The Last of the Mohicans (Barnes & Noble Classics) [Hardcover]

James Fenimore Cooper (Author), Stephen Railton (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 2004

The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

 

During the fierce French and Indian wars, an adroit scout named Hawkeye and his companion Chingachgook weave through the spectacular and dangerous wilderness of upstate New York, fighting to save the beautiful Munro sisters from the Huron renegade Magua.

The Last of the Mohicans is the most popular of James Fenimore Cooper’s five Leatherstocking Tales. With its death-defying chases and teeth-clenching suspense, this American classic established many archetypes of American frontier fiction.

An engrossing “Western” by America’s first great novelist, The Last of the Mohicans is a story of survival and treachery, love and deliverance.

Stephen Railton, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, has written books on Cooper, Mark Twain, and the American Renaissance, and has created major websites on Twain, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and American culture.

Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Stephen Railton's Introduction to The Last of the Mohicans

We must not fall for the fiction Cooper uses to organize the story he tells in The 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 in The 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 Mohicans was 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 in Waverley (1814). The subtitle of Cooper’s novel—A Narrative of 1757—echoes Waverley’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 of The Last of the Mohicans is 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”—that such a father would be anticipating the death of such a son rather then looking forward to his eventual marriage and children seems to violate the truths of the human heart, but as Cooper tells the story, even Uncas accepts his ominous title. In fact, he enters the narrative exactly at the moment in chapter III when Chingachgook tells Hawkeye that when Uncas dies the whole tribe will be extinct, “for my boy is the last of the Mohicans.” “Uncas is here!” is the next line, as “a youthful warrior” steps out of the woods to join the conversation. “Here,” this introduction to him implies, “but not for long”—Uncas will figure throughout the novel as a character with an expiration date. As a rescuer of the story’s two white heroines and as the lost prince of the Delaware nation, Uncas is regarded by both the narrator and the white characters with considerable admiration. His head may be naked except for its “scalping tuft,” but the narrative calls it “noble.” Alice looks upon him as a heathen, “a being partially benighted in the vale of ignorance,” but she also associates his “graceful,” “dignified,” “pure,” and “proud” form with classical ideals, “some precious relic of the Grecian chisel.” Cora goes further: “Who that looks at this creature of nature, remembers the shade of his skin!” To her, that’s a rhetorical question, but her companions’ “short and embarrassed silence” in reply keeps the line between races firmly in place. Combined with the epithet “the last,” that racial boundary lets readers know that all the sympathetic admiration they bestow on Uncas is extended provisionally. Within those limits, the narrative allows Uncas to grow increasingly heroic. After the first rescue scene, for example, while his father scalps the Mingoes they’ve slain, Uncas hurries with Duncan, the white officer and gentleman, to the side of the two white maidens. Duncan is not ashamed to cry at the sight of their deliverance. Uncas doesn’t go that far, but his eyes nonetheless “beam with a sympathy that elevated him far above the intelligence and advanced him probably centuries before the practices of his nation.”



While that sentence doubtless sounds patronizing, if not racist, to most twenty-first century readers, Cooper’s books display more respect and admiration for Indian characters like Uncas than was the norm in his culture. Indeed, his depiction of Uncas as so noble a savage came under attack from a number of critics. A novel like Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837), also a best-seller, was written expressly to contest Cooper’s “poetical illusions” and “beautiful unrealities” by describing instead what Bird in his preface calls “real Indians,” who are unrelievedly “ignorant, violent, debased, brutal.” Mark Twain made the same argument in Roughing It (1872), and began a sequel to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) that takes Huck and Tom into the Indian Territory so he can debunk Cooper’s romances by exposing the boys to a series of atrocities committed by treacherous Indians. In 1851, shortly before Cooper’s death, the Chippewa chief and activist George Copway publicly thanked the novelist for having created Uncas as a “hero” who “possesses all the noble traits of an exalted character,” an Indian whom Native Americans could read about with pride. Yet although Cooper advances Uncas centuries ahead of his tribesmen, he is careful never to suggest that the last Mohican could progress to the point where he belongs inside American civilization. He lifts Uncas high enough to make his passing tragic—but readers mourn for him at the end, as they admire him throughout, from within the safety of a world out of which he has already disappeared.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics (October 21, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593083351
• ISBN-13: 978-1593083359
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #851,378 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "THE TIME OF THE RED-MEN HAS NOT YET COME AGAIN", January 17, 2008

By 

T. Patrick Killough "All about Patrick" (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Last of the Mohicans (Barnes & Noble Classics) (Hardcover)

THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS is a tale of Indians caught up in North American wars started in Europe. One focus is on hundreds of Hurons, part of a force of 10,000, who invade the colony of New York down Lake George as allies of the French Marquis de Montcalm. In August 1757 2,300 besieged British soldiers under Scottish Commander Colonel Munro surrender to Montcalm on generous terms. The men are permitted to march with colors and arms a day south to a larger British army fortress under General Webb who declines to come to their rescue with his 6,000 men. Munro's own advanced fort, William Henry, is then burned by the French. The British march out into the forest with their weapons but must keep them unloaded.

The Huron allies of Montcalm take advantage of their unprotected state to fall upon the British and massacre a goodly number of them, including women and chldren. So much is history.

The fiction, the art, involves the Colonel's two unmarried daughters Cora and Alice, a white Army scout Natty Bumppo and his two close Indian friends Chingachgook and his son Uncas. These two are Mohicans, indeed the last Mohicans, a once powerful component of the Delawares or Lenape of the eastern seaboard. There is also the disgraced (for drunkenness) Huron Indian Magua. He had been banished by his tribe to live among Iroquois allies of the British. There is also a very young British colonial Major Duncan Heyward. Not to be forgotten: a comic religious musician, David Gamut. THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS tells how they interact during and after the siege of Fort William Henry.

Magua, a figure reminding of Milton's Satan, loves dark Cora, who has a black West Indian ancestress. Major Heyward loves blonde Alice. Back in Canada, but close to the New York border, two large Indian encampments lie close to one another, one Huron, one Delaware. Magua divides his prisoners: two with the Hurons, one with the Delawares. The last few chapters of the novel relate efforts by Natty and his associates to free these prisoners.


Through superior oratorical skills supremely evil Magua and naturally good and great Uncas for a few brief hours achieve paramount power in their two respective tribes. They use their new powers to attempt one another's destruction. A French emissary arrives too late to keep the peace.

The Delawares rout and massacre the Hurons. Indians killing Indians, in Fenimore Cooper's vision, seems to be a major element eplaining inevitable white victory in North America. Had the French won, Cooper implies, there might conceivably have been racial integration and respect among two races something like equals. But the British won and they regarded Indians as eternally inferior, savage and unclean. To them miscegenation was therefore unthinkable.

Natty Bumppo, the Deerslayer, also known as Hawkeye, also the Pathfinder or la longue carabine sides with the British in this cultural respect. He personally prefers at least some Indians to most whites and is readily accepted by Delawares and others. All races and all individuals, Natty argues, have their distinct gifts from God. God wills peace but peace must be based on each person or group minding his or its own business, doing its special thing and generally living up to and within the limits of his and its gifts. Thus the races must not intermingle. For there to be peace in North America, the strong must conquer the weak, sad though such an outcome admittedly is.

The last words of this novel are solemnly spoken by ancient Delaware chief Tamenund, well over a century old, whose name is also preserved as Tammany and in Tammany Hall. He concludes the funeral rites for Cora and Uncas:

"It is enough," he said. "Go, children, of the Lenape, the anger of Manitou is not done. ... The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red-men has not yet come again. The day has been too long. In the morning I saw the sons of Unamis [turtles, i.e. Delwares of the eastern seaboard] happy and strong; and yet, before the night has come, have I lived to see the last warrior of the wise race of the Mohicans." (Ch XXXIII)

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A True American Classic, November 21, 2007

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David Jones (Bethel Springs, TN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Last of the Mohicans (Barnes & Noble Classics) (Hardcover)

The Last of the Mohicans taken as part of the series which includes the Pathfinder and The Pioneers is a brilliant adventure novel.

The author, James Fenimore Cooper, never meant the novels to be taken as historical texts. Still, he paints a world as vividly as Tolkien ever did. Only Cooper's American frontier can be understood by any American middle school student.

Like the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Cooper's Last of the Mohicans and other works deserve to be a part of every American child's passage into adulthood.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's Named a Classic for a Reason, August 13, 2009

By 

Susie Derkins (Hawaii) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last of the Mohicans (Barnes & Noble Classics) (Hardcover)

Adventure, history, suspense, it's got it all. Last of the Mohicans has been around for years, because it's still one of the best books ever written. Highly recommendation for teens.