On the Pioneers

Although I had better success on my second reading of The Last of the Mohicans than on my first time through, I don’t expect that this book will go the same way. James Fenimore Cooper writes sleep medicine that masquerade as books. While The Last of the Mohicans had something going for it—a story that takes place against the backdrop of the Seven Years War, filled with pathfinding, hunting, and even battles—The Pioneers almost entirely takes place through conversation in Otsego, New York, bordering on Cooperstown, named after James Fenimore Cooper’s father. The bulk of the conversation is about what settlement means for those who live in the borderlands of the young republican—namely, Native Americans and Natty Bumppo (“Leatherstocking” or, in The Last of the Mohicans “la longue carabine”). The book ends with the recognition that the “old ways” of Native Americans will be displaced and/or destroyed, only to be replaced by what Cooper seems to view as the corruption of modern, nineteenth-century civilization. Fitting with the norms of nineteenth century literature writing, there is the implication that Native peoples will be wiped out, and that Indians are nothing more than “a dying race.”

This book had the theoretical potential of being something interesting, but Cooper simply is not a good writer. The problems here are not necessarily the conventions of early nineteenth-century American literature, as plenty of other works written in the period are captivating and worth reading. I’m not sure what it is, but I don’t find Cooper’s books to be worth reading.