42 pages • 1 hour read
James Fenimore CooperThe Last of the Mohicans
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1826A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The American Frontier as a Place of Danger and Freedom
Published in 1826 and set in 1757, Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans appeared at a time when the American frontier contained unknowns, was very much still expanding, and was a subject of national attention. Cooper’s book shed light on frontier life for both American and international audiences, emphasizing the idea that the wilderness is integral to American identity. This perspective is evident throughout the novel, notably in the knowledge, skill, and savvy that characters like Bumppo, Chingachgook, and Uncas display when navigating and surviving in the wilderness.
The wild, broad frontier provides a setting for scenes of drama, danger, and heroism. Above all, the wilderness is depicted as a place of possibilities—opportunities for freedom as well as risks of danger. These possibilities are outlined within the first few paragraphs of Cooper’s novel. The text identifies the novel as the “wide and apparently an impervious boundary of forests,” exemplified above all in “the country which lies between the head waters of the Hudson and the adjacent lakes” (7), the specific setting of the novel. This “impervious” location requires the “hardy colonist, and the trained European” to struggle “against the rapids of the streams” and “the rugged passes of the mountains,” with courage as a potential reward for these struggles (7). The battling forces of the French and Indian War, the narrator explains, had to traverse this wilderness to even have a conflict—a point which essentially depicts nature as a superior power. On the other hand, the Native Americans, with their knowledge of the ways of the wilderness, provide a model for the colonials to emulate so that no area of the wilderness is “so dark, nor any secret place so lovely” as to prevent their movement (7).
Within these first paragraphs, The Last of the Mohicans outlines key ideas about the wilderness that it continues to explore throughout its 33 chapters. The narrative provides details that center on the realities of the Hudson area wilderness, including details such as Glenn’s Falls. This wilderness often proves to be nearly “impervious,” as Bumppo’s party struggles through darkness, dense forests, rocky mountains, and raging rapids. Both French and British colonial forces struggle to make their way through the wilderness, a point emphasized early in the novel when Magua is able to intentionally mislead Heyward, Alice, and Cora when acting as their guide. Yet, with the aid of Native American experience and knowledge—Magua helping the French and Hurons, Chingachgook and Uncas helping Bumppo’s group—the forces succeed to varying degrees. For instance, Uncas’s skills in tracking allow Bumppo, Heyward, and Munro to track Magua and Munro’s daughters through a wilderness that might otherwise have seemed impenetrable.
In this dense wilderness, dangers lurk at every corner, from the threat of concealed enemy forces waiting to ambush, to life-threatening river rapids. Yet at the same time, the openness allows characters who embrace the wilderness, just like Bumppo and his Mohican friends embrace a life unfettered by the expectations, rules, and order of their British and French counterparts. This sense of the frontier as a space of freedom, already evident at the time Cooper wrote The Last of the Mohicans, has since grown into a fundamental aspect of the American mythos.
Native American Culture and Cultural Resilience
One of several novels in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, The Last of the Mohicans shares their common theme of depictions of Native American culture. At the time the novel was written, Native Americans were largely written about either in stereotypical terms or as savage enemies of the colonial settlers and their descendants—or both. One of the things that made The Last of the Mohicans and other novels by Cooper so notable is that they did not succumb to these notions about how Native Americans could be depicted in literature. Instead, they defy expectations and present Native American characters in more full, complex, and sympathetic ways. In writing his novel, Cooper drew information about Native Americans primarily from second-hand written accounts. The novel includes depictions of Native American customs and beliefs that are not perfectly accurate, but neither are they mere stereotypes.
The Last of the Mohicans takes care to note the diversity of Native Americans. Instead of seeing them as a monolithic group, it distinguishes between Mohicans, Mohawks, Hurons, Lenape, Delaware, and other groups, even while noting the “great tie of language” and other cultural aspects that connect them (240). Cooper’s novel does not overlook some of the practices of some groups that his readers might have found offensive, such as scalping. Indeed, one of the most revered Native Americans in the novel, Uncas, scalps a French sentry in cold blood. Yet, however imperfectly, the novel takes the incident as an opportunity to express a perspective of cultural diversity rather than sensational stereotypes. The novel also points to the presence of superstition, such as among the Huron tribes when they accept Heyward’s (in the guise of a French medicine man) suggestion that he can cast the evil spirit out of a sick woman into rocks. Depictions of these superstitions might have been an opportunity to cast the Native American characters as primitive or simplistic. Yet elsewhere, the novel shows them to be highly sophisticated, as when Magua uses propagandistic oration to rally his people.
Cooper was sensitive to the idea that Native American culture faced grave injustices already by the time of the novel’s action. This is evident in the story of Magua, who became an alcoholic after being introduced to alcohol by white colonials and was humiliated by Colonel Munro as a result. This explanation that one of the protagonists, Munro, is responsible for one of Magua’s flaws spurs some sympathy for the otherwise antagonistic Magua. When Cora pleads with Magua to spare them, he “shook his head, forbidding the repetition of offers he so much despised” (123). At the same time, the story is an accurate portrayal of one of the tactics colonial forces used in attempts to subdue Native Americans. By including this in his novel, Cooper urges readers to confront the actions of the colonial forces that were the direct ancestors of many of his initial readers. When the novel closes with Tamenund’s words that “[t]he pale faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red men has not yet come again” (429-430), he's acknowledging the injustices that had been committed against Native Americans, but also an expressing the resiliency of the diverse groups that the colonial forces encountered in America.
Cultural Diversity and the Racial Composition of America
The Last of the Mohicans is notable among early 19th-century American literature not only for its full depictions of Native American characters, but also for sharing the story of a group of protagonists that is culturally and racially diverse. Bumppo is a white man who has essentially been taken in as the Mohican Chingachgook’s foster brother. Chingachgook’s son Uncas joins the group, along with the travelers David Gamut (a Connecticut singer) and Alice and Cora Munro, daughters of Scottish Colonel Munro. It is also notable that Cora is multiracial, being the daughter of the colonel and a Black woman from the West Indies. This group, containing individuals from Europe, North America, and the Caribbean, and from multiple races, reflects the diversity present in the decades that led to the formation of the United States and which has remained an integral aspect of American society. At the time Cooper published The Last of the Mohicans, however, such a diverse group was rather novel. By depicting its protagonists in this way, Cooper’s novel contains an implicit promotion of the existence of this diversity as well as a validation of it.
Events in the novel address the reactions readers might have had to positive depictions of such a group. Most notably, the topic of race is an undercurrent in the conversation between Heyward and Colonel Munro about Heyward’s interest in Alice. In the course of the conversation, Munro explains his life story, including his years spent in the West Indies and his first marriage to a Black woman with a diverse racial background who became Cora’s mother. Munro notes that his wife was “descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class who are so basely enslaved to administer to the wants of a luxurious people” (193), and he initially chastises Heyward, thinking that Heyward, who came from the slave-owning colony of Virginia, was rejecting Cora on the basis of her race. After Heyward explains that he prefers Alice because of her personality, the argument subsides, but Cooper’s novel still makes it a point to raise the topic of slavery—which was still legal in parts of the United States at the time of the novel’s publication—and cast it in a critical light.
Similarly, Cora defends Magua on the basis of his race when the others in her party begin to suspect (correctly, it later turns out) that he is intentionally misleading them through the wilderness, declaring, “Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark!” (20). Instances such as these are clear reminders to readers that diversity was both an inescapable and integral part of early American society, as well as the basis of stereotypes, biases, and injustice. In depicting a diverse cast of characters in complex ways, The Last of the Mohicans challenged some misguided views of race and ethnicity and reminds readers of the reality of diversity, even if its own depictions of characters are limited and sometimes flawed.
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By James Fenimore Cooper
