The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 8 January 2013
by James Fenimore Cooper
Imagine a time when the country spanned an area a third of what it is today. Imagine, too, that the population is only five or six million, 1/60 of what it is now. In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase goes through, doubles the area of the country, integrating vast new territories to settle and develop (once those pesky Native tribes are subdued). Given the clutter of today's American culture, it is difficult to envision how the place looked, so empty and still largely wild. In some ways, with our backward perspective, it must have been pretty wonderful. But James Fenimore Cooper was contemporary with those times. Famous already for The Last of the Mohicans, he returned to that world in this novel, the tale of Natty Bumppoe's late years. And here he describes a state of the American mind that would sound familiar in the twenty-first century. The people who move west, into the new Louisiana territories, feel crowded, oppressed by the sprawl and development they see as despoiling the country. They are freer spirits, happier when they are living on the edge of society, on the edge of laws, and one-on-one with the wilderness, where they can create the quiet home that they desire, far from their nearest neighbors. So, we have to imagine a country far less populated than it is now, and yet still feeling cramped and oppressive. One supposes that every age considers the past to be simpler easier times. Cooper is merely telling us the sense of his own age. But he peoples the book with characters steeped in the myth of America. Indeed, Cooper is one of the authors of the myth of America, that myth that tells us we are rugged individuals, living in a hostile wilderness, eking out a life with our labor and our guns. It is a spirit that is wholly outdated by the advance of civilization. But it remains the dark core of our mythology.
So, in the time shortly after the Louisiana Purchase, Europeans have already made inroads into the lands of the Native Americans and vast herds of bison and sky-darkening flocks of passenger pigeons. Now that the land is in the hands of Americans, at least from a Western legal standpoint, settlement has begun. The story opens on a wagon train of settlers, a shady group with a history of squatting on open land, wheter it is "owned" or not. These are free spirits, but with a dark animalistic side to them. And with them, they carry a precious and mysterious cargo. The train moves into the open prairie west of the Mississippi, land thought to be utterly empty, a desert. But there are plenty of people to encounter out there, a self-absorbed scientist, an impulsive bee-keeper, a modern-minded young woman, a soldier in search of a kidnapped bride, and, of course, the frightening young braves of the native tribes, bitter over their displacement from lands to the east, and watching white men follow them into the wilderness. Into the mix, we have a hero from earlier Cooper novels The Deerslayer and The Leatherstocking Tales. He is an unnamed trapper, but we've known him already as Natty Bumppo, the adventurous, brave and rugged individual with a history of heroism on behalf of misguided Europeans in a wild land. Here, he helps uncover the mystery of the cargo carried by settler Ishmael and his clan. He endeavors to help two men bring two women home with them to the settled lands. Ishmael, leader of the settlers, is as fed up with the crowded conditions among the established states as is the trapper. There are many insightful observations on the difference between the settled lands and the new wilderness. The treatment of the savage Indians is surprisingly sensitive, even as they are portayed as less civilized and more warlike than the white settlers. The trapper, now more than eighty years old, wants only to live a quiet life on the prairie. He is a reluctant but dedicated hero. The book is full of adventures and dangers, though not quite to the point of cliffhanger adventure. Its language, too, will appear stiff to modern readers, and unrealistically formal for uneducated men seeking independence on the great plains. Cooper's characters are often two-dimensional, especially the silent women. And yet, he imbues the story with surprisingly prescient commentary on the nature of American expansion, and some of his thoughts ring sharply true even in the 21st century. The myth of the frontier has long colored America's view of itself. In truth, it is nothing particularly noble and its history is riddled with atrocities great and small. Cooper seems aware of this troublesome American nature, while also remaining firmly on the side of American civilization. Interesting reading from so long ago.