James Fenimore Cooper

WYANDOTTE,
or,
THE HUTTED KNOLL: A TALE

(1843)

Reviewed by Patrick Killough

 I. biblio.com 09/21/2009

Reviewer's rating of WYANDOTTE: * * * * *

WYANDOTTE may well be the easiest of Fenimore Cooper's 32 novels for a 21st Century American to relate to and enjoy without extensive notes and commentaries.  

Published 43 years before Stevenson's STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE, Cooper's WYANDOTTE, among many  other things, probes the two personalities of a rogue, alcohol-prone Tuscarora Indian Chief. In his noble moments the Indian is Wyandotte, a perceptive, brilliant, compassionate man. When brooding, however, over the wrongs done to him by retired British Army Captain Hugh Willoughby, the savage is, because Willoughby sees him this way, simply an inferior, a semi-civiized, English-speaking Indian called Saucy Nick or Old Nick. 

Most of the novel's action takes place in central New York in the pivotal spring, summer and autumn of 1776. In and around Boston have occurred or are occurring the battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill. Among the family and friends of retired Captain Willoughby and the Hutted Knoll colony he had formed ten years earlier -- with Old Nick's then indpispensable help -- political loyalty rapidly becomes the paramount issue. Shall we maintain our traditional loyalty to the British Crown or don the tempting new loyalty to the Continental Congress?  In 1776 Captain Willoughby's son is a major in the British army. Willoughby's son-in-law is a Continental Colonel. The Captain himself is suddenly by inheritance made an English baronet, Sir Hugh. To whom shall the family, its black slaves, old retainers and manorial dependents be loyal?

As Wyandotte, the Tuscarora Indian unselfishly risks his life to save from scalping Willoughby's wife and two daughters (one by blood, one by adoption). And he also, for love of the Captain's adopted daugher Maud, Wyandotte rescues Robert, the adoptive brother whom Maud loves, the only son of Captain Willoughby. Young Bob is a captive among a marauding band of Mohawks and renegade whites disguised as Indians. They are besieging allegedly Royalist Willoughby's colony, "the Hutted Knoll," with an eye to confiscating it for themselves as patriotic Americans.  

But hours earlier, in his split personality as Nick, the Indian had stabbed to the heart the husband and father of the three women whom as Wyandotte he loved. This Nick did to avenge old beatings given him when on service with the captain's regiment of the British army. In a moment of unguarded arrogance, Willoughby had just made the mistake of threatening to beat the Tuscarora Chief once again if he withheld information about Willoughby's captive son, Bob. Wyandotte/Nick, a Jekyll/Hyde before Robert Louis Stevenson's creation, is summed up in a remark made 19 years later during a visit back to his old New York home by the murdered Captain's rescued son. Now Sir Robert Willoughby, a British Lieutenant General, he says of the Tuscarora to wife Maud over his parents' grave: "He never forgot a favor, or forgave an injury." This is the novel's concluding sentence.         

This is a grand tale, hard to put down once you pick it up.   -OOO-

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 II. bn.com  

TITLE OF THIS REVIEW:  Saucy Nick the Tuscarora Indian said to the English Captain Willoughby: "Buy Nick know, den." The Captain:"That is just what I do wish to purchase." (Chapter One)

REVIEWER'S RATING of WYANDOTTE: * * * * *

Posted 9/24/2009:

Cooper's last of four novels of the American Revolution, Wyandotte, was published in August 1843. It takes a brave man in 2009 to discuss this book, when Edgar Allan Poe reviewed it brililantly and fairly in November 1843. This latter tidbit we learn in ample detail in the impressive Albany, New York critical edition's "Historical Introduction" by editors Thomas and Marianne Philbrick.

In WYANDOTTE Cooper mixes the following elements already used by him in earlier fiction: a family and its inner workings, races and cultures interacting, American colonial loyalty to a distant monarchy, frontiers and boundaries and creation of a European settlement in a remote settlement.

Relatively new in WYANDOTTE, I think, is Cooper's deep probing of the psyche of his Indian hero, Saucy Nick or Old Nick. This Indian, to himself, and as seen by his English and American neighbors, has a weak, even evil side. He calls himself Nick when he feels ashamed of having once been a chief, but expelled by his tribe for unnamed reasons. He is Nick when he begs for dollars to feed his love of strong drink. He is Nick when he glories in killing and scalping his enemies. But both to himself and to the English hero of the novel, retired Royal Army Captain Hugh Willoughby, this Indian is Wyandotte when he is good and noble. Curiously, we read this name for the first time in the 19th chapter of a 30 chapter novel. And there seems to be an intermediate stage of name-giving. When the Indian is merely passably good he accepts being called by himself and others Tuscarora, the name of his tribe. And at novel's end, after a long, imperfect struggle, he is a baptized, conscience-stricken, troubled mercy-seeking Christian: Nicholas.

Does this tale of good and evil contending within one soul sound familiar? WYANDOTTE appeared 43 years before Robert Louis Stevenson's DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE and 24 years after Sir Walter Scott's IVANHOE. The parallel to Nick/Wyandotte in IVANHOE is the proud, sensuous Norman Templar knight, Brian de Bois-Guibert. Their moments of death are strikingly similar and resonate with cognitive dissonance too great to be borne.

To follow on to his less than outstanding career in the army Captain Willoughby intends to find and develop prime land in the wilderness. He "buys" Saucy Nick's "know" and agrees to a perfect spot with a beaver pond known only to Nick. The relation between the two men had been up and down. As comrades in arms they had stormed a French fortification together. But thrice the Captain had felt justified flogging Nick for undisclosed reasons. These floggings rankle, although Nick/Wyandotte has gradually suppressed unpleasant memories. This he did in gratitude to the Captain's wife who had saved his life by inoculating him against smallpox. Nick had also allowed his admiration for the Captain's two young daughters to tamp down his hatred. The Captain, therefore, made a terrible mistake in the autumn of 1776 when he threatened after ten years to renew flogging Nick. A terrible mistake.

Read this brilliant novel to find how how Captain Willoughby paid for his threat to renew flogging Nick. And see how Wyandotte did his best to save the Captain's three women. He even rescued the Captain's son from captivity. Nineteen years later that son pronounces about Nick/Wyandotte the novel's last words: "He never forgot a favor, or forgave an injury."   -OOO-


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III. amazon.com 

TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: "when an Injun does owe a grudge, he is pretty sartain to pay it, in full", September 25, 2009

James Fenimore Cooper's 1843 novel WYANDOTTE spans a half century, from roughly 1745 to 1795. Its geographic focus is along latitude 43 of central New York Colony (and later State) between the Mohawk and Susquehannah rivers. The novel's political story is of the steady unraveling of Great Britain's hold on 13 of its North American colonies. And of the hard choices that individuals, families and a frontier community had to make in their loyalties.

At the family level the novel is about Captain Hugh Willoughby, born in England who retired in New York in 1765 after perhaps 40 years in His Majesty's 23rd Regiment of Foot. His father, a Lieutenant-Colonel, had died too young to provide Hugh with money needed to purchase ranks higher than Captain. But Hugh's American born wife Wilhelmina was more than moderately well off. And in 1775 Captain Willoughby would become Sir Hugh, inheriting a baronetcy that he did not esteem from a deceased cousin. The Willoughbys had one son, Robert, and a six-years younger daughter Beulah. They had also adopted as an infant Maud Meredith upon the death in wartime of her parents, close friends of the Willoughbys.

Captain Willoughby had long dreamed of owning land on the wilderness frontier of New York. In 1765, on leaving the army, he achieved this goal. The land he chose for a Royal Patent had been selected for him by Nick aka Saucy Nick, a Tuscarora Indian, a onetime chief whose tribe had expelled him for reasons we are never told. Thirty years earlier Nick had found some form of employment with the 23rd Regiment in which both Captain Willoughby and Major Meredith, Maud's father, were officers. Nick remembered Major Meredith fondly but had long meditated avenging three floggings given him by Captain Willoughby. Over time the two men had, however, made peace of sorts. And Nick had actually recommended the hard-to-find distant beaver pond around which Captain Willoughby built his claim to 7,000 acres of land.

In short order the Captain took a motley crew of English, Scottish and Irish workers out to his new claim and set up a small colony which he called the Hutted Knoll. There they built the Hut, a combined residence, storehouse and place of refuge for the growing colony.

Fast forward ten years to the spring of 1775. Twenty-seven year old Robert Willoughby is a Major serving with the British forces in Boston. Captain WIlloughby is 60, wife Wilhelmina is 48, Beulah is 21 and Maud is 19. Nick the Tuscarora is 50.

In March 1776 the Americans, led by George Washington, drive the British from Boston. Four months later Congress declares American independence.The Willoughby household's and its frontier community's loyalties are torn between King and Congress. Pro-American Beulah marries a rich young neighbor, already a Colonel in the New York rebel forces. Loyalist Maud is secretly in love with "Bob," her adoptive brother. And he with her.

Curiously, the only other person who notices this love is the Indian Nick. Nick is fond of Wilhelmina and her two girls. Mrs Willoughby had, among many kindnesses, inoculated the Tuscarora against small pox and thereby saved his life during an outbreak. Beulah and Maud has done him many kind deeds and always call him by his honored Indian name, Wyandotte. Seeing that Maud loves young Major Robert Willoughby, Wyandotte/Nick extends his protective care to that officer as well.

But Nick has a mercurial love/hate/respect/fear relationship with Captain WIlloughby. To the Captain, the Indian is a racial inferior, crafty and to be trusted only when he actively fears punishment. And then, during a raid on the Hut by Indians and Americans disguised as Indians, WIlloughby, without need, reminds Nick of the three blood-drawing lashings of old. Willoughby also haughtily threatens to lash Nick on the spot for not telling him precisely how during a siege by the land-grabbing Americans he had stolen into the compound. This insult removes all the long smoldering inhibitions from Nick who now seeks an opportunity for vengeance on the father. At the same time, this Jekyll-Hyde does deadly battle with Mohawks and others who threaten the scalps of the three white women whom Nick/Wyandotte cherishes.

There are many gripping aspects to WYANDOTTE. Black household slaves, Irish, English, Scottish, American Yankee and even Dutch men and women are, for instance, presented with all their varieties of English and differing versions of Christianity. Envy of some of the Captain's dependents gnaws at them until they actively combine to convince American authorities that the Captain is a Tory. The plot of these uncouth rabble rousers, mainly men from New England, is to persuade New York authorities to confiscate the English Captain's Hutted Knoll and turn it over to them.

But the Tuscarora Indian Nick/Wyandotte is by far the most riveting of all characters, possibly, in my opinion, the greatest of Fenimore Cooper's literary creations. He loves. He hates. As Nick he can be a sniveling, money mooching drunk. But when he chooses to be Wyandotte, he is great, wise, loving, generous.

Nineteen years pass after the violent events around the Hutted Knoll in 1776. One time Major, now General Sir Robert Willoughby, Bart., and his ever beautiful wife return in 1795 from England to see if there is still marketable value in their old New York estate. General Willoughby has a final meeting with Nick/Wyandotte, now, in his mentally tortured old age, a Christian convert baptized Nicholas. The novel concludes with Willoughby's final comment on the Tuscarora -- betimes a rogue, betimes a great, fearless chief: "He never forgot a favor, or forgave an injury."

The same thesis, in varying formulations, is applied by condescending whites to Nick or to other Indian savages on a half dozen other occasions in WYANDOTTE. They offer a drumbeat leit motif propelling this great novel from 1745 to 1795.
-OOO-



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 IV, epinions.com

Title: "He never forgot a favor, or forgave an injury."

Reviewer's rating of WYANDOTTE:  * * * * *

by aohcapablanca, Sep 26 '09

As James Fenimore Cooper wrote his way ever deeper into the second half of WYANDOTTE, his great novel of 1843, his imagination was drawn away from its numerous white and black characters. Cooper increasingly focused on its red Indian hero. That brave is a Jekyll and Hyde living a century before Robert Louis Stevenson's creation. The warrior's sometime oppressor, England-born Hugh Willoughby, generally treats this Tuscarora as an inferior, degraded drunken panhandler. He is somewhat contemptuously styled Saucy Nick, Old Nick or just plain Nick. 

We meet 50 year old Nick in 1775. Every few years Nick wanders as he pleases in and out of The Hutted Knoll. That is an isolated community begun ten years earlier in a lush central New York wilderness discovered by Nick. It was also Nick who had commended its acquisition through Royal grant to ten years older Captain Willoughby. Willoughby, although at long last the heir apparent to an English baronetcy, had been orphaned young and therefore never had enough money to purchase the rank of major or lieutentant-colonel in His Majesty's 63rd Regiment of Foot.

Fortunately, Hugh's wife, America-born Wilhelmina, was financially better off and the family has enough money in 1765 to build a large fort-like "Hut" and finance settlement of a hundred or more Americans before the novel's main action begins in 1775 and carries into 1776.

The Willoughbys have a son, Robert, age 27 in May of 1775 and now a British army Major serving with General Gage in Boston. Daughter Beulah is 22. Adopted daughter Maud Meredith is 20. 

Maud's parents were killed during fighting with the French. Nick the Indian was fighting at the side of Major Meredith when the latter fell. Nick loved Maud's parents, especially her father who was always notably kind and courteous to Nick and to the other Indian scouts.

But not every officer of the 63rd Regiment was so cross-culturally sensitive. The ethos of the regiment was: a flogged soldier fights better! And three times Captain Willoughby had Nick flogged, till his back bled.
   
The women of the Willoughby household, by contrast with its head, held the Tuscarora in high esteem. They called him by his true name, "Wyandotte," pronounced why-on-dot-TAY. This name reminded him and them that he had once been an honored chief, husband, father of a daughter and feared in battle.
 
But the Captain made more of the fact that his Tuscarora tribe, for reasons never explained, had expelled Nick. So he must be really bad!  Wilhelmina had saved Wyandotte's life during an outbreak of smallpox. She had inoculated him. Wyandotte, without being asked, had later gone 50 miles into the forest to pick an herb which saved the life of young Bob Willoughby. Beulah and Maud showered Wyandotte with love, presents and attention.

Like a recurring knell from Mozart's Requiem, person after person worries that Indians do not take floggings as well as regular British troops. Says the novel's closest thing to a pure villain, Captain Willoughby's estate manager Joel Strider to his boss:  "when an Injun does owe a grudge, he is pretty sartain to pay it, in full." And the novel's last words spoken by Robert Willoughby  on a visit from England to his old family estate, the Hutted Ridge, are about Wyandotte/Nick,  "He never forgot a favor, or forgave an injury."

Many times the Tuscarora, in his distinct personality as "Nick," had meditated murdering the Captain to right an ancient injustice. Always, however, his love of the three women held him back. Would it restrain him once again in 1776? Would re-defining himself as "Wyandotte" hold Nick back forever? Read WYANDOTTE and find out.
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There are other rich aspects to WYANDOTTE besides revenge and self-esteem contending within the breast of an Indian warrior.

-- Religion: The Willoughbys adhere to the established Church of England. But many of their dependents at the Hutted Knoll are New England Puritans. There is also a Scotsman who follows Calvin. And Mike, a lovable but dumb Irishman from Couny Leitrim, is the only Papist. When it is time to confess his sins, Mike seeks out a large stone deep in the forest to pour them out to.

-- All characters speak English. But Cooper's ear renders their numerous accents and vocabularies, sometimes to considerable comic effect.

-- Not every American during the revolt against Britain was as noble as George Washington. Several of Captain Willoughby's non-Anglican dependents conspire to convince the rebel New York government that Willoughby is a Tory. With luck, his settlement at Hutted Knoll will then be consiscated and given to them.

-- There is romance, some ending tragically. It takes Maud Meredith a few years to realize that she loves as a woman Major Robert Willoughby with whom she has been reared as a sister. But that love is no secret to Nick/Wyandotte. Maud's love for young Bob guarantees the latter extra protection by the Tuscarora.

-- Finally, there is signature Fenimore Cooper action and adventure. Not nearly as much, be it admitted, as in LAST OF THE MOHICANS or THE DEERSLAYER. But a half-hearted raid on the Hutted Knoll by Mohawks led by Americans disguised as Indians (inspired by the Boston Tea Party) is far from danger-free. As "patriotic" American residents of the Hutted Knoll desert Captain Willoughby, even Wyandotte's assistance leaves the little garrison too weak to hold out unless regular troops -- either American or British -- lift the siege.
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For whatever my personal subjectivity is worth, among the dozen Cooper novels that I have read so far (of a total of 32 that Cooper wrote), WYANDOTTE is my personal favorite. The writing is sometimes convoluted and obscure. But Cooper's sympathy for Indians shines through and he can sort out like few other novelists the good and the evil that lurk in Everyman's soul.   -OOO-


Pros:
Split personalities war within Tuscarora Indian Nick/Wyandotte. Can love of his oppressor's family avert revenge?

Cons:
Slower and more psychologically probing than typical Cooper adventures, notably THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS.

The Bottom Line:
From 1745 to 1795 the Willoughbys live through peace and war in a New York wilderness settlement. A complex Indian chief, Wyandotte, is goaded once too often by Captain Willoughby.


Overall Product Rating     * * * * *  EXCELLENT

Recommended:
Yes

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Black Mountain, NC
09/21/2009