Last of the Mohicans, The

The Last of the Mohicans (1826) is James Fenimore Cooper's most famous and influential novel. A historical romance, the story concerns the abduction and rescue of two white women in the wilderness of upstate New York during the French and Indian War (1754–63). The captives are the fair Alice and the dark Cora, daughters of the English Colonel Munro, who battles the French and their Indian allies in colonial America.

Violent, the novel is replete with multiple tomahawkings, scalpings, and shootings, highlighting the dangerous wartime and wilderness environment. The rescuer in this story is the skillful frontiersman called Hawkeye, a white man living in the forest, whose dramatic wilderness exploits would give rise to future frontier heroes in American culture such as Davy Crockett and other rugged individualists who shun civilization.

Hawkeye lives in harmony with nature and natives. He praises the beauty of the forest and is saddened by its disappearance because of the encroachment of white civilization. Hawkeye laments the disappearance of the indigenous population and praises the inhabitants of the forest, namely his friends Chingachgook and his son Uncas, the last of the Mohicans. Cooper presents a sympathetic portrayal of Chingachgook, Uncas, and other selected Native Americans. However, Cooper is careful to portray the good Indian with the bad, and Magua fulfills the role of the evil Indian. Magua causes mayhem and abducts the Munro sisters. Magua, however, is ultimately foiled in his evil designs by the ever-present and resourceful Hawkeye, his two Indian companions, Major Duncan Heyward, and psalmodist David Gamut, the last two representing courageous, albeit inept, colonists in the woods.

Cooper praises the Indians in an early salute to the noble savage concept. Natives are not dehumanized as in early American literature, namely colonial captivity narratives, which portrayed Native Americans as a monolithic block of evil. Cooper individualizes the Indian, and the protagonist states that whites can learn from Native Americans. More provocative is Hawk-eye's assertion that the heaven of the red man and the white man is the same, a bold statement for early-19th-century America.

In addition, purity of blood is not an issue to Native Americans, who welcomed interracial unions. Hawkeye, however, constantly adds the racial disclaimer that he is a man without a cross, meaning that he is white with no admixture of Indian blood. The text presents an interesting paradox, with Hawkeye praising the red man but emphasizing his—and others'—whiteness. This motif is reinforced by the dark countenance of Cora, a white woman of mixed racial identity. The text later reveals that her mother, Colonel Munro's first wife, since deceased, had lived in the West Indies and had black ancestry.

Cora falls in love with Uncas, who reciprocates the feeling. However, both die, suffering the tragic fate of doomed love, which provides several societal and racial implications. Cora is cast as the tragic mulatta and her death implies the non-viability of miscegenation within the new American republic. And the death of Uncas—the last of the Mohicans—portends the doom of overall Native American society. To further the point, the fair Alice, who is the offspring of her father's second marriage, to a Scottish woman, is white and of unmixed blood. She and Major Heyward marry to live the proverbial happily ever after, implying continuation of the white race.

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