SOURCE: Haberly, David T. “Women and Indians: The Last of the Mohicans and the Captivity Tradition.” American Quarterly 28, no. 4 (autumn 1976): 431-44.

[In the essay below, Haberly outlines the influence of captivity narratives on James Fenimore Cooper's creation of The Last of the Mohicans.]

Despite considerable new interest in narratives of Indian captivity, this large genre remains somewhat isolated within American literary history—more interesting to bibliographers and ethnohistorians than to critics.¹ Some recent studies of captivity narratives have ably elaborated basic ideas first presented by Roy Harvey Pearce a generation ago; new and highly imaginative approaches to the captivities have also been attempted, but the critics' eagerness to fit one or more narratives into universal mythic structures or into psychosexual theories of American culture has often distracted them from the fundamental question about the captivities—the specific influence of this vast and enormously popular genre upon the development of literature in the United States.²

Yet it is only logical that such influence must have existed. Bibliographers have catalogued more than a thousand separate captivity titles, published fairly steadily from the sixteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth; many of the best-known narratives were reprinted in dozens of editions.³ For roughly a hundred years, from 1750 to 1850, the Indian captivity was one of the chief staples of popular literary culture; as Phillips D. Carleton noted, such narratives “took the place of fiction, of what might be called escape literature now.”⁴

The frontier between fact and fiction, moreover, was often very vague indeed, and it is sometimes difficult today to separate the authentic accounts of redeemed captives from the works of writers eager to make a quick buck by milking a well-established market—Ann Eliza Bleecker's History of Maria Kittle is a notable example—or dimly conscious of the fictional possibilities inherent in the totally violent and alien reality of Indian captivity—as in the cryptic narrative of “Abraham Panther”⁵ or Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly.

These fictional captivities, however, are at best of marginal interest. I would suggest, rather, that an important and neglected aspect of the captivity tradition is its influence upon major works of nineteenth-century American fiction.⁶ And my purpose here is to define and analyze the impact of that tradition upon James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans—for several generations one of the most popular of all American novels and a work which created an idea of America which put down deep and permanent roots in Europe, in Latin America, and in the recesses of our own minds.

I believe, further, that a number of the most controversial aspects of the structure and the thematics of Cooper's novel are only tangentially related, at best, to such generalities as the theory and practice of myth-making or the suggested homoeroticism of American literature. These aspects, rather, flow directly from the very concrete difficulties Cooper faced in adapting the traditional and clearly-defined captivity narrative to his new and very different purposes.

By 1825, Cooper had tried his hand at a range of novelistic genres, seeking to identify his own strengths and weaknesses and to find a way to use fiction to foster America's “mental independence,” a goal he was to describe—in a letter of 1831—as his chief object.⁷ He had written a novel of manners (Persuasion, 1820); two patriotic historical novels (The Spy, 1821, and Lionel Lincoln, 1825); a sea story (The Pilot, 1824); and a semicomic, semi-autobiographical novel of the local gentry (The Pioneers, 1823). It was natural that, in shuffling through the available genres, he should attempt a fictionalized captivity. A concrete link between parallel incidents in Cooper's fiction and in one authentic captivity has only recently been established,⁸ but his passionate interest in the American past and the ready availability of such narratives—some dealing specifically with his own area of upstate New York—would inevitably have led him to the captivities.

And The Last of the Mohicans, despite the shift in narration away from the traditional first person, is above all a captivity narrative—more exactly, as we shall see, it is two separate captivity narratives. First, however, it is important to look back at the tradition those narratives had created, the tradition Cooper necessarily inherited when he sought to use the genre.

The purpose of many captivities, by 1825, was often frankly commercial. Rescued captives not infrequently found themselves without family or funds, and their accounts of life in Indian hands served both to bring in a little cash and to advise their neighbors—as well as generous readers throughout America—of their heroism, their suffering, and their present need. There must also have been, for many returned captives, a kind of therapy in the recounting of their adventures, a way to exorcise their darkest memories—particularly by Cooper's time, when the changing stylistic conventions of the narrative had placed a barrier of verbal commonplaces between experience survived and experience described.⁹

In the early narratives of Puritans like Mary Rowlandson, captivity, suffering, and final redemption were all part of God's plan, and the publication of these events was a Christian duty.¹⁰ By the nineteenth century, that sort of easy metaphoric structure had disappeared; what remained, in its essence, was violence—the total and almost incomprehensible violence of captives scalped and beaten, women starved or tortured to death, babies drowned or bashed against blood-spattered rocks, children with faces burned into unrecognizable scars.

The physical environment of the captivity narratives linked all of this violence and suffering to the frontier; one wonders anew that Americans moved westward in the face of these tracts, the most readily obtainable and believable accounts of the fate that might await them there. And the captivity narratives were filled with raw and burning hatred of the Indian—a hatred so intense that the motives and even the reciprocal violence of the Indian-hater seem understandable and even, for a moment, wholly justified.

Cooper's own ideas, as he sat down to write his fictionalized captivity, were very different indeed. He was conditioned by his background and by his nationalism to idealize the frontier—the endless forests that appear in The Last of the Mohicans as the image of all of the American West. As George Dekker has noted, “… in Cooper's mind American nationhood and the Westward Movement … were intimately connected; each new clearing furnished a sign of the increasing temporal greatness of the nation. …”¹¹ Further, Cooper's ethnological readings and a patriotic fervor that transcends chronology and even race both determined him to idealize the American Indian.

Cooper's problem, then, was to reconcile his own ideals—the beauty of the American wilderness, the glory of the Westward Movement, and the native heroism and goodness of at least a part of Indian America—with the powerful captivity tradition of horrendous barbarities committed on the western frontier by Indians unspeakably vile. The key to the fictional resolution of these antitheses, I believe, lay for Cooper in a basic feature of the captivity narratives—the role of women.

A large proportion of the authentic narratives of captivity were written by women; deprived by Indian violence of the protection of husbands or family, female captives were often more pressingly in need of the financial support a successful narrative might provide. But women captives were also central figures in many of the captivities produced by males, and by Cooper's time had become preeminent in the increasingly popular anthologies of captivities and in the fictional offspring of the tradition.

In these works, women suffered the cruelest torments, and it was those torments which most sorrowed and enraged readers. Beyond this, however, female-centered captivity narratives had a special interest for readers—and for potential romancers—because they were inherently more suspenseful than the stories of males taken by Indians. For quite apart from the common perils of torture and death, three important additional dangers might await female captives.

There was, first, the possibility that a white woman captured by Indians might be defeminized; that is, that her suffering and her separation from civilization might lead her into patterns of behavior suitable only for males. This danger had not greatly preoccupied the Puritans, who applauded Hannah Dustin's massacre of her captors, but it did worry nineteenth-century readers. Bravery, quickness of action, mental and physical independence—and even the shedding of blood—were totally at odds with the ideal of the sentimental heroine. Leslie Fiedler has documented the hostile reactions of Hawthorne and Thoreau to Hannah Dustin's heroics; Hawthorne's attitude was the more important and more typical. While Thoreau was concerned that Hannah had axed Indian children, Hawthorne was merely distressed that she had acted as a man, shoving her husband into the background.¹²

Similar reservations about unfeminine reactions to even the most horrifying situations were expressed by the editors of nineteenth-century captivity anthologies. John Frost, for example, in his Thrilling Adventures among the Indians, criticized and even ridiculed some acts of heroism by white women, since he found such tales “little pleasing or amiable. Woman, as an Amazon, does not appear to advantage. Something seems to be wanting in such a character; or, perhaps, it has something too much.”¹³

Considerably more frightening for the readers of captivity narratives was the possibility that a white woman might be raped—or, more genteelly, forced into marriage with an Indian. The factual evidence on Indian sexual abuse of captive women in the East is contradictory. Mary Rowlandson declared that during her captivity, “… by night and by day, alone and in company: sleeping all sorts together, and yet not one of them [the Indians] ever offered me the least abuse of unchastity to me, in word or action.”¹⁴ Elizabeth Hanson hedged a little, writing that “… the Indians are seldom guilty of any indecent carriage towards their captive women, unless much overtaken in liquor.”¹⁵

Cooper clearly did not believe that Indians were as chaste as was claimed,¹⁶ and it is likely that his readers had serious doubts as well. It was hardly to be expected, after all, that redeemed female captives would openly confess the loss of their virtue. And the genteel disclaimers of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century captives are repeated, during a later western expansion, in the accounts of women captured by tribes for whom rape appears to have been an established practice.¹⁷ One Mrs. Horn, for example, wrote, “In conclusion, perhaps I ought to say, that with reference to a point, of all others of the most sacred importance to a captive female, (with gratitude to my Maker I record it.) my fears were in no part realized.”¹⁸ But, as a modern scholar notes, “… most white women redeemed from captivity in the West charged that sexual abuse of their fellow captives was common but claimed that because of some unusual circumstance they, themselves, had been spared the ordeal.”¹⁹

Female captives might not only lose their femininity and their virtue; they might also lose their very whiteness. The Indianization process has been of great interest to twentieth-century anthropologists and psychologists,²⁰ but it also troubled thoughtful students of America, like Franklin, who feared that the rapid Indianization of large numbers of white captives—in sharp contrast to the pitifully few recorded cases of Indians civilized by white society—bore some worrisome lesson about the comparative value and permanence of two very different cultural systems.²¹

The Indianization of white females, however, posed a particular problem, since it suggested willing acceptance of Indian sexual mores and of an Indian spouse. The chief characters in many of the most popular captivity narratives—Eunice Williams, Mary Jemison, Frances Slocum, and Cynthia Ann Parker, for example—were Indianized white women who declined to be redeemed and who established enduring relationships with Indian males;²² other captive white females struggled desperately to flee their rescuers and return to their Indian husbands and children.²³ The existence of such Indianized female captives did not merely raise doubts about the values of white civilization; it could also imply the far more disturbing possibility that white women might find Indian men sexually superior.

When Cooper began his fictional captivity, therefore, he quite naturally chose to focus the book on the perilous adventures of white women in the wilderness. In order to describe and discuss a full range of possible reactions to captivity, Cooper used the fictional technique that Henry Nash Smith—in his study of the Leatherstocking character—called “doubling.”²⁴ The two sisters, Alice and Cora Munro, represent two very different types of captivity heroine, and two divergent reactions to captivity.

The doubling process, however, is not confined to the Munro sisters; it also defines the structure of the novel, for The Last of the Mohicans is composed of two separate captivity narratives. The first captivity—the happy captivity, to borrow the title of a seventeenth-century Chilean example of the genre²⁵—ends with the safe arrival of Alice and Cora at Fort William Henry, at the close of Chapter XIV; it derives from the simplest and most pleasant of the captivity narratives, those in which the captive or captives return safely to the bosom of family and friends. After two intercalary chapters, the second narrative begins with the Fort Henry Massacre in Chapter XVII; this captivity—the tragic captivity—represents another, grimmer tradition.

The first, happy captivity, as Donald Darnell has pointed out, takes place between forts, within the outer limits of the white world.²⁶ The violence it contains is almost always potential rather than actual—shouted threats, a drop of blood on a leaf, the loss of a few of Alice's tresses. The purpose of this narrative is not to describe blood-baths—those follow later on in the novel; through this recreation of one type of captivity, Cooper sets out to define and differentiate the characters of Cora and Alice, before they enter the second captivity and the dark, alien world that belongs to the Indian alone.

Cooper begins this process when fair Alice and dark Cora first appear, using the established equation of complexion and character as a kind of novelistic shorthand, suggesting to his readers exactly where their fullest sympathies should lie.²⁷ This cosmetic characterization is immediately reinforced as Cooper gets down to the business of defining the disparate “gifts” the sisters possess—“gifts” as different as those of Natty Bumppo and David Gamut. Alice is lighthearted, weak, and innocent; she is the ideal sentimental heroine of a captivity narrative, weeping and fainting as she confronts a series of purely physical dangers. Cora, however, is prey to the three important moral perils—defeminization, rape, and Indianization—and the “gifts” that expose her to these dangers are made clear in her first reactions to Magua. The sudden appearance of the Indian startles Alice, but she quickly recovers to banter coyly with Duncan. Cora, on the other hand, gazes at Magua with “an indescribable look of pity, admiration, and horror, as her dark eye followed the easy motions of the savage.” (21) In Cora's pity lies her “gift” for unwomanly seriousness and strength of character; her horror foreshadows the rape motif; and her admiration for “the easy motions of the savage” reveals a sensuous miscibility that will lead to her relationship with Uncas and the gradual Indianization that relationship implies.

Cora's unfeminine “gifts” of courage, logic, and self-reliance are more fully developed as the first captivity progresses; even Duncan comes, rather grudgingly, to admire these traits: “… your own fortitude and undisturbed reason,” he tells her, “will teach you all that may become your sex.” (104) By the time the captives reach the security of the fort, Cora actually longs for adventure—like a seasoned trooper. “I sicken at the sight of danger that I cannot share,” she proclaims; Natty welcomes her as an equal, “with a smile of honest and cordial approbation,” and wishes for “a thousand men, of brawny limbs and quick eyes, that feared death as little as you!” (179)

Cora is also far more sensual than Alice, as her “rather fuller and more mature” figure suggests (21); Magua's threats to her virtue are the direct result of this “gift.” She is threatened by rape—in Cooper's terms, forced marriage and sexual submission to Magua—in large part because she is conscious of its possibility. Thus, in the cave scene in the first captivity, the two sisters react in very different ways when suddenly awakened by Duncan. Alice murmurs in her sleep: “No, no, dear father, we were not deserted; Duncan was with us!” Cora's dreams, however, are not those of innocence: “… the motion caused Cora to raise her hand as if to repulse him. …” (81-82)

When the captivity begins, Alice and Cora appear “to share equally in the attentions of the young officer” (21), but it gradually becomes clear that Duncan belongs to Alice alone. While some critics have seen Cora as a case of unrequited love, pining after Heyward, this seems a misreading of the novel. Cora is disappointed that she is not Duncan's choice, but she is also increasingly attracted to Indian men, as her thoughtful contemplation of Magua first suggests. In the cave, when the captives first see Uncas in all his glory, Alice's reaction is that of an art student gazing upon a Greek statue; Duncan considers the young brave a remarkable anthropological specimen; but Cora sees Uncas as a man, without consideration for race and color—and that perception embarrasses her white companions (65-66).

And Cora must have a potential mate, as Alice has Duncan. Natty might seem a reasonable candidate, but Cooper clearly felt that the scout—while suited to Cora by character and by color—was too much her social inferior. Natty's dialect would have made this class distinction obvious to contemporary readers, and Cooper drives the point home, towards the end of the book, when he describes the scout's “deference to the superior rank of his companions, that no similarity in the state of their present fortune could induce him to forget.” (373)

Social class, then, is more important than race, and Cooper provides Cora with two suitors of equal rank—a chief of the Mingoes, Magua; and the last prince of the Mohicans. If we ignore, for a moment, the fact that both Uncas and Magua are Indians, a perfectly commonplace sentimental triangle emerges. Cora is sought after by two suitors of her class—one a handsome and good nobleman of long and illustrious ancestry; one a violent and lecherous type, born a chief but more recently a drunken servant. In these terms, it is only natural that Cora should prefer Uncas.

Because Uncas is an Indian, however, the progress of the Cora-Uncas romance necessarily implies her Indianization. It is Cora who adopts the Indian techniques of leaving a trail, and the full development of the relationship with Uncas is symbolized in a passage at the very end of the first captivity; as the party approaches the fort, “Duncan willingly relinquished the support of Cora to the arm of Uncas, and Cora as readily accepted the welcome assistance.” (183)

During the Fort William Henry interlude, Cooper takes pains to reassure readers worried and perplexed by Cora's “gifts.” “Gifts,” in Cooper, are not the result of conscious choices, but are preordained by genetics or by environment; even the satanic Magua's character is the result of his tribal ancestry and his sufferings among the whites. Cora, as we discover in Chapter XVI, is of African descent, the daughter of a West Indian mulattress with whom Colonel Munro formed a connection and whom he later married; the future mother of pure Alice, of course, was still in Scotland, “a suffering angel [who] had remained in the heartless state of celibacy twenty long years. …” (201-02) This background immediately explains Cora's “gifts,” assures us that she is not really a bad person after all, and makes her relationship with Uncas seem both natural and permissible.

The established characters of Cora and Alice are not altered in any important way during the second captivity, deep in the Indian world. Alice is ever more dependent, a tear-stained and insensible bundle dragged from place to place by her male protectors. Cora is still self-reliant, fatally attractive, and increasingly Indianized—as her adoption of Indian oratory shows. In her plea to Tamenund, in fact, Cora strongly identifies the curse of her ancestors—African slavery—with the sufferings of the Indians, like her the victims of white racism (386).

Cooper finally gives Uncas a forced and tightly-structured opportunity to choose between two worlds—between his love for Cora and his respect for Indian traditions. Uncas cannot overcome the force of tradition and environment; he allows Magua to take Cora away once again, and by that choice all hope for a conventional happy ending is destroyed. Cora's Indianization is complete with her death; she receives an Indian burial, beside Uncas, while the native maidens sing prophecies of a marriage consummated in heaven—a standard resolution of the miscegenation issue in novels from other New World cultures.²⁸

Through this juxtaposition of two kinds of captivity narrative and through the development of the different “gifts” of his two captivity heroines, Cooper explores the multiple fictional possibilities of the genre. The deaths of Uncas and Cora, moreover, allow the novelist to make several self-righteous but highly comforting statements about race. First, he can claim to be free from the racial prejudice he describes as a Southern trait, since he admits the possibility of interracial love. Miscegenation, however, is still an impossibility, precluded by unalterable barriers of culture and tradition. This reassured white Americans worried about the development of mixed races and cultures, like those found in other parts of the Americas, and about the possible miscibility of the two victimized races—the Indians and those of African descent.

Cooper's exposition of the disparate “gifts” of his characters explains what happens in the novel; but it does not explain why such things occur. And his fundamental problem remains: how to reconcile his idealized vision of the frontier with the violence implicit in the captivity tradition and explicit in this, the most violent of the Leatherstocking tales.

The gap between idealism and the reality of violence could be bridged only by an explanation based upon immutable “nature,” not upon the deterministic “gifts” of individuals. And Cooper therefore took the central role of white females in the captivity tradition and in his own novel, and subtly changed the focus in order to provide such an explanation. It is not mere chance and coincidence that women appear as the chief objects of captivity violence; that violence does not flow from the realities of frontier life or from the evil lusts of Indian males. White women, rather, are the direct cause of all the violence that surrounds their passage through a world in which they do not belong; it is their “nature.”

Cooper and his contemporaries believed that the power of white women was the result of their powerlessness; as he wrote in The Sea Lions, most of their “… real power and influence … arises from their seeming dependence. …”²⁹ And The Last of the Mohicans is above all a study of the enormous, ironic power of those consistently described as “tender blossoms” and “harmless things.”

This power, while interesting and perhaps amusing in the drawing rooms of civilization, becomes immensely destructive when transferred to the frontier wilderness. White men and red, Cooper believed, could sublimate their different genetic and environmental “gifts” and exist in something approaching harmony in the haven of the American wilderness; the very presence of white women makes such harmony impossible. As Natty says, in one of the novel's most significant speeches, “… it would not be the act of men to leave such harmless things to their fate, even though it breaks up the harboring place for ever.” (55)

White women have this effect because it is their “nature” to excite passion among men—all sorts and kinds of men. No matter how superficially civilized in dress and speech, no matter how sharply their different “gifts” are defined, Cora and Alice are both inherently and potentially sexual, designed above all else for procreation—a point Cooper makes obliquely through his description, in the lines just before our introduction to the sisters in all their finery, of the “low, gaunt, switch-tailed mare,” whose foal is “quietly making its morning repast, …” (20) As soon as Cora and Alice appear, they artlessly exhibit their charms; such is their “nature,” as it is the “nature” of males to react. And such brief moments of exhibitionism in fact become a kind of predictable motif in the novel, inevitably introducing violence.³⁰

This inherent power of attraction upsets the balance between man and nature, between white and Indian. To preserve and to please white females, the harboring places are broken up; horses are trained to ungainly and unnatural paces (154-55); and the decorative creatures of the wilds are slaughtered (378). And men of both races willingly take enormous and totally irrational risks in order to possess or to defend the virtue of white women.

Thus, merely because these “flowers, which, though so sweet, were never made for the wilderness” (55) have presumed against all advice to travel where they do not belong, violence will replace harmony and death will come to Cora, to Magua, and to Uncas—the last of the Mohicans, the last hope in Tamenund's vision for a rebirth of Indian America. No less is the natural culpability of Alice and Cora.

In the first captivity, Alice and Cora are only intuitively conscious of their power. Of the male characters, only Magua fully understands the potential of white women—the power, as he expresses it, to make white men their dogs. He seeks to possess Cora because he is attracted to her, but he also comprehends her importance as a symbol and as a means to control the actions and reactions of other men.

Magua's expectations are realized. Duncan becomes so distraught at the thought of “evils worse than death” (100), of a fate “worse than a thousand deaths” (138), that he is almost incapable of rational thought and action. Uncas too becomes, in Magua's terms, a dog to the women, providing menial services for the two sisters and amazing and amusing the others (69). By the mere presence of white women, Uncas is led to deny “his habits, we had almost said his nature, …” (145); his contact with Cora and Alice has “elevated him far above the intelligence, and advanced him probably centuries before the practices of his nation.” (146) In fact, Natty complains that Uncas' behavior, in his eagerness to rescue the girls, has been “more like that of a curious woman than of a warrior on his scent.” (152)

Once the women are safe within Fort William Henry, Cooper suggests the deep cultural roots of their power. Alice coyly calls Duncan to task—in terms of the chivalric tradition: “… thou truant! thou recreant knight! he who abandons his damsels in the very lists!” (189) She is surprised when Heyward is deeply wounded by the accusation. References to chivalry continue to crop up in these intercalary chapters—and it is this tradition which forms the powerless power of Cora and Alice and all other white women.

Just as the first captivity began with the mare-foal image and with the sisters' artless display of their charms, the tragic captivity begins with women and children—the latter serving as symbols of the sexual nature and purpose of women. An Indian is attracted by a shawl one of the women wears and tries to grab it. “The woman, more in terror than through love of the ornament, wrapped her child in the coveted article, and folded both more closely to her bosom.” The Huron then grabs the child, teases the woman with it, and dashes the head of the infant against a rock; he then kills the mother. At that point the massacre of the innocents and the second captivity commence; once again women appear as the cause of violence as well as its object (221-23).

Magua seizes Alice—“he knew his power, and was determined to maintain it” (225)—and the two girls disappear with him into the forest. Their power remains, however, affecting their rescuers. Uncas is uncharacteristically excited by the discovery of Cora's veil, and begins to act “as impatient as a man in the settlements. …” (235) Duncan embarks on the insane and dangerous adventure as a sham witch doctor: “I too can play the madman, the fool, the hero; in short, any or everything to rescue her that I love,” he declares (288). Natty is amazed by Heyward's irrational daring, but such is the power of the women that the young officer for the first time takes command: “But Duncan, who, in deference to the other's skill and services, had hitherto submitted somewhat implicitly to his dictation, now assumed the superior, with a manner that was not easily resisted.” (288)

Natty continues to ponder this power, and tries to define it. “I have heard,” he muses, “that there is a feeling in youth which binds man to woman closer than the father is tied to the son. It may be so. I have seldom been where women of my color dwell; but such may be the gifts of nature in the settlements. You have risked life, and all that is dear to you, to bring off this gentle one, and I suppose that some such disposition is at the bottom of it all.” (336)

The power of Cora and Alice increases in its scope as the second captivity progresses. Magua loses his cool, cunning appreciation of the symbolic and strategic value of his captives, and begins himself to be controlled. Natty too falls under the influence of the power he cannot explain, and offers Magua an increasingly illogical set of bargains in exchange for Cora. While the scout knows that “… it would be an unequal exchange, to give a warrior, in the prime of his age and usefulness, for the best woman on the frontier,” he is nonetheless prepared to sacrifice himself when all else fails. Magua, with equal irrationality, refuses the trade (397-98). Even David Gamut, the pacifist hymnmaster, is overpowered, and prepares to go to war for Cora, reminded “of the children of Jacob going out to battle against the Shechemites, for wickedly aspiring to wedlock with a woman of a race that was favored of the Lord.” (413)

When the last battle begins, Cora challenges Magua—confident that he too is now her “dog.” He tries to kill her, but cannot: “The form of the Huron trembled in every fibre, and he raised his arm on high, but dropped it again with a bewildered air, like one who doubted. Once more he struggled with himself and lifted the keen weapon again. …” (426) As he hesitates, another Huron kills Cora—and Magua delays his escape and slays one of his own men to avenge her death. Magua and Uncas then struggle; Uncas allows himself to be killed—since Cora is dead. Magua makes a mad, suicidal attempt to escape, and Natty kills him.

The final victory of the Delawares over the Hurons is itself yet another example of Cooper's doubling. Magua consistently refers to the Delaware-Mohican tribes as “women”—a pejorative epithet that Cooper took from Heckewelder's writings, but which fully conforms to his own cultural prejudices. As Paul Wallace has demonstrated, Cooper's use of this epithet was conditioned by a misunderstanding of the complex intertribal relationships of Indian America. The Delawares were defined as “women” in their agreements with the Five Nations; that role, however, was one of honor and of power.³¹ For Cooper, however, women were necessarily dependent and inferior. But the concept of the natural powerless power of white women is transferred, in the novel, to the Delawares and Mohicans. Like Cora and Alice, they cannot escape violence, and cannot control their own destinies; but they do retain the power to destroy.

The ending Cooper chose for the novel is a direct result of his transmutation of the captivity tradition. White women and their intrusive, destructive power must be removed before the ideal harmony of the frontier can exist once again; Cora is buried, and Alice departs for civilization, sobbing in the seclusion of her litter. With her go her white “dogs,” like her the creatures of the civilized world. Natty and Chingachgook must stay behind, since the harmony of their grief for Uncas represents all that is possible in the absence of white women. The crude woodsman and the drunken Indian of The Pioneers are no longer merely local color, quaintly useful in forcing philosophical discussions about the nature of government; they are the final proof of Cooper's reconciliation of his idealized frontier with the tradition of the captivity narratives. And from this artificial, novelistic pairing—from these “two childless womanless men of opposite races,” in Lawrence's phrase³²—issue Huck and Jim, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and all the other offspring, cultured or popular, of The Last of the Mohicans.

Notes

1. Major bibliographical sources for the captivities include: the Newberry Library's list of books in the Edward E. Ayer Collection (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1912) and Clara A. Smith's supplement to that list, Narratives of Captivity among the Indians of North America (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1928); R. W. G. Vail, The Voice of the Old Frontier (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1949); and C. Marius Barbeau, “Indian Captivities,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 94 (1950), 522-48. Also see Dwight L. Smith, “Shawnee Captivity Ethnography,” Ethnohistory, 2, No. 1 (Winter 1955), 29-41.

2. To date, by far the most interesting response to this question is Richard Slotkin’s massive and always stimulating study of the captivities, Regeneration Through Violence (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973).

3. Four captivity narratives—those of Mary Rowlandson, John Williams, Jonathan Dickinson, and Mary Jemison—are listed among the great best-sellers of American publishing by Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes (New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 20-22 and 303-05.

4. Phillips D. Carleton, “The Indian Captivity,” American Literature. 15 (1943-44), 170.

5. R. W. G. Vail, “The Abraham Panther Indian Captivity,” The American Book Collector 2 (1932), 165-72.

6. The importance of the captivity tradition in the formation and popularization of the figure of the Indian-hater—in Bird's Nick of the Woods, Melville's Confidence Man, and elsewhere—has not yet been fully studied. The captivity theme also crops up elsewhere within Cooper's Leatherstocking novels, notably in The Deerslayer, and is central to his Wept of Wish-ton-Wish. However, its first and most forceful appearance, in Cooper's works, is in The Last of the Mohicans.

7. Cited by Robert E. Spiller, James Fenimore Cooper (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1965), p. 8.

8. Richard VanDerBeets, “Cooper and the ‘Semblance of Reality’: A Source for The Deerslayer” American Literature, 40 (1971), 544-46.

9. See Roy Harvey Pearce, “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative,” American Literature, 19 (1947-48), 4-5; and Richard VanDerBeets, “A Surfeit of Style: The Indian Captivity Narrative as Penny Dreadful,” Research Studies, 39 (1971), 297-306.

10. Pearce, “The Significances,” pp. 2-3; and David L. Minter, “By Dens of Lions: Notes on Stylization in Early Puritan Captivity Narratives,” American Literature, 45 (1973), 335-47.

11. George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), p. 65.

12. Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day, 1968), pp. 95-108.

13. John Frost, Thrilling Adventures among the Indians (Philadelphia: J. W. Bradley, 1851), p. 84.

14. Mary Rowlandson, from The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in Held Captive by Indians, ed. Richard VanDerBeets (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1973), p. 84.

15. Samuel Bownas, ed., An Account of the Captivity of Elizabeth Hanson, from the English edition of 1760, in Held Captive by Indians, p. 147.

16. Natty claims, at one point, that not “even a Mingo would ill-treat a woman, unless it be to tomahawk her,” but this statement is contradicted by Magua's insistence that Cora become his squaw and by the reactions of Heyward and of Natty himself. J. F. Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (New York: W. A. Townsend, 1859), p. 273. All page references in the text are to this, the Darley edition.

17. See Dee Alexander Brown, The Gentle Tamers (New York: Putnam, 1958); Carl Coke Rister, Border Captives (Norman, Okla.: Univ of Oklahoma Press, 1940); and J. Norman Heard, White into Red (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973).

18. From Mrs. Horn's narrative, in Carl Coke Rister, Comanche Bondage (Glendale, Calif.: A. H. Clark, 1955), p. 197. The punctuation is Mrs. Horn's.

19. J. Norman Heard, White into Red, p. 101.

20. A. Irving Hallowell, “American Indians, White and Black: The Phenomenon of Transculturalization,” Current Anthropology, 4 (1963), 519-31.

21. See Franklin's famous letter of May 9, 1753, to Peter Collinson, in Alfred Owen Aldridge, “Franklin's Letter on Indians and Germans,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 94 (1950), 392-93; and J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904), Letter XII, pp. 304-08.

22. John Williams, The Redeemed Captive (Boston: Printed by B. Green for S. Phillips, 1707); A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (Canandaigua, N.Y.: J. D. Bemis, 1824); John Todd, The Lost Sister of the Wyoming (Northampton, Mass.: J. H. Butler, 1842)—the first account of the Frances Slocum captivity, subsequently retold by a number of other authors; Narrative of the Perilous Adventures, Miraculous Escapes and Sufferings of Rev. James W. Parker (Louisville: Morning Courier, 1844), which includes Cynthia Ann Parker's story.

23. Heard, White into Red, pp. 2-4.

24. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), p. 69.

25. Francisco Nuñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, Cautiverio feliz (Santiago, Chile: Imp. de El Ferrocarril, 1863).

26. Donald Darnell, “Uncas as Hero: The Ubi Sunt Formula in The Last of the Mohicans.” American Literature, 37 (1965), 261-62.

27. The best general discussion of Cooper's female characters and his use of cosmetic symbolism is Nina Baym's “The Women of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales,” American Quarterly, 23, No. 5 (Dec. 1971), 696-709.

28. For a very similar example from Brazil, see José de Alencar's O Guarani (Rio de Janeiro. Tip. do Diário do Rio de Janeiro, 1857).

29. Cited by Kay Seymour House, Cooper's Americans (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1966), p. 27.

30. See, for example, p. 110.

31. Paul A. W. Wallace, “Cooper's Indians,” in James Fenimore Cooper: A Re-Appraisal (Cooperstown, N.Y.: New York State Historical Association, 1954), pp. 63-77.

32. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: T. Seltzer, 1923), p. 86.