Leatherstocking Tales

James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales comprise five novels—The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841)—chronicling the adventures of the rugged frontiersman, Indian fighter, and British scout, Natty Bumppo. Bumppo, a white man raised among Native Americans, is skilled at survival and hunting on the frontier. He clears the way for western settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though ultimately rejecting settlement for himself. Inspired by English tales of chivalric knights and the mythical exploits of the frontiersman Daniel Boone, and also troubled by the growth of the American republic, Cooper created in the character of Natty Bumppo the archetypal American “Western” male hero, poised between a savage “natural” masculinity (expressed in Bumppo's various nicknames) and “civilized” white Victorian manhood.

The Leatherstocking Tales move back and forth in time, with each story revealing more about Natty Bumppo. In The Pioneers, Bumppo is seventy-seven-years old and known as “Leatherstocking.” He lives outside the community of Templeton in upstate New York in the 1790s. Although the townspeople see him as a throwback to an earlier time, Leatherstocking and his Indian companion John Mohegan (also known as Chingachgook) instruct Oliver Effingham, the owner of the lands surrounding Templeton, in the ways of the American wilderness. By enhancing his manliness, they make him a more responsible patriarch than the community leader, Judge Marmaduke Templeton.

In The Last of the Mohicans, Bumppo is forty-four-year-old “Hawkeye.” Fighting with the British during the French and Indian War (1754–63), Hawkeye, Chingachgook, and Chingachgook's son Uncas attempt to rescue Cora and Alice, the daughters of a British colonel, from Mohawk Indians. Here, as in the other Tales, Cooper uses weak, refined heroines to heighten the masculinity of his male characters. In this particular story, he refines his masculine ideal by contrasting Cora and Uncas's interracial sexual attraction with Hawkeye's whiteness and chastity (and uses Cora and Uncas's deaths to prevent the consummation of their relationship).

[Page 268]In The Prairie, Bumppo, at age eighty-six, has left Templeton, New York, to live among the nomadic Indians of the American Plains. White civilization intrudes, however, when the squatter Bush clan from Kentucky seeks a new home. Bumppo uses his frontier skills and sacrifices his life to save these white settlers. His death symbolizes the passing of heroic, frontier masculinity and the triumph of genteel, civilized manliness, a transition that troubled Cooper.

The final two novels detail Bumppo's early beginnings. In The Pathfinder, forty-two-year-old Bumppo (the “Pathfinder”) falls in love with Mabel Dunham, the daughter of a British soldier. Dunham proves too refined for him, however, and marries another, ensuring that Bumppo will remain unredeemed by female domesticity and civilization. The Deerslayer describes how the twenty-four-year-old Bumppo (now known as “Deerslayer”) befriends the young Delaware chief Chingachcook in upstate New York during the 1740s. In saving Chingachcook's bride from Iroquois marauders, Bumppo allows Chingachcook to reclaim his “natural” masculinity, earns the Indian name “Hawkeye,” and acquires a life-long companion in Chingachgook.

Cooper's Natty Bumppo remains an enduring figure in American culture, and his influence can be seen in such figures as the Lone Ranger and Rambo—highly-skilled white men who straddle the line between savagery and civilization. Bumppo's model of manhood appears not only in many portrayals or the western frontier, but also in literary works such as Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851), and Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan series (first introduced in 1912). The Leatherstocking Tales continues to offer an appealing model of “natural” white masculinity that transcends the seemingly artificial realities of modern, industrial America.

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