96 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865as event. The Spy was an immediate success. One reviewer hailed Cooper as “the first
who has deserved the appellation of a distinguished American novel writer.” And it
was followed, just two years later, by The Pilot (1823), the first in a series of sea
stories intended to prove that a former sailor could write a better novel in that genre
than the landsman Scott had done in his book, published a year earlier, The Pirate.
Some of the success of this novel was due to the character of Long Tom Coffin, a
daring old sea dog. Even more came, though, because it contrasted Tory ineffectuality
with the composure and courage of the hero. The mysterious Pilot of the title is, in
the words of the story, “a Quixote in the behalf of liberal principles,” whose status as
a natural aristocrat is reflected in his boast: “I was born without the nobility of
twenty generations to corrupt and deaden my soul.”
In the same year as The Pilot appeared, the first of the five Leatherstocking Tales,
The Pioneers (1823), was published. Set in 1793 in Otsego County in the recently
settled region of New York State, it introduces the reader to the ageing figure of
Natty Bumppo, known here as Leatherstocking. The reader also meets Chingachgook,
the friend and comrade of Natty from the Mohican tribe; and, in the course of the
story, Chingachgook dies despite Natty’s efforts to save him. The other four
Leatherstocking Tales came over the next eighteen years. The Last of the Mohicans
(1826) presents Bumppo, here called Hawkeye, in his maturity and is set in 1757
during the Seven Years’ War between the French and the British. In The Prairie
(1827) Bumppo, known simply as the trapper, has joined the westward movement;
he is now in his eighties and, at the end of the novel, he dies. The Pathfinder (1840)
is set soon after The Last of the Mohicans, in the same conflict between the French
and Indians and the British colonials. Here, Bumppo is tempted to think of marriage.
But, when he learns that the woman in question loves another, he nobly accepts that
he cannot have her. Like the many Western heroes for which he was later to serve as
prototype, he recognizes that, as he puts it, it is not according to his “gifts” to love
and to marry. The last novel to be written, The Deerslayer (1841), is, in fact, the first
novel in chronological order of events. It takes the reader back to upstate New York
in the 1740s. A young man here, Natty Bumppo begins the action known as
Deerslayer. In the course of the story, though, he kills an Indian in a fight that
approaches the status of ritual; and, before he dies, the man he has killed gives him a
new name, Hawkeye. So the series ends with the initiation of its hero into manhood.
It does not quite begin with his death; nevertheless, there is clearly a regressive
tendency at work here. The Leatherstocking Tales, as a whole, move back in time,
back further into the American past and the youth and innocence of the hero. As
they do so, they move ever further away from civilization, in terms of setting and
subject, and ever further away from social realism, in terms of approach. The Pioneers
is set in a settled community where Natty Bumppo, who is a relatively marginal
character, can be arrested and jailed for shooting a deer out of season. The Deerslayer,
by contrast, is set in a place that is several times referred to as a “wilderness,” amid
“the sleeping thunders of the woods,” in a period that, Cooper observes, “seems
remote and obscure” already, “so distant as seemingly to reach the mists of time”;
and it has a hero who is described as a “legend,” “the beau ideal” that “constitutesGGray_c02.indd 96ray_c 02 .indd 96 8 8/1/2011 7:54:37 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 37 AM