A 2014 edition, and a war in 1757

The notes say the writer read a 2014 October edition of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. They place the book at the head of American western writing: a novel that joins the sad fate of Indian peoples to a tender love story. The setting they give is 1757, during the French and Indian War, when France and Britain fought over rights and power in North America.

In that war, they write, France, on the north-eastern fringe, relied heavily on Indian allies against far more numerous British settlers. A party taking a British officer’s two daughters to a British post is attacked by Indians aiding the French. The notes first name Natty Bumppo, a frontier settler who aids the British, with his friends the Mohican chief and the chief’s son. Later they describe a white youth, Hawkeye, raised by the Mohican chief, who goes out to fight in order to protect Uncas, the chief’s son, and the Mohican people.

Munro’s daughters, and Cooper’s own ground

Alice and Cora, daughters of Colonel Munro, set off across the battlefield with Major Duncan Heyward to meet their father. Their guide is the Indian Magua. The notes then frame the book as a love and adventure between Hawkeye — the white youth raised by the Mohicans — and Cora, the British officer’s daughter, a chase they call an origin of the western.

Cooper, they write, was born in 1789 and died in 1851, in a Quaker family, on his father’s isolated estate at a lake in central New York. The country of his childhood was, for a time, relatively quiet, yet it had also been a site of massacre of Indians. As a boy he saw frontier settlers and Indians on the lake, and later watched white settlers push into their ground. The notes call him a cultural relativist: no culture, in his understanding, held virtue or refinement first. His father, they add, was both landowner and a local leader.

A wilderness that vanished like a mirage

Nature and the Indians in Cooper’s novels, the notes say, are fundamentally good, and so are people who have received much of culture. Between them stand poor, greedy white settlers, not educated enough to understand either nature or culture. Cooper, they write, was the first to state clearly a tragedy that American fiction would repeat.

Where other writers looked to Europe for myth and castle, The Last of the Mohicans, in their reading, caught — and threatened — a myth of America’s past, as if the country had always been a wilderness outside time. European history on this land may even, they suggest, have replayed a fall from Eden. What the book did to society, they write, was to make people see that the first new Eden, Indian land, was not opened so much as destroyed, vanishing like a mirage before the arriving scouts, soldiers, merchants, pioneers, and then the poorer migrant families and the middle-class households of judges, doctors, and bankers. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of a 2014 October edition of The Last of the Mohicans.

Last updated: 15 November 2026