The Last of the Mahicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic 103ment of Interior twenty-five years later following the annexation
of half of Mexico. In making this transfer, the federal government
showed overconfidence in assuming that armed Indigenous resis
tance to US aggression and colonization had ended. Such resistance
would continue for another half century.
Whereas white supremacy had been the working rationalization
for British theft of Indigenous lands and for European enslavement
of Africans, the bid for independence by what became the United
States of America was more problematic. Democracy, equality, and
equal rights do not fit well with dominance of one race by another,
much less with genocide, settler colonialism, and empire. It was
during the l82os-the beginning of the era of Jacksonian settler
democracy-that the unique US origin myth evolved reconciling
rhetoric with reality. Novelist James Fenimore Cooper was among
its initial scribes.
Cooper's reinvention of the birth of the United States in his novel
The Last of the Mahicans has become the official US origin story.
Herman Melville called Cooper "our national novelist."18 Cooper
was the wealthy son of a US congressman, a land speculator who
built Cooperstown, named after himself, in upstate New York
where he grew up. His hometown was christened all-American with
the establishment of the National Baseball Hall of Fame there in
1936, during the Depression. Expelled from Ya le, Cooper joined the
navy, then married and began writing. In 1823, he published The
Pioneers, the first book in his Leatherstocking Ta les series, the other
four being The Last of the Mahicans, The Prairie, The Pa thfinder,
and The Deers/ayer (the last published in 1841). Each featured the
character Natty Bumppo, also called variously, depending on his
age, Leatherstocking, Pathfinder, or Deerslayer. Bumppo is a Brit
ish settler on land appropriated from the Delaware Nation and is
buddies with its fictional Delaware leader Chingachgook (the "last
Mohican" in the myth). To gether the Leatherstocking Ta les narrate
the mythical forging of the new country from the 1754-63 French
and Indian War in The Last of the Mahicans to the settlement of the
plains by migrants traveling by wagon train from Tennessee. At
the end of the saga Bumppo dies a very old man on the edge of the
Rocky Mountains, as he gazes east. 19