A History of American Literature

Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 97

poetry.” At work here, in short, is an Edenic impulse common in American writing

that drives the imagination out of the literal and into romance and myth – and out

of a world where the individual is defined in relation to society and into one where

he or she is more likely to be situated outside it. As the conception of him alters over

the course of the five Leatherstocking Tales, Natty Bumppo gravitates more and

more toward the condition of an American Adam: in his comradeship with another

man, his virginity, as much as in his reliance on action and instinct rather than

thought and reasoning – and in his indebtedness, too, not to education or convention

but to natural wisdom and natural morality.

Natty Bumppo is more than just an American Adam, however, as his recollection

of earlier figures set on “neutral ground” suggests, as well as his anticipation of later

Western heroes. And the Leatherstocking Tales are far more than types of the

American pastoral, resituating Eden somewhere in the mythic past of the country.

They are densely textured historical narratives using contrasts and conflicts both

within and between characters to explore the national destiny. The Prairie illustrates

this. The characteristically convoluted plot involves a series of daring adventures,

raids, and rescues, during the course of which Bumppo saves his companions from

both a prairie fire and a buffalo stampede. Woven through that plot is a close

examination of human nature and its implications for human society. The original

inhabitants of America, for example, are taken as instances of natural man but, the

reader soon discovers, the instances are ambiguous. On the one hand, there are the

Pawnees, who are “strikingly noble,” their “fine stature and admirable proportions”

being an outward and visible sign of their possession of such “Roman” virtues as

dignity, decorum, and courage. On the other, there are the Sioux, a race who resem-

ble “demons rather than men” and whose frightening appearance is matched only by

their treachery and savagery. Nature, in turn, is represented variously, as benevolent,

the source of Natty’s natural wisdom (“’Tis an eddication!” he is wont to declare,

while gazing at his surroundings), and the scene of a desperate internecine battle.

That reinforces the account of Indians as both Rousseauistic noble savages and imps

of the devil. The issue of whether human beings are good, originally innocent, or

evil, steeped in original sin, is sounded here. So is the issue of whether America is an

Eden or a wilderness. And both those issues, Cooper realized and intimates, feed

into the question of what kind of society was needed, particularly in the New World.

This was a question fundamental to the infant republic, and The Prairie offers a

fascinatingly ambivalent answer.

The ambivalence goes further. The portrait of Natty Bumppo suggests, in many

ways, that that government is best which governs least. He does not need any civil

laws to guide or restrain him since he is, the reader is told, “a man endowed with the

choicest and perhaps rarest gift of nature, that of distinguishing good from evil.” He

knows what is right. Remarkably, this includes knowing about the need for

conservation: he is an instinctive ecologist, who laments the inclination he sees all

around him “to strip th’ arth of its trees” and rob “the brutes of their natural food.”

But Natty is perhaps a rarity, as his complaints about “man’s wish, and pride, and

waste,” the destruction of the wilderness he witnesses all around him, intimate. His

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