Cooper's Last of the Mohicans: Myth, Race, and American Identity

Introduction: History, Myth, and the Novel's Dual Title

The theme of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans would seem to be contained not only in the title of the novel, but also in its subtitle: A Narrative of 1757. Both halves of the book's title point to a historical past and indicate the tremendous changes that had occurred on the North American continent between the Colonial era of the French and Indian War depicted in the novel and the prosperous bourgeois United States of 1826, when the novel was first published. This essay explores how certain aspects of Cooper's narrative illuminate this theme in different ways and attempt to point to a vanished past — not necessarily a Paradise Lost, but a version of history constructed mythically, to justify the United States by offering a myth of its early beginnings.

First, I will examine the novel's protagonist, Natty Bumppo, to see what Cooper is saying about America through his depiction. Then I will examine the specific comedy or satire that Cooper has placed in the novel with the character of Gamut, who exists as a kind of joke within the novel to better define Bumppo. Finally, I will examine Bumppo's relationship with the Indians depicted in the book and how it relates to the book's central theme of a vanished historical American past. Overall, Cooper's central theme — to present a mythic "narrative" of events that were a half-century in the past when he was writing, and which predated the existence of anything called "The United States of America," as a way of establishing a fictive foundation for the nation — will be seen as the unifying purpose of the novel.

We must first observe that Cooper's protagonist, Natty Bumppo, is actually somewhat unexpected. In the era of European colonization of North America, Bumppo is, in fact, not quite European. This is most noteworthy in Cooper's use of names for his protagonist: the character is only referred to as Natty Bumppo at the very outset. Cooper's "Introduction" tells us that "every word uttered by Natty Bumppo was not to be received as rigid truth," and in Chapter 3, Hawkeye (to give Natty his Indian name), speaking with Chingachgook, refers to his ancestors:

Natty Bumppo and the Racially Ambiguous American Hero

"…For myself, I conclude the Bumppos could shoot, for I have a natural turn with a rifle, which must have been handed down from generation to generation, as our holy commandments tell us all good and evil gifts are bestowed; though I should be loath to answer for other people in such a matter. But every story has its two sides; so I ask you, Chingachgook, what passed, according to the traditions of the red men, when our fathers first met?" (Ch. 3)

It is important to note that the answer to Bumppo's question here could be given in a very different way than Bumppo himself would choose to answer it. As Haberly notes about the popularity of Cooper's novel, "for roughly a hundred years, from 1750 to 1850, the Indian captivity was one of the chief staples of popular literary culture" (431). The so-called "Captivity Narrative" — a genre that can be taken to encompass actual autobiographies in Cotton Mather's Massachusetts describing the experience of being kidnapped by Native Americans, and could also be extended to various types of "Western" story, such as the famous John Ford film The Searchers — usually emphasizes the utter enmity between the "Aborigines," as Cooper calls them in his "Introduction," and the white settlers.

Here, Bumppo — whose story was begun by Cooper in a previous novel and would be continued through several more of the "Leatherstocking Tales" — has been raised by Indians. There is a sound writerly reason for Cooper to do this: it allows him to have a character who can translate effortlessly between the homely domestic world of the white settlers and the "primitive" life of Chingachgook and the Mohicans. But to make such a character central to the American self-image in 1826 carries an added meaning. Notably absent from Cooper's novel — although it had existed in America for almost a century and a half at the time when the novel is set, and for two centuries at the time of its writing — is slavery. The "race question" in the United States is therefore effortlessly displaced by Cooper's strategy of shifting it from black and white to red and white: as he says in the "Introduction," "the color of the Indian, the writer believes, is peculiar to himself."

In fact, what defines Bumppo to the Indians as well as to the French is his weaponry — he has all the fighting skill of an Indian, but possesses the additional skill of using the one weapon the Indians lacked, which was responsible for the wholesale slaughter of so much of their population: his rifle.

"A burst of voices had shouted simultaneously, 'La Longue Carabine!' causing the opposite woods to re-echo with a name which, Heyward well remembered, had been given by his enemies to a celebrated hunter and scout of the English camp, and who, he now learned for the first time, had been his late companion." (Chapter 9)

Here the French recognize Bumppo only by his gun, perhaps because it is the clearest sign that he is not, in fact, an Indian himself.

Conclusion: Cooper's Myth and Its Lasting Resonance

But what is most fascinating about reading Stafford's study is that, as a professor of English literature, she knows American literature like The Last of the Mohicans well, yet appears unaware of the existence of The Book of Mormon, which is not discussed in her book. However, it is this slightly comic note of counterpoint that can allow us to understand the full scope of Cooper's theme. The Book of Mormon is narrated by the "Last of the Mohicans" (although Joseph Smith, who supposedly discovered the Golden Tablets in Upstate New York — the same region in which Cooper's novel is set — gives a different tribal name) and proceeds to outline a racial mythology that presented the Indians as the lost tribe of Israel (a motif used comically by Cooper in one of his later novels) while simultaneously demonizing African slaves, who were officially excluded from the Mormon church until the 1970s.