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THE LEATHERSTOCKING TALES AND INDIAN REMOVAL: A STUDY OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER'S LEATHERSTOCKING TALES IN THE LIGHT OF UNITED STATES POLICY TOWARDS THE AMERICAN INDIAN by JAMES DOUGLAS MANLY B.A., University of British Columbia, 1954 B.D., Union College of British Columbia, 1967 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of English We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA April, 1976 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of English The University of British Columbia 2075 Wesbrook Place Vancouver, Canada V6T 1W5 Date April 17, 1976 ABSTRACT Because of his portrayal of noble and heroic Indians in the Leatherstocking Tales, James Fenimore Cooper has often been regarded as a writer very sympath• etic to the Indian people in their struggle against dispossession by white society. Because they include many statements which support concepts of aboriginal land rights for the Indians, the Leatherstocking Tales appear to support this understanding of Cooper. However during the time in which Cooper wrote and published the five Leatherstocking Tales, Pioneers (1823), Last of the Mohicans (1826), Prairie (1827), Pathfinder (1840), and Deerslayer (1841), the United States debated and adopted a policy of Indian removal. As a result of this policy, most Indian peoples living east of the Mississippi were removed to unfamiliar lands west of the Mississippi. While some Indians agreed to this policy, others, most notably the Cherokee, objected and tried to maintain themselves as a people on their traditional lands. A treaty, endorsed by an unrepresentative minority of the Cherokee people, ceded these lands and the Cherokee were expelled from their homeland; some four thousand Cherokee people died on this "Trail of Tears" to their new home. Although Cooper was politically active and aware, he did not protest the actions of the government. In Notions of the Americans (1828), a fictional travel narrative, the presumed author, who, in many respects, can be identified with Cooper, speaks of removal as a "great, humane, and . rational project." Otherwise, Cooper does not appear to have addressed himself to the removal controversy. The thesis, therefore, re-examines the Leather- stocking Tales in the light of the removal controversy; it seeks to determine what understanding these novels give of the Indian people, of Indian-white relations, and of Indian rights to the land. The first three Leatherstocking novels were written during the debate on Indian removal. Although Indian rights to the "land are frequently mentioned, other aspects of these novels work to deny the validity of the Indian claim. The last two Leatherstocking novels, written after the removal policy had come into effect, do not have as much rhetoric about Indian land rights; like the earlier Leatherstocking Tales, however, they see the Indian and white civilization as mutually exclusive. Although Cooper presents good and noble Indians, in opposition to his Indian villains, they lack the necessary qualities to become a happy and worthwhile part of American life and culture. Critics accused Cooper of patterning his Indians too much after those described by Rev. John Heckewelder, one of Cooper's major sources. However, as this thesis iv shows, Cooper significantly altered Heckewelder's view of the Indians and of Indian-white relations; Cooper plays down the importance of white savagery, which Heckewelder had stressed and detailed, and, in contrast, emphasizes and details Indian acts of savagery and cruelty. The thesis concludes that Cooper saw the Indian primarily as material for romance; wrongs done to the Indian and statements about Indian rights to the land are included in the novels because they added to the picture of the Indian as a romantic figure. Basically, Cooper did not have any political or social commitment to the Indian people. V TABLE OF CONTENTS chapter page I Introduction and Historical Background ... 6 II The Early Leatherstocking Novels 26 A. The Pioneers 26 B. The Last of the Mohicans 41 C. The Prairie 60 D. Notions of the Americans 82 III The Later Leatherstocking Novels 91 A. The Pathfinder 91 B. The Deerslayer 106 IV Cooper's Use of Material from Heckewelder 127 V Conclusions 142 Footnotes 160 Selected Bibliography 176 LEAVES 1-5 OMITTED IN PAGE NUMBERING. CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND This thesis examines the relationship between two things: first, the protest in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales against white usurpation of Indian lands, and second, the removal by the United States government of Indian peoples from their ancestral lands in the eastern United States to unfamiliar territory west of the Mississippi River. This removal took place during the time when Cooper wrote the Leatherstocking novels. In spite of protests in the novels about white greed for land in earlier periods of history, and in spite of his involve• ment in Jacksonian politics, Cooper made no public protest over the removal policy. Nor do the six volumes of i The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper indicate any private feelings of concern or opposition. This curious gap between stated concern over injustice done to the Indians in the past and a seeming insensitivity to similar injustice in Cooper's own time requires a re-examination of the Leatherstocking Tales. This thesis maintains that protests against dispossession of the Indian, and statements which support Indian land claims must not be taken at face value in these novels, but must be examined in terms of the total effect that the novels 7 make upon the reader. The Leatherstocking Tales will be examined, not simply as romances of a passing frontier, but as documents which partly reflected, and partly helped to shape, political and social attitudes towards the Indians in the first half of the nineteenth century. In one way or another, all literary art relates to the political process; the artist, however, is not always aware of the political implications of his art, which, very often, are quite different from, and even opposed to, his stated intentions. These implications, therefore, cannot be understood through a study which is limited to overt political statements; rather, the total work of art must be considered: plot, characterization, imagery, and the imaginative world which the writer creates. In attempting to determine the relationship between the Leatherstocking Tales and the removal policy of the United States government, this thesis asks, "What understanding of the relationship between Indians and the rapidly developing white society of early nineteenth- century America finds expression in these novels?" Cooper did not create his fictional Indians wholly from his own imagination, nor from detailed, first-hand memories of real Indians; rather, as Roy Harvey Pearce 2 claims, he took them "as his culture gave them to him." 8 Gregory Lansing Paine quotes Cooper's remark to an acquaintance: "You have the advantage of me, for I never was among the Indians. All that I know of them is 3 from reading and hearing my father speak of them." The author's daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, said in her 1861 book, Pages and Pictures from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, with Notes: "His own opportunities of intercourse with the red men had been few; occasionally some small party of the Oneidas, or other representatives of the Five Nations had crossed his path in the valley of the Susquehanna, or on the shores of Lake Ontario, where he served when a midshipman in the Navy. And more recently, since the idea of introducing these wild people into his books had occurred to him, he had been at no little pains to seize every opportunity offered for observation. Fortunately for his purpose, deputations to Washington from the Western tribes were quite frequent at that moment; he visited these different parties as they passed through Albany and New York, following them in several instances to Washington, and with a view also to gathering inform• ation from the officers and interpreters who accompanied them. " (Quoted by Paine, pp. 19-20) To compensate for this lack of first-hand information, Cooper read widely in the journals, reports, and travel narratives of explorers, missionaries, government agents, and travellers who had spent time among different Indian peoples. Cooper's daughter gives an ambiguous, and sometimes wrongly spelled list of some of the authors whom 9 Cooper consulted. Correcting Susan Fenimore Cooper's account, John T. Frederick identifies these authors as follows: Rev. John Heckewelder, Rev. P.F.X. de Charlevoix, William Penn, Captain John Smith, Rev. John Eliot, Cadwallader Colden, as well as accounts of the expeditions of Stephen H. Long, Lewis and Clark, and Alexander 4 Mackenzie. In addition to those writers named by Susan Fenimore Cooper, Frederick suggests that Cooper would also have read "others equally available and equally prominent. Among the most likely candidates are the lively narratives of Alexander Henry, John Long, and John Bradbury; the newly published works of James Buchanan and Joseph Doddridge; and the officially sponsored reports of Jedediah Morse and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft" (Frederick, pp. 1006-1007). Frederick shows the extent to which Cooper depended upon his sources for the figurative expressions used by his Indian characters: "More than three-fourths of all the figures employed by Cooper appear also in the sources, and ..

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