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James Fenimore Cooper
THE DEERSLAYER, or
THE FIRST WAR-PATH (1841) Reviewed by Patrick Killough
I. For
barnesandnoble.com
Reviewer's Rating of THE DEERSLAYER * * * * FOUR STARS Title of this review: 'And white shall I live and die!' Many who have not yet read Fenimore Cooper's 1841 novel THE DEERSLAYER, or THE FIRST WAR-PATH, have nonetheless heard of Mark Twain's satire of it. Variously styled "Cooper's Indians" or more accurately, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses,'" Twain's essay, by any admission both inaccurate and unfair, nonetheless, has a grain of truth. Some of Cooper's Indians do seem a mite too stupid or at least clumsy and some of his white people speak like bad translations from Homeric Greek. Happily, the Barnes and Noble Classics edition of DEERSLAYER contains Twain's humorous treatment of DEERSLAYER as an appendix, and Mark Twain is very funny, accurate or not. So make up your own mind after you read the original! The action takes place in 1744, at the onset of King George's war between Britain and France. And it will not be long before Britain will also be distracted by France's support of the rising for Bonnie Prince Charlie in Scotland. The location of THE DEERSLAYER is Lake Otsego, one of 11 Finger Lakes in Central New York. Indians call it "Glimmerglass." Muskrat Castle is a fortified hut on stilts in the lake. It was built by Floating Tom Hutter, a trapper. He also has a smaller lake craft, the ark, resembling a diminutive canal barge. Iroquois make an attack on this barge while it carries Tom, his two daughters, Judith and Hetty, along with 'Natty' Bumppo, aka Deerslayer and his Indian friend Chingachgook. Mark Twain makes much of Indian ineptness in their failure to seize a slow moving boat being winched out of a river into the lake. At novel's beginning Deerslayer had been traveling with Henry Marsh, 'Hurry Harry' who is courting Judith. Natty was to meet up with Chingachgook on the lake to help him recover his captured wife from Hurons. Adventures with Iroquois and Huron Indians -- indiscriminately styled Mingos by Deerslayer -- make up much of the rest of the tale. Somewhat older Judith falls heavily in love with 20 year old Natty Bumppo, but he is not then or later much of the marrying kind. The novel's appeal is in its description of interactions and misunderstandings between white men and red men. Trading is a big feature of frontier life and lives are saved when the Mingos become fascinated by elaborate chess pieces offered by Judith in trade for the lives of her father and Hurry Harry. Throughout the five Leatherstocking Tales Natty Bumppo, illiterate but with a probing mind, tries to understand what makes white and red men different. He articulates his theory that every creature has its own "gifts." If redskins have a gift for taking scalps of slain enemies, well, white men simply do not. Accept the diversity of God's gifts and get on with life. Here are three samples of Natty's wisdom: --
God made us all, white, black, and red and, no doubt,
had his own wise intentions in coloring us differently. Still, he made us, in the main, much the same in feelin's though I'll not deny that he gave each race its gifts. A white man's gifts are Christianized, while a redskin's are more for the wilderness.'(Ch. III) -- I've fou't, Judith yes, I have fou't the inimy, and that, too, for the first time in my life. These things must be, and they bring with 'em a mixed feelin' of sorrow and triumph. Human natur' is a fightin' natur', I suppose, as all nations kill in battle, and we must be true to our rights and gifts. (Ch. VIII) -- (Telling of his first kill to his admiring Indian friend'): ' ... I fou't like a man with gifts of my own color. God gave me the victory. ... White he made me and white I shall live and die.' (Ch. IX) The skirmishes on Lake Glimmerglass are part of the first war-path of two young friends, raised together among Delaware Indians, who hate Mingos. Natty kills his first human, a Mingo warrior and holds him in his arms till he dies. Natty is loved for the first time by a white woman and Chingachgook rescues his wife from the Mingos who had captured her. Ah, to be young in the wilderness in 1744! -OOO- Other recommended reading: -- Sir Walter Scott: WAVERLEY, GUY MANNERING, THE SURGEON'S DAUGHTER. --Rudyard Kipling: KIM, SOLDIERS THREE, STALKY & CO. Dallas, Texas 01/08/2008 =-=-=-=-=-=- II. For amazon.com Reviewer's rating of THE DEERSLAYER: * * * * FOUR STARS Title of this review: "We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness." In THE DEERSLAYER, Nathaniel "Natty" Bumppo, mythic hero of the LEATHERSTOCKING TALES, only 18 or 20 years old, steps self-confidently into world literature. He will reappear in one sequel and three prequels by James Fenimore Cooper. Collectively, these five novels of early America make up THE LEATHERSTOCKING TALES. Mr Bumppo begins the novel styled "Deerslayer," appropriate to a peaceful young man who lives like an Indian brave among the Christianized Delawares, and ends as "Hawkeye" after his first man-kill, when his reputation as a crack shot is solidified. Europe is locked in its War of The Austrian Succession. That conflict has just spread to North America as "King George's War" (1744 - 1748). The fresh hostilities have unleashed Indian allies of both French and English. Natty's slightly older Delaware/Mohican friend Chingachgook, "the Great Serpent," is on the war-path pursuing the Hurons or Iroquois (Cooper is never clear about which, letting Natty call both tribes indiscriminately Mingos, to distinguish them from his beloved Delaware) who have whisked away his fiancee, Hist-oh-Hist, or Hist for short. The two inseparable friends had agreed before novel's beginning to meet up at Lake Otsego in Central New York to effect Hist's liberation. Over seven days a little Trojan War is played out on lake and ashore, with Natty, a young Achilles, mythical North American sans pareil, in his first starring role. Experienced sailor Fenimore Cooper will later have his lake lore called savagely into question by another fresh water expert: Mississippi River pilot Mark Twain. Is Cooper so likely to have mistaken the size of the "ark" of old Floating Tom Hutter as Twain pretends? Would that small craft have been so slowly winched out of the river at the foot of Lake Otsego that a Mingo war party led by great chief Rivenoak would all drop like idiots into the water behind it when they leap down from a tree directly above it? DEERSLAYER is a story of white-red relations, of the love of two Indians -- Chingachgook and Wist, of sailing and trapping and of that first time when two young warriors of different races kill their first human prey out legally on the international war-path. The young giant Hurry Harry loves Floating Tom's beautiful daughter Judith. She loves Deerslayer. Tom's simple-minded daughter Hetty loves Hurry Harry. The young Huron brave Catamount loves Hist. Love is in the air of the ferocious forest primeval. Natty Bumppo tells the disappointed Judith that he is happy to be her friend, but if he had a mother and father he would not leave them for her or any other woman. British redcoats stationed not far away come to the relief of Tom's besieged family, happily slaughtering Huron women and children when given the chance. Hatred there is a-plenty between the races. When the slaughter is done and the players have departed, fifteen years pass. The lake returns to a solitude. Three inseparables, Natty and widowed Chingachgook along with Chingachgook's stripling son Uncas, then return to Lake Otsego, long deserted, to reminisce briefly. Ruins of old canoes, the ark and scattered bones of the buried remind of once fierce battles. One of Judith's old ribbons makes Deerslayer's heart beat faster. A new name has stuck to him, "Hawkeye," earned by endless prowess with his already legendary great long rifle "Killdeer," Judith's present to him. Judith, we fear, makes an unhappy, immoral ending as the unwed lover of an unworthy nobleman. Yet Otsego, also called Glimmerglass, was the first mountain lake Natty ever beheld and the most beautiful. It was a major source of the mighty Susquehannah River which would end in Chesapeake Bay. Deerslayer/Hawkeye would later return and dwell beside it for decades till driven out onto the western prairies by encroaching, destructive white civilization. THE DEERSLAYER tale ends with a sober moralizing sentence worthy of Calvin tempered by Augustine: "We
live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that
represent us otherwise can be true; though happily for human nature,
gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned
are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating, if not
excusing its crimes." (Ch. 32)
It is all there in THE DEERSLAYER: good and evil embedded in heart after human heart. Thank God for those occasional gleamings of human goodness, infrequent as they may be, especially among warriors and more pacific males! -OOO- Your Tags: james fenimore cooper, deerslayer, hawkeye, hist-oh-hist, chingachgook, hurry harry, muskrat castle =-=-=-=-=- III. For epinions.com Title of this review: "Forts and churches ... go together." by aohcapablanca, Jan 11 '08 What is the setting of THE DEERSLAYER or THE FIRST WAR-PATH? James Fenimore Cooper provides " ... a close description of the Otsego, prior to the year 1760" (1850 Preface to the novel). There was not yet a single European town. There were no roads. Game abounded. Lake Otsego was and is a main source of the mighty Susquehanna River. The time is 1744 or 1745. Europe's colossal War of the Austrian Succession has just spread to North America to be known as the four-year long King George's War. Previously peaceful red men are suddenly unleashed by their French, English and Spanish masters to take hostile European scalps. Who are the principal people of THE DEERSLAYER? James Fenimore Cooper's romantic novel of 1841 is modeled on the earliest Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott. That should mean that it is about the romance between two young people. And it is. Surprisingly, in this case the separated lovers are not white. Both are Delaware Indians: Chingachgook or The Big Serpent and his fiancee Wah-ta-Wah, whose English name is Hist-Oh-Hist or "Hist" for short. A love-sick Delaware rival had hatched a plot for the Serpent to lose Hist through her being abducted by another tribe out on the warpath. The latter are called Mingos by the Colonials. They are either Iroquois or Hurons or both, Cooper doesn't quite make it clear which. Chingachgook is only in his early 20s and he can't rescue Hist all by himself. So he calls on Nathaniel Bumppo, his 18 year old chum. Nathaniel will grow to manhood through many names: Natty for a starter; among the Indians he has been Straight-tongue, the Pigeon (for fleetness of foot), Lap-ear (because he "partook of the sagacity of a hound,") and, once he bought a rifle and used it brilliantly, "Deerslayer" (Ch. IV). He will earn yet more names in the course of Cooper's five LEATHERSTOCKING TALES. The two young men, who had grown up together, have agreed to meet on a day and hour certain at a rock on the lower shores of Lake Glimmerglass/Otsego in central New York, one of the 11 Finger Lakes. But first, by chance, Natty has met and trekked with a giant young fur trapper named Henry March, or Hurry Harry. Hurry Harry knows the lake and wants to spend a few days visiting Floating Tom Hutter in Muskrat Castle, his fortified home on stilts out on the water. Widowed Tom has two beautiful daughters, clever Judith and simple-minded, holy, Bible-trusting Hetty. To Natty, Otsego is his first ever fresh-water lake. He will repeatedly and at length admire its beauty. There are two parties of hostile French-allied Canadian Indians near the lake. One is made up of initially peaceful Huron game hunters and their wives and children, who had left Canada before word of renewed hostilities. A second contains just arrived painted warriors of the same tribe out for English scalps to sell to their French masters. Their leader is Chief Rivenoak. Not many hours march away from is a British garrison. Several officers there visit Lake Otsego from time to time and show admiration for flirtatious Judith. Her younger sister Hetty, is slow-witted. (She can read, but Moravian-raised Natty cannot!) This keeps her from being of marriage interest to whites but earns Hetty respect from all Indians, who indulge the mentally impaired as being specially dear to the Great Spirit. [NOTE: the fact that Cooper tells us dozens, perhaps a hundred times, that Hetty is weak in the head, is by itself enough for me personally not to rate THE DEERSLAYER five stars. A second reason is that, fairly or not, I find more than a nugget of truth in Mark Twain's famous critique of the novel. Several modern editions of DEERSLAYER include as an appendix Twain's essay, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Six Mingos, for example, literally but incredibly miss the boat when they leap upon Floating Tom's "ark." And Natty's eyesight and marksmanship are preternaturally great.] King George's war comes to Lake Otsego for one furious week when Floating Tom, a retired pirate, persuades Hurry Harry to sneak with him by night into the camp of the Mingo hunters. The hunters are erroneously thought to be away and the two Indian-haters will take scalps of women and children to sell to the British. Natty refuses to join them but agrees to protect Tom's undefended daughters. Tom's plan fails and the two white men are captured. Natty negotiates their release with Rivenoak, making a swap for elegant, elephant-shaped rooks from an elaborate oriental chess set which Tom had left behind with memorabilia from his days as a freebooter. Not long after, Natty himself will be captured and briefly tortured before being rescued by redcoats. Judith Hutter is one of Cooper's two great female characters. How so? She grows, tries at least to put aside her vanities. She begins self-absorbed and flirtatious, moved only by surface attractions. To her credit, however, Judith then see the attractiveness of a physically plain but morally straight backwoodsman like the illiterate, tunnel-visioned, ever moralizing Deerslayer. She eventually proposes marriage. Natty, always the loner, declines. At novel's end, 15 years after the violent week on Lake Otsego, there are hints that Judith has settled down in Britain as the kept woman of an aristocratic British officer, morally lower but socially higher than the Deerslayer. Why should you or anyone open THE DEERSLAYER if you have not already read it? Or if you have, why reread it now? Try out its treatment of religion, the Deerslayer's early version of C. S. Lewis's "Mere Christianity." Here is a brief snatch. Judith makes a case for living near forts, farms and churches. Natty replies: "Then,
as to churches, they are good, I suppose, else wouldn't good men uphold
'em. But they are not altogether necessary. ... Neither forts nor
churches make people happier of themselves. Moreover, all is
contradiction in the settlements, while all is concord in the woods.
Forts and churches almost always go together, and yet they're downright
contradictions, churches being for peace, and forts for war." (Ch.
XV)
The tale is well told and provokes hard thinking. Indian Hist and white Hetty meet and become instant friends, language difficulties notwithstanding. It makes you wonder if Europeans and Indians might not have come to better understanding had there not been so many absurd wars between distant European potentates. THE DEERSLAYER also shows us a strong literary prototype: the first classic American loner, a marginalized misfit ever on the edge of society. It takes only the first sounds of pioneer axes and the first smoke from a squatter's cottage to drive Natty Bumppo westward, ever westward. Is it possible to be true blue American and yet not be forever restless? Make up your own mind. -OOO- Pros: America when there was still a chance Indians might make it. An American Adam. Cons: No maps. Mark Twain's perhaps unfair but unforgettable critique of "Cooper's Indians." Sententious, pretentious dialog. The Bottom Line: This is myth, not history. But it is a myth that made America. Even the Lone Ranger and Tonto are its by-products. It is wordy but worth it. Overall Product Rating: Above Average * * * * Recommended: Yes =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Dallas, Texas 01/11/2008 |