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Overview

The classic tale of Hawkeye—Natty Bumppo—the frontier scout who turned his back on "civilization," and his friendship with a Mohican warrior as they escort two sisters through the dangerous wilderness of Indian country in frontier America.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781101157596
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 07/05/2005
Series: The Leatherstocking Tales
Sold by: Penguin Group
Format: eBook
Pages: 464
File size: 1 MB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) was born in Burlington, New Jersey, and his family moved to Cooperstown, New York, while he was still an infant. He attended Yale College until he was expelled for bad behavior. He served in the U.S. Navy, resigning in 1811 to get married. With his story The Pilot (1823), Cooper set the style for a new genre of sea fiction. His most famous novels are the Leather-Stocking Tales including The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841), featuring the quintessential American hero Natty Bumppo. Cooper, a keen social critic, wrote several well-regarded naval histories.
 
Richard Hutson is an associate professor of English and director of the American Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His teaching and writing have been primarily on American popular culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially on the American West.
 
Hugh C. MacDougall, a graduate of Harvard, Columbia Law School and Columbia School of International Affairs, served in the State Department for twenty-eight years, including postings in tropical Africa, Brazil, and Burma. He is a founder of the James Fenimore Cooper Society, and has presented many papers on Cooper and his writings.


From the Paperback edition.

Date of Birth:

September 15, 1789

Date of Death:

September 14, 1851

Place of Birth:

Burlington, New Jersey

Place of Death:

Cooperstown, New York

Education:

Yale University (expelled in 1805)

Read an Excerpt

Chapter I

Mine ear is open, and my heart prepared; The worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold:— Say, is my kingdom lost? Richard II, III.ii. 93–95.

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 offered to the march of the combatants, were too obvious to be neglected. The lengthened sheet of the Champlain stretched from the frontiers of Canada, deep within the borders of the neighbouring province of New-York, forming a natural passage across half the distance that the French were compelled to master in order to strike their enemies. Near its southern termination, it received the contributions of another lake, whose waters were so limpid, as to have been exclusively selected by the Jesuit missionaries, to perform the typical purification of baptism, and to obtain for it the title of the lake “du Saint Sacrement.” The less zealous English thought they conferred a sufficient honour on its unsullied fountains, when they bestowed the name of their reigning prince, the second of the House of Hanover. The two united to rob the untutored possessors of its wooded scenery of their native right to perpetuate its original appellation of “Horican.”*

Winding its way among countless islands, and imbedded in mountains, the “holy lake” extended a dozen leagues still farther to the south. With the high plain that there interposed itself to the further passage of the water, commenced a portage of as many miles, which conducted the adventurer to the banks of the Hudson, at a point, where, with the usual obstructions of the rapids, or rifts, as they were then termed in the language of the country, the river became navigable to the tide.

While, in the pursuit of their daring plans of annoyance, the restless enterprise of the French even attempted the distant and difficult gorges of the Alleghany, it may easily be imagined that their proverbial acuteness would not overlook the natural advantages of the district we have just described. It became, emphatically, the bloody arena, in which most of the battles for the mastery of the colonies were contested. Forts were erected at the different points that commanded the facilities of the route, and were taken and retaken, rased and rebuilt, as victory alighted on the hostile banners. While the husbandmen shrunk back from the dangerous passes, within the safer boundaries of the more ancient settlements, armies larger than those that had often disposed of the sceptres of the mother countries, were seen to bury themselves in these forests, whence they rarely returned but in skeleton bands, that were haggard with care, or dejected by defeat. Though the arts of peace were unknown to this fatal region, its forests were alive with men; its glades and glens rang with the sounds of martial music, and the echoes of its mountains threw back the laugh, or repeated the wanton cry, of many a gallant and reckless youth, as he hurried by them, in the noontide of his spirits, to slumber in a long night of forgetfulness.

* As each nation of the Indians had either its language or its dialect, they usually gave different names to the same places, though nearly all of their appellations were descriptive of the object. Thus, a literal translation of the name of this beautiful sheet of water, used by the tribe that dwelt on its banks, would be “The tail of the Lake.” Lake George, as it is vulgarly, and now indeed legally, called, forms a sort of tail to Lake Champlain, when viewed on the map. Hence the name. [1831]

It was in this scene of strife and bloodshed, that the incidents we shall attempt to relate occurred, during the third year of the war which England and France last waged, for the possession of a country, that neither was destined to retain.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Maps
Introduction
James Fenimore Cooper: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

The Last of the Mohicans

  • Preface
    Volume I
    Volume II

Appendix A: Illustrations

Appendix B: Cooper’s Historical Sources

  1. From John Gottlieb Heckewelder, History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations (1876)
  2. From Jonathan Carver, Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America in the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768(1781)
  3. From Benjamin Silliman, A Short Tour Between Hartford and Quebec (1824)

Appendix C: Recollections and Appraisals of Cooper

  1. From the United States Literary Gazette (May 1826)
  2. From the Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres (April 1826)
  3. From W.H. Gardiner, North American Review (1826)
  4. From William Cullen Bryant, “Discourse on the Life, Genius, and Writings of J. Fenimore Cooper” (1852)
  5. From Susan Fenimore Cooper, Pages and Pictures, from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (1861)
  6. From Mark Twain, “Fenimore Cooper’s Further Literary Offenses,” The New England Quarterly (c. 1895)

Appendix D: The Cherokee Removal

  1. The United States Congress’s Indian Removal Act (1830)
  2. From Andrew Jackson’s Second State of the Union Address (1830)

Select Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

D. H. Lawrence

In his immortal friendship of Chingachgook and Matty Bumppo [Cooper] dreamed the nucleus of a new society….A stark stripped human relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex. Deeper than property, deeper than fatherhood, deeper than marriage, deeper than Love.

James Franklin Beard

The Last of the Mohicans raises again the question of the efficacy of human effort to control irrational forces at work in individual men, races, and nations. The question has never been more pertinent than now.

From the Publisher

“In his immortal friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo [Cooper] dreamed the nucleus of a new society….A stark human relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex. Deeper than property, deeper than fatherhood, deeper than marriage, deeper than Love.” –D. H. Lawrence

The Last of the Mohicans raises again the question of the efficacy of human effort to control irrational forces at work in individual men, races, and nations. The question has never been more pertinent than now.” –James Franklin Beard 

Reading Group Guide

1. How do Cooper's characters, specifically Natty Bumppo and the Indian Magua, test the boundary between Indian and white cultures? What happens to these characters? How does the metaphorical racial boundary extend to that between wilderness and cultivated land, if at all?

2. What are the differences Cooper outlines between the Mohicans and the Delawares, and to what end? What role does Uncas play in the conflict between the two tribes? What is the significance of his relationship with Cora?

3. How does Natty Bumppo's view of society oppose Munro's, particularly at the novel's conclusion? How do Natty's views support or contradict his own existence, straddling two worlds as he does? How does this deep-rooted ambivalence about social and racial hierarchy inform the novel?

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