used to represent a certain vision of America that is vanishing due to the encroachment of white civilization. In Cooper's romantic and rather idealized view, the Native Americans are nature's children, living in harmony with the natural world, unencumbered by the burdens of civilization. Hawkeye, while a white man, has embraced this way of natural living, although as a white hero, he is also able to move between the two worlds in a way that his Native American counterparts cannot. InMohicans, the natural, pastoral world is not so much threatened by urbanization or industrialization, which were still decades away, but by the wars fought by different powers and by the expansion of white civilization. Pointedly, Cooper makes little mention of the violence directed towards the Native American tribes by whites seeking to take their land. He prefers the romantic version of a noble people who are out of step with the times.

Cooper is more direct in his contrast between town and country in The Pioneers (1823). Though published before Mohicans, it features an older Hawkeye, whose ways and lifestyle are becoming obsolete in a rapidly developing New York. It is a curiously progressive novel in its treatment of environmental themes, as Hawkeye is concerned about what might be lost as nature is cleared to make way for civilization. Once again, he represents a more pastoral, romantic, and innocent vision of living than what is found in the cities and towns of the fledgling nation.