SOURCE: "Red Satan: Cooper and the American Indian Epic," in James Fenimore Cooper: New Critical Essays, edited by Robert Clark, Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1985, pp. 143-61.

[In the following essay, McWilliams contends that Cooper failed to employ the epic and romantic imagery that his contemporaries used to describe American Indians.]

Americans who first conceived of heroic historical romance about the American Indian may have lacked facts about the red man, but they were familiar with conflicting preconceptions of him. Cooper, Bird, and Simms had all read historical sources which portrayed Indians as Homeric warriors living on in the American forest. They were also drawn in varying degrees to the Enlightenment belief that the red man had been Nature's noble savage, Man in all his unspoiled virtue. To a generation raised on Homer and Milton, yet exposed to the continuing demand for an American epic in verse or prose, these conflicting images suggested usable literary parallels. To imagine the Indian as hard, solitary, unyielding, aging and doomed (Hector, Achilles, Turnus, Satan) would prompt romancers and historians to create the Big Serpent, Magua, Mahtoree, Sanutee and Pontiac. To imagine the Indian as graceful, generous, pliable, young and equally doomed (Apollo, Patroclus, Achates, Chactas) would lead the same writers to create Uncas, Hard Heart and Occonestoga. Although these two models of Indian heroism were often to appear as separate characters within one work, the way in which the romancer shaped them became a crucial measure of his attitude, not only toward the American Indian, but toward the nature of heroism in the New World.

Cadwallader Colden's 'Introduction' to his widely read History of The Five Indian Nations (1727) is clear testimony to the power of the Homeric lens. Familiar with the red man at treaty signings, but not in the forest, Colden writes of councils of chieftains, feasts, war songs, rites of hospitality, games and ceremonial burials. Again and again he likens Indians who practice these customs to the peoples of heroic poetry. The red man's willingness to die for his nation exalts him to heroic stature: 'None of the greatest Roman Heroes have discovered a greater love to their Country or a greater Contempt for Death, than these people called Barbarians have done.' Indian ceremonies of convening prompt Colden to assert that 'all their extraordinary visits are accompanied with giving and receiving Presents of some Value; as we learn likewise from Homer was the practice in Old times.' The most telling sign of Colden's inability to perceive Indians apart from The Iliad is his discussion of the Indian oratory heard in war councils. Although Colden admits he is 'ignorant of their language,' he praises the eloquence of Indian speech by asserting 'the same was practised by Homer's Heroes.'

By the 1780s the notion of noble savagery had blurred Colden's rather one-dimensional view. The five-month journey Chateaubriand made through America in 1791 was motivated, he later insisted, by a desire to gather materials for his epic on American Indians, Les Natchez: 'J'etois encore très jeune lorsque je conçus l'idée de faire l'epopée de l'homme de la nature, ou de peindre les moeurs des sauvages.' The enormously popular prose poems which resulted from this trip, Atala (1802) and Renée (1803), portray heroic Indians as gentle, disaffected philosophers of the simple way, who almost never seem to have to engage in killing.

The rapidity with which this view of the red man was welcomed in America is apparent as early as Sarah Wentworth Morton's four-canto poem, Ouabi: or the Virtues of Nature (1790). Mrs. Morton's title hero at first seems a gentle man of Nature, loving to his wife and protective of his tribe, a figure 'form'd by Nature's hand divine / Whose naked limbs the sculptor's art defied'. As soon as Ouabi appears on the battle-field, however, he hardens into the requisite Homeric stature:

Thus before Illion's heav'n-defended towers
Her godlike Hector rais'd his crimson'd arm;
Thus great Atrides led the Grecian powers,
And stern Achilles bid the battle storm.

Mrs. Morton, who calls herself, 'Philenia, a lady of Boston,' evidently remained discomfited by her red Achillean hero. At the poem's end, she arranges for Ouabi to die nobly in battle, relinquishing his gentle wife to an adopted white tribesman, and thereby enabling the softer red virtues to live on into the future.

Despite his calculated bonhomie, Washington Irving was similarly troubled by the issue of Indian heroism. His two essays, 'Traits of Indian Character' and 'Philip of Pokanoket' describe New England's oppressed seventeenth-century Indians as 'a band of untaught native heroes . . . worthy of an age of poetry'; 'No hero of ancient or modern days can surpass the Indian in his lofty contempt of death.' When these essays were assimilated into The Sketch Book, their firm accusatory tone, their sense of a lost heroic world, jarred tellingly amid the pretentious modesty of that genial sketchist, Geoffrey Crayon. And yet, Irving was not prepared to embrace the red values he seemed to be condoning. Regretting that the Indian's primitive virtues are still unsung, Irving seems to call for an American Scott to write a Lay of the Last Minstrel about our fast-disappearing Indians. Almost immediately, however, Irving compromises the value of courageous resistance by castigating primitivist poets and romancers as sentimental idealists: 'Thus artificially excited, courage has arisen to an extraordinary and factitious degree heroism'.

The more the Indian resembled a Homeric warrior, the more clearly American writers could be sure that their land had known an heroic age. The price of having had an heroic culture, however, was accepting the dignity of the Indian's presumably barbarous values. In 1824 Harvard Professor Edward Everett, who had long been anticipating an heroic American literature, developed 'a comparison of the heroic fathers of Greece with the natives of our woods'. Intent upon proving the Homeric stature of the red man, Everett offered the following evidence:

The ascendancy acquired by personal prowess independent of any official rank, the nature of the authority of the chief, the priestly character, the style of hospitality in which the hero slays the animal and cooks the food, the delicacy with which the stranger is feasted before his errand is inquired for, the honor in which thieving is held, and numerous other points will suggest themselves to the curious inquirer, in which the heroic life reappears in our western forests.

The single word 'thieving' here taints our impression of epic heroism by its inference of savage immorality. Everett's only hope for extricating himself from this tonal inconsistency is to claim that 'barbarism, like civilization, has its degrees'.

Everett's comparison ends with a sentence which, for a Professor of Greek who revered The Iliad, is a bizarre testimony to his culture's divided images of savage identity:

Nations who must be called barbarous, like the Mexicans, have carried some human improvements to a point unknown in civilized countries; and yet the peasant in civilized countries possesses some points of superiority over any hero of the Iliad, or Inca of Peru. Though we think, therefore, the heroic life of Greece will bear a comparison with the life of our Northern American savages, inasmuch as both fall under the class of barbarous; yet the Agamemnons and Hectors are certainly before the Redjackets and Tecumsehs; whether they are before the Logans would bear an argument.

Although Logan might even be as great a hero as Hector, Everett would have us believe that both are somehow inferior to the civilized peasant who, in other equally unspecified ways. does not participate in the improvements of barbarous cultures!

In spite of his shaky logic, Everett is attempting to resolve the problem of assessing the savage hero by the same device used in imaginative literature—the gradation of barbarous qualities among a range of Indian characters. The Indian as noble savage would prove to be especially useful because he humanized the harshly stoic grandeur of the fighting chieftain. Celario outlives Ouabi, Yamoyden's gentleness balances King Philip's rage. the memory of Uncas seems to outlive the memory of Magua. Matiwan's humanity relieves Sanutee's intransigence, and so forth. Although the Roman chief usually remains the dominant model of the heroic Indian, the doubling of his image with the noble savage heightens elegiac regret while it conveniently assuages the reader's fear.

The activating call for an American heroic literature about the Indian occurred in consecutive articles in the 1815 issue of the North American Review. During the journal's ardently nationalistic first year, editor William Tudor solicited from Walter Channing an essay which would have the blunt title 'Reflections on the Literary Delinquency of America'. Joel Barlow's would-be epic poem The Columbiad (1807) had evidently convinced Channing that the great American work could not now be written about so recent and so familiar a topic as the American Revolution:

In the most elevated walk of the muses, the Epick, we cannot hope much distinction [sic]. . . . We live in the same age; we are too well acquainted with what has been, and is, among us, to trust to the imagination. It would be an 'old story' to our criticks, for the events transpired yesterday, and some of our oldest heroes are not yet dead.

Convinced that epic literature can only concern the distant past, Channing calls for a complete, celebratory history of American peoples, a work so comprehensive that it vaguely anticipates the heroic histories of Bancroft, Prescott and Parkman.

The renewed hope of Channing's article suited Tudor's purpose exactly. In his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa address of 1815, Tudor had recently reached the same conclusion about the failure of American epic literature, though he had proposed a markedly different solution. Offering his own address as the lead article in the November 1815 issue, Tudor placed Channing's essay after his in a complementary but subordinate position. Like Channing, Tudor begins by attacking the cliché that America must have a verse epic on the founding fathers:

The American Revolution may some centuries hence become a fit and fruitful subject for an heroick poem; when ages will have consecrated its principles, and all remembrance of party feuds and passions, shall have been obliterated; when the inferiour actors and events will have been levelled by time, and a few memorable actions and immortal names shall remain.

Tudor, however, has no interest either in the gradual winnowing of the true Revolutionary hero, or in trying to prove that Washington could be convincingly decked out in Virgilian clothing Preferring the remote past, Tudor insists that the wars between the Five Nations and the Algonquins, together with the wars between the French and the English, constitute the heroic subject now pertinent and possible for American writers. It is the Indian, not the Revolutionary gentleman, who 'possessed so many traits in common with some of the nations of antiquity, that they perhaps exhibit the counterpart of what the Greeks were in the heroick ages'.

Tudor draws up a kind of literary prospectus specifying the traits common to Greeks and Indians: martial codes of honour, solitary and exalted heroes, feasts and games, eloquence in tribal council, a pantheon of nature deities, and the virtues of 'hospitality, reverence to age, unalterable constancy in friendship'. An American writer would be historically accurate if he conceived of Indian eloquence according to the Homeric pattern:

The speeches given by Homer to the Characters in the Iliad and Odyssey form some of the finest passages in those poems. The speeches of the Indians only want similar embellishment, to excite admiration.

Responding to the romantic affinity for the Natural Sublime, Tudor proclaims that the American Indian epic should contain word paintings of our unspoiled grandeur—particularly 'the numerous waterfalls, and 'the enchanting beauty of Lake George'. Episodic adventures similar to the tenth Iliad and the ninth Aeneid should be developed in order to enliven the narrative pace ('These episodes are two of the finest in these immortal Epicks, yet it is only to the genius of Homer and Virgil, that they are indebted for more than may be found in several Indian adventures'). Although Walter Scott is not mentioned by name, his heroic verse romances surely prompted Tudor to assert that 'the actions of these people in war had a strong character of wildness and romance; their preparations for it, and celebrations of triumph, were highly picturesque'.

Although Tudor avoids specific consideration of genre, he seems to be conceiving of an historical romance in verse which would recount the deeds of the French and Indian War around Lake George, and end with a 'prophetick vision' of the Indian's demise. Tudor's refusal to restrict the medium to poetry was timely and prescient, because the delivery of his address shortly followed the publication of Waverley. Whether Tudor privately had any firm conception of genre or not, his address provides a crucial transition in American literary history. Without the model of heroic literature he somewhat ingenuously offered, the Indian romances of Cooper and Simms would perhaps have developed both later and differently.

'Funeral Fires'

The author of The Last of the Mohicans was clearly never deterred by the possibility that an heroic romance about the American Indian should be written in verse by any aged minstrel, red or white. In his tetchy review of Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott, Cooper was to contend that Scott's great achievement as a writer had been that 'he raised the novel, as near as might be, to the dignity of the epic' The epic might remain the highest of forms, but the novel was the only genre through which contemporaries could approximate it. Nor was Cooper disposed to be timid in suggesting that America's one trace of an heroic culture might have passed away with the last warriors of a red tribe. As early as The Pioneers (1823), Cooper's approving view of America's expanding settlements had been qualified by condescension toward the gaucheries of middle class progress. In The Redskins (1846), Cooper's gentlemanly narrator, Hugh Littlepage, offers a passing slight upon the pretensions of old Albany's new rival, Troy:

I wonder the Trojan who first thought of playing this travestie on Homer, did not think of calling the place Troyville or Troyborough! That would have been semi-American, at least, whereas the present appellation is so purely classical! It is impossible to walk through the streets of this neat and flourishing town, which already counts its twenty thousand souls, and not have the images of Achilles and Hector, and Priam, and Hecuba, pressing on the imagination a little uncomfortably. Had the place been called Try, the name might have been a sensible one.

Like Fisher Ames and James Russell Lowell, Cooper was sufficiently appreciative of the inner spirit of The Iliad to realize how ill-suited it was to a commercial, middle-class democracy. When the children of the Templeton Academy botch their scansion of Virgil, their ineptitude nicely complements a passage from Cooper's letter to his onetime Yale professor, Benjamin Silliman. After jokingly admitting that he had 'never studied but one regular [i.e. Greek] lesson in Homer', Cooper promptly added that he had studied The Iliad in 'the latin translation which I read as easily as English'. The probable exaggeration in this statement is not as important as Cooper's desire to have it believed.

If American society truly were as impoverished in ancestral legend and human variety as Cooper claimed in Notions of the Americans, then the dying Indian tribes of the eighteenth century could provide the colour and figurative language of poetry. Poetry, in turn, was the sine qua non of romantic fiction. In his 1831 Preface to The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper asserts 'the business of a writer of fiction is to approach, as nearly as his powers will allow, to poetry.' When Cooper wrote the 1850 preface to the Leatherstocking series, he ended with a paragraph that suggests how the conjunction of these two ideas had led him to attempt (with apologies to Henry Fielding) a tragic-epicpoem in prose:

It is the privilege of all writers of fiction, more particularly when their works aspire to the elevation of romances, to present the beau-ideal of their characters to the reader. This it is which constitutes poetry, and to suppose the red man is to be represented only in the squalid misery or in the degraded moral state that certainly more or less belongs to his condition, is, we apprehend, taking a very narrow view of an author's privileges. Such criticism would have deprived the world of even Homer.

Throughout the 1850 Preface, the phrase 'elevation of romance' is linked with characterizations of the Indians and of the heroic Leatherstocking, who in many ways resembles them. Homer, the only author named in the preface, provides its closing word.

As soon as Hawkeye appears in The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper endows him with the knowledge that the days of oral transmission of heroic legend are fading fast:

I am willing to own that my people have many ways of which, as an honest man, I can't approve. It is one of their customs to write in books what they have done and seen, instead of telling them in their villages, where the lie can be given to the face of a cowardly boaster, and the brave soldier can call on his friends to witness for the truth of his words. In consequence of his bad fashion, a man who is too conscientious to misspend his days among the women, in learning the names of black marks, may never hear of the deeds of his fathers, nor feel a pride in striving to outdo them.

Cooper's own 'black marks' are, of course, the only means by which Hawkeye's complaint against written language can be preserved. Everything that troubles Hawkeye about the removal of white legends from cultural currency becomes many times aggravated when applied to the tribal histories of the Indians, whose oral legends, even if extant in 1757, let alone 1826, have been distorted in translation. Throughout the novel, Hawkeye tells only two oral lays, which concern white soldiers' battle exploits around the Bloody Pond and the blockhouse. From Heckewelder's Account, if nowhere else, Cooper had become familiar with the general nature of Indian oral heroic legends, yet he never allows his Indians to tell or invent one. Instead, the void in oral epic legend is filled with the matter of medieval romance. Around the councils and battle scenes which comprise the epic substance of The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper fashions escape and pursuit adventures in which the chivalry of rescuing distressed maidens serves as the unifying motif. By thus adapting the captivity narrative for purposes of historical romance, Cooper found a workable, highly popular compromise which avoids patent fakery of Indian legends (Chateaubriand) at the risk of trivializing the stature of his heroes.

The problems of generic adaptation seem to have troubled Cooper less than the dilemma of approving a practicable heroic code. The antebellum American romancer who would find an epic history in the Indian had to ascribe heroic qualities to a race then being dispossessed and killed by the very people who would read his book. To depict the Indian as an inhuman savage lusting to scalp white maidens would be historically indefensible and would ultimately diminish the achievement of conquest—as the hopefully 'epic' poems of Daniel Bryan and James K. Paulding had sadly shown. But to depict the Indian as an aged stoic hero or a noble savage would implicitly deny the justice of the continuing March of Civilization. Throughout the Leatherstocking Tales, Cooper would pursue this problem as an issue of daily conduct, as well as of historical displacement. How far could an enlightened author, bent on the beau idéal of romance, excuse the 'virtues' of retaliatory justice (scalping, killing in cold blood) and of stoic endurance (sadomasochistic torture scenes) on the relativistic grounds that these were the norms of courage for an heroic people defending their own lands?

The extraordinarily complex and intricate narrative of The Last of the Mohicans rests upon a simple symmetrical arrangement of sections:

1. Exposition (chapters 1-4).
2. Battle around Glenn's Falls (5-9).
3. Cora and Alice captured by Magua: Captivity Narrative (10-14).
4. Fall of Fort William Henry (15-17). End of Volume I.
5. Cora and Alice recaptured by Magua; Captivity Narrative (18-22).
6. Rescues of Alice, Uncas and Cora (23-30).
7. Battles between Delawares and Hurons, Uncas and Magua (31-32).
8. Denouement, funeral ceremonies for Uncas (33). End of Volume II.

After the escape and pursuit sequences, the narrative of each volume is resolved in a climactic military action. At the end of the first volume, the fall of Fort William Henry, prefaced with epigraphs from Gray's 'The Bard', reveals white principles of military honour through a panoramic rendering of an historical event. At the end of the second volume, the victory of the Delawares over the Hurons, prefaced with epigraphs from Pope's Iliad, demonstrates red war codes as they are practiced in a wholly imagined combat. Only by comparing the two battles do the full complexities of deciding upon a code that is both heroic and morally honourable clearly emerge.

In his first paragraph, Cooper emphasizes that his subject is anything but a celebration of the founding of a western empire. The French and the English, 'in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage', have learned to make an 'inroad' upon any 'lovely' and 'secret place' in the forest. In the context of international politics, such intrusions serve only to 'uphold the cold and selfish policy of the distant monarchs of Europe'. Over the entire narrative Cooper casts a perspective of historical futility by remarking

the incidents we shall attempt to relate occurred during the third year of the war which England and France last waged for the possession of a country that neither was destined to retain.

Only within this controlling sense of overall historical doom, so like The Iliad, are we allowed to appreciate the momentary heroics shown on battlefields or during forest rescues.

Throughout the antebellum era, the presumably humanitarian if not Christian conduct of the white man remained the crucial justification for dispossession of the red man. Nostalgia for the demise of Indian virtues could readily be indulged so long as the white man illustrated his ethical superiority. Unfortunately, none of Cooper's European military commanders conducts himself with the needed combination of integrity and success. General Webb's refusal to send reinforcements is a self-protective cowardice far worse than the flight from battle of the Huron named Reed-That-Bends, who welcomes his own death after he has been ostracized from his tribe. Duncan Heyward may marry Cooper's fair heroine, but he proves so incompetent in the woods that Hawkeye finally tells him that he could best assist by remaining silent in the rear. Although the commanding British officer who is present, Colonel Munro, has the requisite integrity and courage for heroic stature, he proves to be so victimized by chance disadvantages, by the disloyalty of Webb, and by the treacheries of his environs, that he withdraws from the wilderness a beaten, half-senile man.

The hypocrisy of white pretension to ethical superiority is the controlling theme of Cooper's rendering of the fall of Fort William Henry. After introducing the Marquis de Montcalm as the epitome of refined European gentility, Cooper pictures him offering Munro terms for bloodless surrender which are honourable according to white, but not red, war codes. Because Montcalm then stands apathetically by while his 2,000 Huron mercenaries slaughter every English person they can reach, including women and children, Montcalm's deceit seems the most dishonourable form of barbarism. Intending to qualify the popular memory of Montcalm as a man who 'died like a hero on the plains of Abraham', Cooper asserts that Montcalm was 'deficient in that moral courage without which no man can be truly great'. By selecting Chapter 17's epigraph from 'The Bard' ('Weave we the woof. The thread is spun / The Web is wove. The work is done') Cooper likens the fall of the fort to the atrocities through which Christian King Edward I conquered the people of Wales. An analogy less flattering to civilization's march might be difficult to find.

Indian heroic codes prove to be no more commendable than white. However often Hawkeye may excuse Indian scalping and Indian tortures because they are red 'gifts', Cooper always describes them with fascinated disgust. The principle of retaliatory justice may motivate Magua, Chingachgook and Uncas to perform remarkable feats of tracking and endurance, but the principle itself leads only to ever-increasing carnage. Montcalm's cowardice causes the slaughter at Fort William Henry, but the most graphic brutalities, from the dashing of a baby's head against a rock, to the scalping of the wounded, are committed by red men. Inflamed by the sight of blood, Cooper's Hurons far outdo Achilles in their berserk butchery; we are told that 'many of them even kneeled to the earth and drank freely, exultingly, hellishly, of the crimson tide'.

The climactic battle of the second volume proves to be the most hollow of triumphs. Because both the Hurons and the Delawares are being used as pawns in an inter-imperial struggle, their fighting against one another, as Magua knows, can only hasten their destruction while it underscores their ignorance. Although the Delawares may have routed the Hurons, the fighting in the woods is confused, desultory, historically insignificant and little like the hand-to-hand confrontations at the end of The Iliad and The Aeneid. Cora is stabbed, for little apparent purpose, by one of Magua's followers; Magua stabs Uncas in the back because of the frustration of losing his captive; Hawkeye shoots Magua when Magua is immobile and exposed. Like both Achilles and Aeneas, Uncas, Magua and Hawkeye attack their worst enemy to avenge a fallen friend, but all three men attack in a manner that avoids the risk of equal combat. The irony of the Delawares' triumph is emphasized by the epigraph Cooper chooses from Kalchas's prophecy in book one of The Iliad:

But plague shall spread, and funeral fires increase
Till the great King, without a ransom paid,
To her own Chrysa send the black-eyed maid.

Lest the reader forget the cost of the Delawares' victory, Cooper thus darkens their triumph by a reminder of the many deaths caused by the demeaning abducting and ransoming of women (Briseis by Agamemnon, Cora by Magua).

The contrast Cooper establishes between his gentle noble savage (Uncas) and his brutal Satanic villain (Magua) proves not to be so total as it first appears. Deprived of their due status as tribal leaders, both Uncas and Magua regain command before the climactic battle. Magua's eloquent accusations of white greed and white deceit merely confirm, in far more inflammatory language, the conclusions reached by Chingachgook, Hawkeye and a tellingly silent Uncas in Chapter 2. Whereas Milton's Satan had sought vengeance against God because of his limit-defying pride, Cooper's Magua ('the Prince of Darkness') seeks vengeance against the white race because of the tangible injustice done him by Colonel Munro. Uncas and Magua, both of them wronged, and both pursuing vengeance, must be killed together at the tale's conclusion. The red devil who would turn inter-tribal war into genocidal war cannot remain a continuing forest force. But the noble Apollonian hero whose fine feelings 'elevated him far above the intelligence, and advanced him probably centuries before the practices of his nation' cannot be allowed to survive either. Whereas Magua would pose a threat to white conquest through force and cunning, Uncas would challenge white superiority through simple human example.

The determining differences between Magua and Uncas have little to do with their tribal loyalties, their prowess or their courage. Unlike Magua, Uncas has no personal motive for feeling vengeance toward the white man. Uncas's silent acceptance of white authority has its counterpart in his deference to white women. Whereas Uncas even outdoes Duncan Heyward in his chivalrous regard for Alice and Cora, Magua is endowed with the presumably red trait of treating women as serviceable beasts. In spite of the taboo against miscegenation, Uncas proves capable of genuinely loving Cora. Magua's consummate villainy (a villainy which determines the plot) is his decision to abduct Cora three separate times, not primarily to exact vengeance upon Munro, but to satisfy his own conveniently unexplained lust. The protective reverence which the white man and the exceptional 'white' Indian pay to white women thus serves as Cooper's only sure means of upholding the presumed moral superiority of his own 'civilized' and conquering race.

The concluding scene of The Last of the Mohicans, surely the finest chapter of fiction any American had yet written, was clearly influenced by the twenty-fourth book of The Iliad. The lamentations of Andromache, Hecuba and Helen over the body of Hector, like the Delaware maidens' lamentations over the body of Uncas, precede the climactic short laments of those aged father-kings, Chingachgook and Priam, who know that their nation's demise is one with their son's death. The images of fire with which The Iliad closes, a fire that envelops Greek and Trojan, Achilles as well as Hector, conveys the same sense of impending conflagration we find in Tamenund's words: 'It is enough. Go, children of the Lenape, the anger of the Manitou is not done'. Just as Cooper was the first American clearly to recognize that prose was the genre for a national heroic literature, so he was the first to recognize that the death of brave men and the end of an heroic age, rather than any panegyric of republican empire, are the true measure of the epic art.

However similar these endings may be in deed and in spirit, the characters of the two mourned heroes differ markedly. Uncas never boasts of his search for personal battle glory, nor does Hector often display Uncas's gentleness and grace. Neither Chingachgook nor Magua can serve as the Indian for whom white readers could mourn. Wholly committed to red values, these two older chieftains deeply resent the red man's dispossession. Political enemies though they may be, Magua and the Big Serpent are similar in their racial ethos; when they are joined in single combat, Cooper even remarks that 'the swift evolutions of the combatants seemed to incorporate their bodies into one'. The warrior to be elegized must rather be the younger red man who most closely approximates, and defers to, the white man's supposed moral sensitivity. Through Uncas's death, the best of Indian qualities can thus be mourned and removed, allowing his less flexible father to remain, a figure of real but lesser challenge to the injustice of dispossession.

Because neither the red man nor the white man practices a code that is both moral and heroic, the closing paragraphs of the novel offer us an alternative that combines yet supersedes them both. The bond between the Big Serpent and Hawkeye, formed over the body of Uncas and beyond the incursions of civilization, is based upon absolute honesty, a mastery of forest skills, and a wordless sense for the divinity of nature. Their heroic life can only be maintained, not by leading either of their peoples, but by separating themselves from any culture whatsoever. The most admirable men of America's heroic age are thus held forth, not as examples for backwoodsmen and Indians to imitate, but as exceptions who represent a promise never fulfilled. The Big Serpent and Hawkeye, like many a semi-divine pair in epic poetry (Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Achilles and Patroclus, Beowulf and Wiglaf, Roland and Oliver) seem to have the ability to perform anything except to escape suffering and mortality. Unlike every one of these pairs of heroes, however, Hawkeye and the Big Serpent represent no community, lead no men, and defend no civilization. Embodying the unrealized potential of two passing cultures, they are nothing more, but nothing less, than the last of their several kinds. In the oldest of extant epics, Gilgamesh forms his abiding bond with Enkidu (a dark skinned 'hunter' from the wilderness) and they undertake adventurous tasks together. Whereas Gilgamesh finally returns to the city of Uruk to guard the walls he has built, Leatherstocking's heroism has been forever defined by his departure from the compromised civilization of Templeton.

By the time Cooper had completed all five tales, the importance of the red man's Greek-like heroism had receded, the bond between the Big Serpent and Hawkeye had become increasingly central, and Leatherstocking had finally become the acknowledged 'hero' of the entire series. At no time, however, did Cooper suggest that Leatherstocking had solved the problem of how to be a Christian hero in the wilderness. In The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper twice refers to the Roman worship of household gods in order to convey the acuity of the dilemma. When Magua urges his Hurons to kill Uncas in order to fulfil a tribal custom 'to sacrifice a victim to the manes of their countrymen', Cooper admits that Magua is factually correct, but then condemns him for having 'lost every vestige of humanity in a wish for revenge'. Shortly thereafter, the psalmodist David Gamut, convinced that unresisting death is better than 'the damnable principle of revenge', tells Hawkeye 'Should I fall, . . . seek no victims to my manes, but rather forgive my destroyers'. Caught between Christian principle and forest necessity, Hawkeye replies with the fullest account he ever gives of his forest code:

There is a principle in that . . . different from the law of the woods; and yet it is fair and noble to reflect upon. .. . It is what I would wish to practice myself, as one without a cross of blood, though it is not always easy to deal with an Indian as you would with a fellow Christian. God bless you, friend; I do believe your scent is not greatly wrong, when the matter is duly considered, and keeping eternity before the eyes, though much depends on the natural gifts and the force of temptation.

Hawkeye's statement begins confidently, but soon breaks down into hesitant qualifications and appeals both to 'gifts' and to human weaknesses. Although he may denounce revenge and bloodshed, Hawkeye knows that he must always be ready to fire first in self-protection. The heroism of Cooper's 'magnificent moral hermaphrodite' clearly depends on trying to remain Christian in principle, while surviving by un-Christian, if not Indian, displays of deadly prowess.

The few demurrers from the praise with which reviewers greeted The Last of the Mohicans reflect a failure to concede that fiction might incorporate the romance and the epic. Acute though W. H. Gardiner had been in assessing The Spy, he objected to the presumably breathless pace of Cooper's adventure sequences because even a frontier novel should contain 'a little quiet domestic life'. Lewis Cass's accusation that Cooper's Indians were 'of the school of Heckewelder and not of the school of nature' was based upon the constricting premise that no author should imagine red men as they might have been during their irrecoverable forest lives. Two years later, Grenville Mellon sharpened the terms of Cass's attack into a critical absurdity:

The Indian chieftain is the first character upon the canvass or the carpet; in active scene or still one, he is the nucleus of the whole affair; and in almost every case is singularly blessed in some dark-eyed child, whose complexion is made sufficiently white for the lightest hero. This bronze noble of nature, is then made to talk like Ossian for whole pages, and measure out hexameters, as though he had been practicing for a poetic prize.

Mellon's probably deliberate conflation of Homer's metric with Macpherson's prose, like his misleading inferences about Cora and Uncas, are of small importance. His blinding error was his refusal to admit either that Indian life might have shared the spirit of the heroic age, or that prose fiction could absorb the spirit of heroic poetry. The Last of the Mohicans had already brought both possibilities to convincing realization.