Civilization vs. Savagery -- 8/19/24

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Today's selection-- from An Infinity of Nations by Michael Witgen. The Foundational Myths of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans.

“In the first half of the nineteenth century America was engaged in a national conversation about the place of Indian peoples in the republic. Did they belong in the United States? Could they leave the wilderness behind and make the transition to civil society? James Fenimore Cooper answered these questions in his novel of 1826 The Last of the Mohicans. His response took literary form in a showdown between the good and bad Indians who inhabited America's backcountry during the time of the Seven Years' War. Like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha, Cooper's fictional Indian landscape was a literary creation, and a product of the mythology of Europe's discovery and conquest of North America. The novel answers the question about the fate of Native peoples in the New World through a cascading series of events that place the future of Anglo-America in the hands of his Indian protagonists. Their struggle, in effect, becomes a metaphor about the fate of the new American nation. 

“The birth of the United States is the narrative end point of Cooper's story, which unfolds as a story about the Seven Years' War, and the triumph of Anglo-America. In many ways, America's historical memory of this conflict mirrored the national debate about the place of Indians in civilized society. 

“The Seven Years' War concluded with the British claim of conquest over the majority of North America east of the Mississippi. This epic struggle, however, was identified by a different name among the Anglo-American colonists on their way to becoming citizens of the New World's first republic. They called it the French and Indian War. As the name suggests, this conflict was remembered as a battle against a French Empire that willingly encouraged its savage allies to terrorize Anglo-American settlements in the backcountry. 

“The Seven Years' War provided the ideal setting for a novel about the meaning of the American experiment, and what it took to make a new civilization in the wilderness of North America. This idea that the founding of a New World on this continent involved a clash between civilization and savagery is fundamental to the ideology of European discovery. It survives to this day in arguments about the significance of the frontier in American history. And it explains the enduring popularity of works like The Song of Hiawatha and The Last of the Mohicans. Cooper's novel, like Longfellow's poem, suffered a great deal of criticism, even mockery. And yet both works made their authors famous and wealthy. 

“The Last of the Mohicans, even more than Longfellow's poem, stands out as a reflection about the founding and meaning of America in the popular imagination. Cooper's book has never been out of print since its publication in the early nineteenth century. It has been made into a movie multiple times, in multiple countries and languages; it is an enduring signifier of the twinned meanings and attributes associated with American Indians and the United States of America. Perhaps most important, Cooper was explicitly interested in writing a distinctly American national narrative. Cooper's vision of America was essentially conservative, a privileging of the white elite in the new society created by the republic. This vision, however, was also crossed by a streak of romantic primitivism that allowed the author to identify with the noble savages who sometimes appeared in stories about the discovery of the New World. Although Cooper's text is fiction, it is important to understand that his work fits within an existing tradition of polemical writing about Indian wars and the founding and development of Anglo America.

Illustration from the novel's 1896 edition depicting Hawk-eye disguised as a bear fighting Magua in the cave where Alice is held captive

“The Last of the Mohicans is not only a tale about the creation of a new civilization in North America, it is also a story about the battle between the good and bad Indians who inhabited the continent. The idea that there were two kinds of Indians-good and bad, noble and bloodthirsty-was a common element in narratives of discovery. Cooper's plot, however, also centers on the ways in which discovery and conquest had created a shared history for Natives and newcomers in the New World. Last of the Mohicans takes up this narrative thread through the story of Alice and Cora Munro and their escort, Major Duncan Heyward. Indians attack the trio on their way to the battle of Fort William Henry in the Lake George region of New York. They are then rescued by the Mohicans Uncas and his father, Chingachgook, but abducted yet again by the leader of their Indian attackers. The novel essentially unfolds as a variation of the captivity narrative, the earliest and most popular literary genre in colonial America. True to form, the narrative revolves around a series of journeys with the sisters either fleeing from their Indian tormentors, or undergoing a forced march at the hands of Indian captors. During the course of these journeys the fate of Cora and Alice Munro becomes intertwined with that of Uncas and Chingachgook, just as in Cooper's imagination the fate and future of Anglo-America became intertwined with that of Native America.

“In this fashion, the journeys undertaken by the novel's heroes and heroines foreshadow the fate of all of the peoples of colonial America. En route to the fort on the eve of the battle between the British and French forces, the Munros learn too late that their Indian scout Magua has betrayed them. Magua, who lost his family at the hands of their father, Colonel George Munro, is the epitome of the bloodthirsty savage. He finds glory in violence, revenge, death, and self-destruction. Magua is Cooper's bad Indian, the narrative counterpoint to Uncas and Chingachgook. It is the good Indians, the Mohicans, and their companion Hawkeye, who disrupt Magua's attempt at revenge. The character Hawkeye is another uniquely American archetype—the white Indian. This literary figure, like the real life persons George Rogers Clark, Daniel Boone, and Davy Crockett, appropriated some Native customs and practices in order to survive on the frontier. In American popular culture, the figure of the white Indian takes on elements of both the bloodthirsty savage and the noble savage. This adaptation was seen as a necessary response to life on the frontier, which during the Seven Years' War, and at the time Cooper wrote his novel, was seen as a dangerously Indian place.

“The people who adopted the persona of a white Indian often styled themselves as Indian fighters. They were unofficial agents of the republic clearing the continent of Indian opposition to American settlement—precisely what was at stake in The Last of the Mohicans. The novel functions as a narrative microcosm of the epic struggle for the settlement and possession of North America that asks the reader to contemplate who survives, who will inherit the continent, and most important who should assume the mantle and legacy of Cooper's good Indians— ‘the unchanged race’ of noble savages who imparted their character onto the American landscape. 

“Like Longfellow, Cooper imagined a time when Indians would vanish from the continent, leaving behind only their legacy. Even more than the poet, however, Cooper makes it clear that this legacy had two faces—one noble, the other vicious and bloodthirsty. Both kinds of savage were destined to vanish, but in appropriating the legacy of the noble savage Americans could stake their claim to a cultural heritage rooted in North America's beautiful and untamed wilderness. Equally important, in killing off Magua's savage kind of Indian, Americans could claim the continent by right of conquest. In making this connection to Native America, Cooper's novel anticipated Longfellow's epic poem about the vanishing of Indian peoples and triumph of the people of morning and light.  And yet he offered a strikingly different interpretation of the fantasy of the vanishing Indian than the romantic poet.

“In both texts the Indian protagonists see the end of their time in North America, and they embrace their fate. But where Hiawatha retreats into the west to preserve the memory of his nobility, Uncas and Chingachgook stand and fight. The Mohicans refuse to accept a quiet death in the west. Uncas fights and dies honorably against Native savagery, proving the fitness of his lineage as one of the Native founders of America. Equally important, in granting his protagonist an honorable death, Cooper is able to draw upon an established American literary tradition that Phil Deloria has called ‘the Indian death speech.’ The Last of the Mohicans was published in 1826, and by this time there was already a ‘last of…genre in American letters. One of the first and most famous of these death speeches was attributed to a Cayuga chief, identified as Logan by Anglo-Americans. After a frontier war that saw his family killed, Logan supposedly gave a speech lamenting his fate as the last of his race: ‘There is not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. Who is there to mourn for Logan?---Not one.’ While Logan was a real person, the speech attributed to him was an American literary creation recycled in various forms of cultural production during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this same tradition, Longfellow's Hiawatha vanishes quite literally, fading from sight and history as he paddles into the sunset. Cooper's Uncas is killed, a more permanent kind of vanishing, and one from which it is impossible to return. Both vanishing acts, like Logan's speech, give voice to the fantasy that there will come a time when all the Indian peoples disappear from the face of the earth, their bloodlines extinguished, their spiritual and political legacy up for grabs.”

author:	Michael Witgen
title:	An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America
publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press
pages:	317-320