The last of the Mohicans. The biographer Robert long identifies both indirect and direct influences on Cooper’s creation of the last of the Mohicans: the presence of an Indian

(1826)

The biographer Robert Long identifies both indirect and direct influences on Cooper’s creation of The Last of the Mohicans: the presence of an Indian graveyard in his childhood home of Cooperstown and his interviews in 1821 and 1822 with Ongpatonga and Petalesaro, members of the Omaha and Pawnee tribes, respectively. Long reports that Cooper informed the duchess of Brogile during his stay in Europe, “Ongpatonga had been his model for Chingachgook, and Petalesaro for Hard-Heart in The Prarie, ” but Long fi nds it more likely that the latter “inspired Cooper’s conception of Uncas”. In addition to Cooper’s interviews with these two members of an Indian delegation whom he followed to Washington, D.C., “his immediate source for [the novel] was a trip Cooper took to Glen Falls and Lake George in early August 1824 in the company of four young Englishmen, including Edward Stanley, later prime minister of England”.

Cooper opens the novel with a brief retelling of George Washington’s gaining military fame for his performance in the French and Indian Wars. This history is united with the creation of the Six Nations, tribes of the eastern seaboard. From this broad historical scope, Cooper narrows in on a party traveling in the woods in the hope of reaching Fort William Henry and their father, Colonel Munro, on the other side of the lake. The party, made up of two beautiful half sisters named Cora and Alice Munro, are led by Captain Duncan Heyward and an Indian runner named Magua, Huron by birth but adopted by the Mohawk, whose mere presence alongside Cora is enough to unsettle her and solicit an unguarded look mixed with pity and horror. William Starna has pointed out Cooper’s historical inaccuracy in casting Magua as a Huron: “Huron Indians, as described so vividly by Cooper had ceased to exist almost a century before the time-frame of his Leatherstocking tales, ” having been killed by the Iroquois in the mid-1600s. The party is soon joined with a song master, David Gamut, who unintentionally amuses the two sisters and Heyward with his awkward style of dress and lack of horsemanship. By employing two different riding styles simultaneously, David Gamut forces his horse to travel, on each side, at separate paces. He might very well represent the Yankee whom Cooper, as did Washington Irving, detested, for the song master’s pride in his voice is responsible for alerting the Iroquois in the woods of their presence and location, and he holds a high opinion of himself despite his inability to aid in the party’s travels or escapes.

From the scene of the traveling party, Cooper exerts his authorial presence to relocate the readers to the west, where they encounter a conversation between Chingachgook and Hawkeye over such weighty topics as truth, oral versus written history, and the comparative worth and skill of white versus red skin. When Chingachgook recalls his own tribal history, he laments that although the blood of chiefs is in his veins, and that his bloodline is unmixed, his son Uncas is the “last of the Mohicans.” The history of the Mohican chasing off and defeating the Iroquois still resonates in the present as Uncas reports to his father that 10 Iroquois are currently hiding in the very forest where they are. At this moment, the two sets of characters meet because Heyward suspects that his Indian runner, Magua, has betrayed them for an ambush by the Iroquois. These misgivings are only voiced when Hawkeye gives a clear and deliberate reading of Magua, stating, “Once a Mingo, always a Mingo.” Heyward disapproves of Hawkeye’s two plans to punish the deceptive runner, and when he attempts to trust his own manhood to take on Magua, the runner quickly escapes, having received a wound from Hawkeye’s rifl e. Left without a guide and lost in the woods, the traveling party solicits the pity of Uncas, Chingachgook, and Hawkeye, who feel responsible for the safety of the two daughters, whom they describe as “such flowers, which though so sweet, were never made for the wilderness.” Rather than accept Duncan Heyward’s offer of a monetary reward for their service as guides, the trio ask instead that the party keep secret the location where they will take them to safety. Uncas slaughters the foal attached to David Gamut’s colt in a swift action that the narrator characterizes as a seemingly cruel yet necessary death to allow them to proceed through the river and into safety in a cavern behind the waterfall.

The Iroquois soon discover the safe haven and engage in gunfire and hand-to-hand combat on steep precipices with the party. Uncas saves Heyward’s life, and the two men clasp hands in a sign of respect and camaraderie that will later be echoed in the novel’s final scene, when Chingachgook and Hawkeye join hands in their mutual mourning over Uncas and their vow to remain in each other’s company, and to keep the fallen warrior’s memory alive. Although Cooper allows for this momentary crossing of the racial line, it is critical to note that it is a homosocial bond, and not one that would actually result in racial crossing, as the romance between Uncas and Cora Munro might.

The protectors and guides soon exhaust their supply of ammunition, and in their absence to retrieve more gunpowder, Magua and the Huron take Alice, Cora, and Gamut captive. In exchange for Alice’s release, Magua reveals his desire to make Cora his wife, less out of an attraction to her and more as an act of revenge against her father, Colonel Munro. Long believes that readers should not view Magua’s expressed wish to marry Cora as sexual at all. Magua, Long believes, views Cora as “an extension of her father.... By making her one of his wives, by reducing her to subjection and degradation (to a condition where he may kill her at any time he wishes), he will be humiliating and torturing her anguished father, his old enemy Colonel Munro”.

The Mohican and Hawkeye quickly arrive at the scene and rescue the captives, thus delaying Magua’s attempts to marry Cora. A second captivity happens soon after the fall of the fort, and this time, Uncas acknowledges that Cora belongs to Magua and only secures the release of Alice, who is being held by the Huron. In their pursuit of the Huron, however, Uncas witnesses Cora’s murder by a member of the Huron tribe. His attempts to avenge her death are scuttled when Magua stabs him in the back. Hawkeye then shoots Magua with his rifle, and the villain plummets to his death. The novel concludes with the burials of Cora and Uncas, and the unbreakable bond between Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook.

The romantic tendency of the novel is therefore dashed. The interracial romance between Cora and Uncas, who are mutually attracted, is destroyed by their deaths, and their reunion in the afterlife is precluded by the belief that the two worship different deities. Some critics believe Cooper was willing to unite Cora to Uncas only because of Cora’s racial identity. She is described early on as having dark tresses, and later readers learn from Colonel Munro that her mother was from the West Indies, meaning that Cora’s identity includes African blood. It is at this moment that Heyward reveals his revulsion at the knowledge of Cora’s “Negro blood” and expresses his desire to wed her white, blonde half sister, Alice. Thus, only by making Cora racially ambiguous, critics argue, is Cooper capable of nodding to a cross of racial lines. The rigorous policing of the racial line appears time and time again in Cooper’s description of Natty Bumppo, the very white man whose association with Mohican society and its members makes him a candidate for racial mixing or racial ambiguity, as “a man without a cross, ” meaning a man with racially pure white blood. Long counts 15 instances of this phrase. D. H. Lawrence believes that Cooper “kills [Cora and Uncas] off” in order to assure that only “the white lily, ” represented by Cora’s half sister, Alice, who marries Major Heyward, survives to propagate the race. Leslie Fiedler argues that the interracial romance of Cora and Uncas constitutes Cooper’s “secret theme” in the novel. Another critic, Donald Davie, believes that Cooper briefly considers miscegenation only to “repress it hysterically”.

Stephanie Wardrop extends the critique of Cooper’s treatment of Cora a step further, arguing that “in terms of the nationalistic project integral to Cooper’s writing, to allow Cora to live and marry would call into question not only the right to slaveholding still safeguarded by the Constitution, but the Colonialist expansion across the West that was displacing millions of other people of color—Native Americans”. Not only must Cora’s union with Uncas be prevented, but her life itself must also be extinguished as she represents an anathema to the project of western expansion that Cooper champions. Further, Cora’s display of bravery in the face of the Huron, compared to the nearly constant swooning fits of her sister, Alice, threatens the masculinity of those men around her who, in the shuttling of capture and rescue, look to her to function less as a figure capable of defending herself and more as a helpless victim whose inability to act on her own behalf helps to shore up the masculinity of those around her. Nina Baym extends the feminist aspect of Wardrop’s argument by declaring that “outspoken bravery, firmness, intelligence, self-possession and eloquence in a woman” are not celebrated or rewarded attributes in male-authored 19th-century fiction.

The critic Donald Darnell imagines the novel divided up spatially, with the first half occurring in the “white man’s world” represented by Fort William Henry and presided over by Colonel Munro, and the second half, following the massacre and destruction of the fort, transpiring in the “Indian’s stronghold” where “the white man is the intruder who must constantly look over his shoulder”. Uncas’s very name in the gauntlet scene, when the Huron have captured him through the deceitfulness of Magua, causes a stir among the tribe, which is only surpassed by their awe at the sight of his totem sign, a tortoise tattooed on his chest. Darnell contrasts these emotional reactions, coupled with the mythology surrounding the son of Chingachgook, to the satanic figure of Magua, who forecloses the myth of Uncas and the Mohigan tribe when he murders him. The Delaware prophet Tamenund who delivers Uncas’s eulogy clearly recognizes the connection between the tribe’s fate and that of its fallen warrior: “In the morning I saw the son of Unamis 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”.