Last Of The Mohicans

From Stephen Railton's Introduction toThe Last of the Mohicans We must not fall for the fiction Cooper uses to organize the story he tells inThe Last of the Mohicans. There has never been a "last" Mohican. The tribe Cooper refers to by that name survives to this day, on a small reservation in Wisconsin. According to Cooper's version of the Mohicans' story, the death of Uncas in the middle of the eighteenth century is the last act in the tragedy of a once-mighty nation. There are a number of tragic elements in the real history of the people who, when they learned to write English, referred to themselves as the Muhheakunnuk or Moheakunnuk, but the story they have written with their actions is that of a people who, while remaining true to key elements of their heritage, made great efforts to adapt to and earn a place in the new world that descended on them with the arrival of the traders and settlers from Europe. As Patrick Frazier recounts that story inThe Mohicans of Stockbridge, the tribe accepted Christianity about two decades before the events Cooper dramatizes in the novel; two decades after the supposed death of the last Mohican, they fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War. When the tribe relocated from Massachusetts to the vicinity of New York's Oneida Lake in the mid-1780s, just a few years before the infant James Cooper was carried to Cooperstown on the banks of nearby Lake Otsego, they took with them a letter from George Washington attesting that the Muhheakunnuks "have fought and bled by our side . . . as our friends and brothers . . . [and] as friends and subjects to the United States of America." No efforts could stop the tide of white pioneers from diminishing their population and driving them farther west, but like nearly all the original Native American tribes, they survived despite the centuries of cultural loss, economic dispossession, white aggression, discrimination, and neglect. That true story, however, is one the United States is still reluctant to tell, and repressed almost completely throughout the nineteenth century as the pioneers moved westward across the continent. On the other hand, Americans loved the story Cooper tells in Mohicans. Published in 1826, it was Cooper's sixth novel; he was already America's most successful novelist, a position he held through most of his career, and among the thirty-two novels he wound up writing before his death in 1851 were a number of best-sellers.The Last of the Mohicanswas first among them all: his most popular book, and one of the most widely read American novels ever. Like most of Cooper's novels, especially those he wrote in the first half of his career, it derives from the model of the historical romance that Walter Scott established inWaverley(1814). The subtitle of Cooper's novel--A Narrative of 1757--echoesWaverley's subtitle,'Tis Sixty Years Since, and in his preface to the book's first edition Cooper warns mere novel readers that by "narrative" he means historical fact, not imaginative fancy. But the project ofThe Last of the Mohicansis myth making, not history writing, and the myth it makes served contemporary readers precisely by replacing history as the nation was enacting it with a story about the fate of the Indians that both moved and reassured the whites who were in fact (but not in Cooper's fiction) the agents of that fate. As Cooper tells the story, the first person to label Uncas "the last of the Mohicans" is actually his own father. Chingachgook himself is still a vigorous warrior, and the narrative repeatedly refers to Uncas as "young" and "youthful"--thatCooper, James Fenimore is the author of 'Last Of The Mohicans', published 2003 under ISBN 9781593080655 and ISBN 1593080654.