A History of the American People

country and wrote a Guide to the Wilderness. But this was published posthumously in 1810
because when young Cooper was twenty his father was shot dead at a political meeting-not
uncommon in those days. Cooper's third novel, The Pioneers (1823), first of what became known
as the Leatherstocking Tales, introduced his frontiersman hero, Natty Bumppo. The five books of
the series, above all The Last of the Mohicans (1826), made Cooper world-famous. Natty is the
first substantial character in American fiction, a recurrent American ideal-type, putting his own
special sense of honor and character above money and position-not so different from the Ernest
Hemingway hero who would emerge almost exactly a century later. Cooper used his father's
experiences as well as his own to recreate the American wilderness, fast disappearing even as he
recorded it. The novels fascinated readers in the big East Coast cities, to whom all this was new
and strange. Equally, perhaps more, important it brought home to literally millions of people in
Europe what they assumed to be the realities of American frontier life. Germans in particular
loved them: they were read aloud at village clubs. The Pioneers was published in Britain and
France the same year it appeared in America and within twelve months it had found two rival
German publishers-eventually thirty Germany publishing houses put out versions of the
Leatherstocking tales. In France, where he was le Walter Scott des sauvages, eighteen publishers
competed. Many Russian translations followed, and his works appeared in Spanish, Italian, and
Portuguese and eventually in Egyptian, Turkish, and Persian. By the end of the 1820s, children
all over Europe and even in the Middle East were playing at Indians and learning to walk Indian file.' Yet in many respects Cooper was hostile to what America was becoming. He opposed mass immigration. Indianremoval' was infinitely painful to him. He was backward-looking,
conservative, and, in American terms, a hidebound traditionalist, who could not get over the
demise of the old federal party. Today he would have been an extreme environmentalist. It was a
point he made again and again in his novels that Natty and his friends killed wildlife only to eat,
not for sport, still less because they feared the beasts and yearned for civility.' He was an elitist, a seer, an aristocrat of sorts, fiercely defending his property, loathing the vulgarity and populism of Jacksonian democracy and egalitarianism, which he assailed in a savagely hostile book, The American Democrat (1838). In many ways he was the first critic of the American way of life. The three novels he wrote in the 1840s, known as the Littlepage Trilogy (Satanstoe, 1845, The Chairbearer, 1845, The Redskins, 1846) presented the business of settling the Mississippi Valley as an affair of greed, destroying the pristine morality of the American ideal. The first American intellectual and writer to go wholly with the mainstream American grain, in some ways the archetypal American of the 19th century, was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803- 82), who consciously set out to reject cultural cringing, toextract the tape-worm of Europe from
America's body,' as he put it, to cast out the passion for Europe by the passion for America.' He too went to Europe but in a critical and rejecting mood. Emerson was born in Boston, son of a Unitarian minister. He followed in his father's footsteps but threw off the cloth when he discovered he could not conscientiouslyadminister the Lord's supper.' His skepticism, however,
did not make him a critic of the essential moralism and religiosity of American secular life: quite
the contrary. In seeking to Americanize literature and thought, he developed a broad
identification with the assumptions of his own society which grew stronger as he aged and which
was the very antithesis of the hostility of the European intelligentsia to the way things were run.
After discovering Kant in Europe he settled in Concord, Massachusetts, where he developed the
first native American philosophical movement, known as Transcendentalism, which he outlined
in his book Nature (1836). It is a Yankee form of neo-platonism, mystical, a bit irrational, very