novel does have merits. If you have come here after reading the Deerslayer you will find something much more readable because Cooper's intrusive authorial voice is budding but not yet in full flower. If this is your first experience of Cooper, I know it's hard to believe, but he actually gets worse. The dialogue is broken but thankfully he makes little attempt to represent Hawkeye's pronouciation.What you're lacking is anything like the thematic unity of the prequel. There Hawkeye's internal conflict will his ethnic identity is reflected in the plot. There's none of that here. I did find myself wondering a couple of times if Hawkeye was protesting too much and is actually supposed to be mixed race and in denial, but on reflection I think he's just degenerated into a sort of contemptuous racist. I found myself wondering why the Mohicans put up with him. I certainly found it hard to do so.There are so many examples of unparalleled incompetence but I shall restrict myself to this little diamond from page 301:“The effect of so strange an echo on David may better be imagined than described.”Bad enough, but he then proceeds to the end of the chapter, taking a further 71 words to describe the effect.

[leandrod-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Boriŋ. But ðen I was a kid.

[claytondonhauser · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Last of the Mohicans is a story about two sisters escorted from fort Henry to their fathers house for a visit. Guided through the forest by a major. The major named Duncan Heyward. Also he was guided by a Mohican. They stumble upon an Indian that leads them on the wrong direction. Once they find out he runs away bringing back more allies. but saved by a adopted settler by one of the last Mohicans.This book is an intresting read, Yet it is not related to your work or your selected genre expressed to me from you, Mr. Poppe, For that reason this read would not be good for you currently. So i would not recommended this as of right now. If you are interested in fictional history when you are retired, maybe you could kick back to this book in your senior years.

[santhony_35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For Christmas, I ordered an mp3 player (Library of Classics) that was pre-loaded with 100 works of classic literature in an audio format. Each work is in the public domain and is read by amateurs, so the quality of the presentation is hit or miss. Last of the Mohicans is one of my favorite movies, starring Daniel Day Lewis and Madeleine Stowe. While this novel features the same time frame (French and Indian War), the same geography (New York/Canadian border) and the same characters (with the addition of David Gamut, who did not appear in the movie), much of the action, plot and story lines differ significantly.James Fenimore Cooper, the author of Last of the Mohicans and several others of the same genre, came under fairly scathing criticism from none other than Mark Twain, concerning both his style and the contents of his tales. Certainly, Cooper was somewhat wordy, and imbued his heroes with outlandish talents and skills, but not to the detriment of the story, in my opinion.The hero of this novel, and the others in the Leatherstocking series, is known variously as Hawkeye, the Long Rifle or the Scout, an American who has been raised by a Mohican chief, Chingachgook, and his son, Uncas (last of the Mohicans). Hawkeye is the quintessential frontier woodsman, well versed in all of the skills possessed by the natives, but imbued with all of the intelligence, morality and virtues of his race. Some have criticized Cooper for his stereotypical portrayal of the Native Americans (the Delaware as noble savages, the Huron as simply bloodthirsty beasts), but this falls within the common critical failing of attributing current societal norms and mores to historical personages. In any event, Hawkeye and his Mohicans befriend an English officer charged with transporting two English maidens to an English fort on Lake Champlain. The English have been betrayed by their Huron guide (Magua). The balance of the novel entails the effort to rescue the women from their Huron captors with the aid of the friendly Delaware tribe. Much woodscraft, skill in battle and Indian practices and beliefs are contained within the story.While I much preferred the movie to the novel, having much to do with the striking visuals provided by the former, I cannot overly fault the latter and found it to be entertaining taken as a whole. Taking it for what it is, an early-19th century look at the French and Indian War, the reader could do far worse than this classic work.

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kidnapping, adventures tramping through the woods, battles between Native American tribes, this book is full of adventure! This is the most well-known book from Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales series. It’s set during the French and Indian War in 1757. Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of Lieutenant Colonel Munro, are being escorted through the forest in New York when they are kidnapped by members of the Huron tribe. The leader of the band is the vile and unrepentant Magua. The Munro sisters’ protectors, including Major Duncan Heyward, Hawkeye, two Mohican Indians, Chingachgook and Uncas, and a singing teacher named David, attempt to rescue them. Their methods are clever, dressing as animals, even using David’s love of singing at one point! I also loved that there are quotes from Shakespeare throughout the text. He was so revered, even at a time when his plays weren’t readily available. The book was published in 1826, but even back then there are so many mentions about the atrocities that were done to the Native Americans. There are fascinating parts that delve into the history of that time period, but much of the plot is spent with one group chasing another group through the woods. I’ll admit it became tedious after a while. BOTTOM LINE: Wonderful historical information, but it stretched on and became repetitive.

[aliceanna-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Overall a good story, but told in a very awkward style. I kept drifting off, my mind wandering as I read it. It just simply couldn't keep my attention even though the story itself and most of the characters were very good.

[misses_london · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Difficult to adjust to the writing style? No doubt. Patience required even then? Yes. Nevertheless an artfully and skillfully accomplished novel? Absolutely. This book is so descriptive and tedious in its setting because the merciless and rugged wilderness of N. American before colonisation and Europeans ultimately conquered it was in and of itself one of the primary characters in the novel, just as important as that of the Mohicans, their Indian foes, and the white settlers. While it's a work of fiction, in order to fully understand the tale, it forced me to educate myself on the history of the French-Indian War, most of which it appears I'd forgotten. I'd recommend this book to those interested in the history of colonisation of N. American and certainly anyone interested in Native American culture and the clash between it and the white settlers. A beautiful piece of work.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Last of the Mohicans
by James Fenimore Cooper
Published 1826
Pages: 416
Genre: Fiction, historical romance
My copy: kindle/☊, narrated by Larry McKeever.
Rating ★ ★ ★ 1/2

Story of the Seven Year War of 1757. Frontiersman, Hawkeye and his Native American friend Uncas, along with David Gamut, the singing teacher, and Major Duncan Heyward, the group's military leader set off to rescue the two Munro sisters who have been taken captive. This author is one of the first to include Native American's in his writing and he does a good job of respecting their culture. There is the suggestion of interracial marriage in the story which would have been quite controversial and maybe also was the reason for his popularity. I think his book might have been one of the very first to make this suggestion. While it is a historical novel and also a novel about a people, there are some inaccuracies. The author's prose is not easy to read. Audio made it better and McKeever had a fine voice but the quality of the audio was poor. I had an echo and also the transitions were quite obvious. Twain criticized Cooper as being a spendthrift as far as his use of words.

[bcrowl399 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a difficult book to read. I only read it because I loved the moive "Lat of the Mohicans" with Daniel Day Lewis. The really interesting part is that some threads of the original are present in the movie. Some of the best lines in the movies are actually taken from the book. 

[jmoncton_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

OK, let's start with what I enjoyed about this classic - great story and wonderful characters. In this book you really get a good mental picture of Hawkeye, the scout, and Uncas, the last purebred Mohican chief. You fall in love with Cora's heroism and you detest Magua as a treacherous villain. Now, what did I not like - the writing style! This book was so wordy and hard to slug through. Although I enjoyed all the conversations between the characters the descriptions were so tedious and peppered with footnotes. Toward the end of the book, I found myself fast forwarding through the footnotes - some of them were several tracks long! I can see why people love this book - what a great story! But does anyone like his writing style? Last of the Mohicans is the Last of Cooper's books for me!

[rebeccagraf · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Classic American stories are part of our lives. We read books on them, references in television series, and watch movies on them. But when we read the actual classic, we find that what we thought it was about is slightly different. The Last of the Mohicans is no different.James Fenimore Cooper wrote a classic that is read in most schools across the country. It’s the story of 2 young English women on a journey to see their father who is a leader in the British Army. With an escort of British military and one native scout they find themselves ambushed. They are saved by a scout and 2 other natives. The fighting amongst the French, English, and native tribes gives Cooper a plethora of material for an intricate plot.This proved to more difficult of a read than I remember from high school when I read it. Maybe it is because I’ve read so many more contemporary versions and watched movies. There are several scenes were the dialogue is only in French. Sorry, I know about three words in that language. Also, so much description was placed that I’d forget what was happening in the scene.Now, I have to admit how movies ruined Cooper’s book for me. The movie with Daniel Daye Lewis was great. I loved it. When I just reread the book, I was so disappointed because the storyline is so different. The book has Alice and Duncan in love. The move has Hawkeye and Cora. There are many other differences, but I would be spoiling the reading experience.If you have not read the book yet, try not to see any movies on it first. It will make the experience so much more enjoyable.Note: This book was free as a public domain piece of literature.

[crunky_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

--May contain minor spoilers--This novel held a few charms, but none were sustained throughout. Although the plot is one of adventure and suspense, to the modern reader the prose and dialogue often come off as goofy at best. The multiple epithets for each character, for example, imply a sense of grandeur to the pageant that simply wasn't there. The sentence structure, the narrative voice, the epigraphs that preface each chapter and the dialogue all shared in this effect. I was initially entertained by Cooper's eagerness to please, but eventually groans and eye-rolls began to take their toll. The book is at its best when we're getting to know the characters. I became fond of Major Heyward, and much preferred his character to that of Hawkeye the scout. Hawkeye is likely meant to be portrayed as an amazing hero, but he starts out as a completely insufferable know-it-all. (Hawkeye becomes much more tolerable in the final third of the book, but by that point the book has other problems...) I enjoyed the banter with Gamut, the descriptions of the Munro family's love for and loyalty to one another, and the portrayal of Uncas's and Chingachgook's relationship. Magua makes a worthy foe.Memorably, whenever a character is engaged in a debate or is called upon to make a stirring speech, Cooper goes to great lengths to describe the rhetorical strategy, cunning, and eloquence that must be employed for the occasion. One is asked to hear the listeners of these speeches oooh and aaah as Cooper praises the words of his noble and ignoble characters. These speeches on the page, however, are never all that different from how he has any given character speak the most casual dialogue anyway. It's goofball stuff.Cooper asks for a heavy suspension of disbelief when it comes to the amazing prowess of Hawkeye, but even this does not prepare one for later chapters featuring characters infiltrating enemy villages by wearing... a bear costume. (There was also a brief moment of a character blending in with some beavers.) There are truly impressive moments in the book (the massacre outside the fort, for example) but having recently finished it I just can't take it seriously--I'm hung up on the complete cheese of the hero crawling around disguised as a gruff but domesticated bear and getting away with it. Only the experienced eye of Uncas can notice the subtle differences between this farce and the real thing! I read this book out of literary/historical interest, and I'm glad I read it. I enjoyed it at times, although maybe not for the reasons Cooper may have intended. My curiosity is now satisfied, and I will not be looking to read more Cooper.

[thetwods · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Cooper's famous tale of the white scout Hawkeye (aka Natty Bumppo aka La Longue Carabine) who has forsaken the growing materialism of "civilized" society to live amongst the natives in the woods of 18th century New York offers what should have been a lively tale of adventure. The year is 1757, the French and Indian War rages in North America, both the British and French having their own Indian allies. The daughters of a British commander, Munro, must travel from Fort Edward to Fort William Henry, guided by a Huron whom their father trusts. That Huron, Magua, turns out to be an ersatz ally of the French commander Montcalm. Hawkeye and his companions, father and son Chingachgook and Uncas, rescue the daughters, Cora and Alice. They lose them to Magua and his band of Huron. They rescue them again. Then, when they finally arrive at Fort William Henry, it is nearly too late as the French have it under a ferocious siege. Munro surrenders the fort to Montcalm who lets the British troops retreat to Fort Edward. Magua has other designs and attacks and massacres the British, yet again kidnapping the Munro girls.The racial and gender views of the time are repeatedly brought forth in the narrative, and this is not just Cooper regurgitating beliefs from 100 years prior to his writing. In the preface, Cooper himself states that women should not read his book as they won't like it, it's too manly. On practically every other page, Hawkeye, while treating his two Delaware as of his own family, reminds his white companions and the reader that his blood has no cross, meaning no cross-contamination with native blood. After a dozen or so instances, it gets incredibly trying seeing it on the page again and again.Somewhere inside is a great adventure story, but you have to get through a multitude of asides, 18th century racial philosophy that is repeatedly placed in the reader's face and a density of language beyond the usual anachronistics of early 19th century literature. It still, however, retains its place in literary history as one of the earliest examples of the American novel.