Children's Stories in American Literature, 1660-1860

by Henrietta Christian Wright

In The Deerslayer the hero of the series makes his appearance as a youth of German descent whose parents had settled near a clan of the Mohegans on the Schoharie River. At a great Indian feast he receives the name Deerslayer from the father of Chingachgook, his Indian boy friend, and the story is an account of his first war-path. The tale was suggested to the author one afternoon as he paused for a moment while riding to gaze over the lake he so loved, and whose shores, as he looked, seemed suddenly to be peopled with the figures of a vanished race. As the vision faded he turned to his daughter and said that he must write a story about the little lake, and thus the idea of Deerslayer was born. In a few days the story was begun. The scene is laid on Otsego Lake, and in the tale are incorporated many tender memories of Cooper's own boyhood. It portrays Leatherstocking as a young scout just entering manhood, and embodies some of the author's best work. Perhaps no one was so well-fitted to illustrate the ideal friendship between Deerslayer and Chingachgook as he, who in his boyhood stood many a time beside the lakeside as the shadows fell over the forest, not knowing whether the faint crackling of the bushes meant the approach of the thirsty deer, or signalled the presence of some Indian hunter watching with jealous eye the white intruder.

In The Last of the Mohicans, Leatherstocking, under the name Hawkeye, is represented in the prime of manhood, his adventures forming some of the most exciting events of the series. Here his old friend Chingachgook and the latter's son Uncas follow Deerslayer hand in hand, and make, next to the hero, the principal characters of the story, the scene of which is laid near Lake Champlain during the trouble between the French and English for the possession of Canada.

In The Pathfinder the famous scout, under the name which gives the title to the book, is carried still further in his adventurous career. The scene is laid near Lake Ontario where Cooper spent some months while in the navy. These three tales are not only the finest of the series from a literary standpoint, but they illustrate as well the life of those white men of the forest who lived as near to nature as the Indian himself and whose deeds helped make the history of the country in its beginnings.

The Pioneers finds Leatherstocking an old hunter living on Otsego Lake at the time of its first settlement by the whites. The character was suggested by an old hunter of the regions who in Cooper's boyhood came frequently to the door of his father's house to sell the game he had killed. The hero is in this book called Natty Bumppo and the story is one of the primitive life of the frontiersmen of that period. Their occupations, interests and ambitions form the background to the picture of Leatherstocking, the rustic philosopher, who has finished the most active part of his career, and who has gathered from nature some of her sweetest lessons. Many of the scenes in the book are transcriptions from the actual life of those hardy pioneers who joined Cooper's father in the settlement of Cooperstown, while the whole is tinged with that tender reminiscence of the author's youth which sets it apart from the rest though it is, perhaps, the least perfect story of the series.

Leatherstocking closes his career in The Prairie, a novel of the plains of the great West, whither he had gone to spend his last days. It is the story of the lonely life of the trapper of those days, whose love of solitude has led him far from the frontier, and whose dignified death fitly closes his courageous life. It is supposed that the actual experiences of Daniel Boone suggested this ending to the series.

The story of the war of the frontiersmen with nature, with circumstances and with the red man is told in these books. It is the romance of real history and Leatherstocking was but the picture of many a brave settler whose deeds were unrecorded and whose name remains unknown. Side by side with Leatherstocking stand those Indian characters which the genius of Cooper immortalized and which have passed into history as typical.

Cooper began the tales without any thought of making a series, but the overwhelming success of The Pioneers, the first which appeared, led him to produce book after book until the whole life of the hero was illustrated.

Cooper's series of sea novels began with The Pilot, published in 1824. It followed The Pioneers, and showed the novelist to be equally at home on sea and land. In his stories of frontier life, Cooper followed the great Scott, whose thrilling tales of Border life and of early English history had opened a new domain to the novelist. Cooper always acknowledged his debt to the great Wizard of the North, and, indeed, spoke of himself as a chip of Scott's block. But in his sea stories Cooper was a creator. He was the first novelist to bring into fiction the ordinary, every-day life of the sailor afloat, whether employed on a peaceful merchant vessel or fighting hand to hand in a naval battle. And it is interesting to know that the creation of the sea story was another debt that he owed to Scott, though in a far different way. Scott's novel, The Pirate, had been criticised by Cooper as the work of a man who had never been at sea. And to prove it the work of a landsman he began his own story, The Pilot. The time chosen is that of the Revolution, and the hero is the famous adventurer John Paul Jones, introduced under another name. It was so new a thing to use the technicalities of ship life, and to describe the details of an evolution in a naval battle, that, familiar as he was with ocean life, Cooper felt some doubts of his success. To test his power he read one day to an old shipmate that now famous account of the passage of the ship through the narrow channel. The effect was all that Cooper hoped. The old sailor fell into a fury of excitement, paced up and down the room, and in his eagerness for a moment lived over again a stormy scene in his own life. Satisfied with this experiment Cooper finished the novel in content.

The Pilot met with an instant success both in America and Europe. As it was his first, so it is, perhaps, his best sea story. Into it he put all the freshness of reminiscence, all the haunting memories of ocean life that had followed him since his boyhood. It was biographical in the same sense as The Pioneers. A part of the romance of childhood drafted into the reality of after life.

The Red Rover, the next sea story, came out in 1828. By that time other novelists were writing tales of the sea, but they were mere imitations of The Pilot. In The Red Rover the genuine adventures of the sailor class were again embodied in the thrilling narrative that Cooper alone knew how to write, and this book has always been one of the most popular of novels.