The Story of Cooperstown

by Ralph Birdsall

In the opinion of Sainte-Beuve, Fenimore Cooper possessed the "creative faculty which brings into the world new characters, and by virtue of which Rabelais produced Panurge, Le Sage Gil-Blas, and Richardson Pamela." Thackeray, praising the heroes of Scott's creation, expressed an equal liking for Cooper's, adding that "perhaps Leather-Stocking is better than any one in Scott's lot. La Longue Carabine is one of the great prize-men of fiction. He ranks with your Uncle Toby, Sir Roger de Coverley, Falstaff—heroic figures all, American or British; and the artist has deserved well of his country who devised him." Thackeray proved the sincerity of his admiration when he borrowed a hint from the noble death-scene of Leather-Stocking in The Prairie, and adapted it to describe the passing of Colonel Newcome.

Cooper's wide audience of general readers is here in agreement with Sainte-Beuve the critic and Thackeray the novelist. Whatever else may be said of Cooper's works it is certain that in the man Natty Bumppo, known as "Leather-Stocking," "Pathfinder," "Deerslayer," and "La Longue Carabine," Cooper created an immortal being. Among heroes of fiction Leather-Stocking stands with the few that are as real to the imagination as the personages of veritable history. Readers of Cooper recall Leather-Stocking with genuine affection; others, without having read a line of the Leather-Stocking Tales have somehow formed an idea of his person and character. Leather-Stocking is a rare hero in being noble without being offensive. "Perhaps there is no better proof of Cooper's genuine power," says Brander Matthews, "than that he can insist on Leather-Stocking's goodness,—a dangerous gift for a novelist to bestow on a man,—and that he can show us Leather-Stocking declining the advances of a handsome woman,—a dangerous position for a novelist to put a man in,—without any reader ever having felt inclined to think Leather-Stocking a prig."

Leather-Stocking was first introduced to the public in The Pioneers, the novel descriptive of early days in Cooperstown which Cooper published in 1823. The character was not yet fully developed, but Nathaniel Bumppo in outward appearance stood at once complete. "He was tall, and so meagre as to make him seem above even the six feet that he actually stood in his stockings. On his head, which was thinly covered with lank, sandy hair, he wore a cap made of fox-skin. His face was skinny, and thin almost to emaciation; but yet it bore no signs of disease; on the contrary, it had every indication of the most robust and enduring health. The cold and the exposure had, together, given it a color of uniform red. His gray eyes were glancing under a pair of shaggy brows, that overhung them in long hairs of gray mingled with their natural hue; his scraggy neck was bare, and burnt to the same tint with his face. A kind of coat, made of dressed deerskin, with the hair on, was belted close to his lank body, by a girdle of colored worsted. On his feet were deerskin moccasins, ornamented with porcupines' quills, after the manner of the Indians, and his limbs were guarded with long leggings of the same material as the moccasins, which, gartering over the knees of his tarnished buckskin breeches, had obtained for him, among the settlers, the nick-name of Leather-Stocking."

In this story the novelist had presented Leather-Stocking as a finished portrait, with his long rifle, dog Hector, and all. Cooper had described him as a man of seventy years, and intimated no purpose of carrying him over into another volume. Natty Bumppo proved to be so popular, however, that in 1826 Cooper made him an important figure in The Last of the Mohicans, representing him in young manhood, at the age of thirty years, and betrayed a more profound interest in the spirit of the character which he had discovered. The success of this venture encouraged the author, in the next year, to bring Leather-Stocking forward, for what he intended to be the last time, in The Prairie. The closing chapter of that story describes the death and burial of Leather-Stocking.

But the public could not have enough of Natty Bumppo, and the result was that, after leaving him in his grave, Cooper resurrected Leather-Stocking as the hero of two more novels. In The Pathfinder, published in 1840, he described Natty Bumppo at the age of forty years; and The Deerslayer, the last published of the series, gave a youthful picture of Leather-Stocking at the age of twenty. When the Leather-Stocking Tales were afterward published complete they of course followed the logical order in the presentation of the hero's life, without regard to the dates of original publication. The actual order in which they were written, however, suggests an interesting glimpse of Cooper's method of work in developing his most successful character.

It is generally believed that an old hunter named Shipman, who lived in Cooperstown during Fenimore Cooper's boyhood, suggested to the novelist the picturesque character of Leather-Stocking. The persistence of this tradition requires some explanation, for it is not strikingly confirmed by what Cooper himself had to say of the matter. In the preface of the Leather-Stocking Tales, written after the series was complete, he said: "The author has often been asked if he had any original in his mind for the character of Leather-Stocking. In a physical sense, different individuals known to the writer in early life certainly presented themselves as models, through his recollection; but in a moral sense this man of the forest is purely a creation."

In the face of this, the most that can be said for the current tradition is that Cooper's assertion does not exclude it from consideration. What he lays stress upon is that the inner spirit of Leather-Stocking was the novelist's creation. His statement is not inconsistent with the possibility that he had the hunter Shipman chiefly in mind as the prototype of Leather-Stocking, with some characteristics added from other hunters, of whom there were many in the early days of Cooperstown. The heat with which he denies having drawn upon the character of his own sister in portraying the heroine of The Pioneers seems to betray a feeling, which later writers have not often shared, that an author cannot transfer real persons to the pages of fiction without a violation of good taste. Here lies perhaps a partial explanation of the fact that Cooper never acknowledged a living model for any of his characters. Even Judge Temple in The Pioneers, who occupies exactly the position of Judge Cooper in reference to the village which he actually founded, Fenimore Cooper will not admit to be drawn in the likeness of his father. He disposes of this supposition in the introduction of The Pioneers by observing that "the great proprietor resident on his lands, and giving his name to his estates, is common over the whole of New York." Yet in the same introduction he confesses that "in commencing to describe scenes, and perhaps he may add characters, that were so familiar to his own youth, there was a constant temptation to delineate that which he had known, rather than that which he might have imagined." How far he yielded to the temptation is a question which, in making as if to reply, he deftly leaves unanswered, and his unwillingness to satisfy curiosity on this point is the one thing that a careful reading of his words makes clear. He is free to admit in a general way that he drew upon life for material, but he will not be pinned down as to any particular character; yet only in the one instance—when his sister was named as the original of Elizabeth Temple—did he flatly deny the identification of a real original with a creature of his fiction. After all, even if Cooper had drawn many of his characters from real life, there would have been so much modification necessary to fit them into the action of a story as to warrant him in the assertion "that there was no intention to describe with particular accuracy any real character"; and if he did not wish to take the public into his confidence regarding these intimate details of his work, he had a perfect right to treat the matter as evasively as the truth would permit.

One can see reasons for Cooper's unwillingness to inform the public that his old neighbors in Cooperstown were to be recognized in his books. There is the creative artist's reason, who does not wish to be regarded as a mere photographer; there is the gentleman's sensitiveness to certain rights of privacy not to be invaded by public print; there is the experience of a writer who was often dismayed at the facility of his pen in stirring neighborly animosities.

As to Leather-Stocking, this is to be said: that in Cooper's boyhood there lived in Cooperstown a hunter named Shipman whom Cooper himself in the Chronicles of Cooperstown, published in 1838, described as "the Leather-Stocking of the region." Furthermore,—whether owing to any private information from Fenimore Cooper cannot now be ascertained,—the tradition from his time to the present day, in spite of the author's vague disclaimer, persistently clings to Shipman as the original of Leather-Stocking.