THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE TRIGGER: DEMYTHOLOGIZING VIOLENCE IN COOPER’S THE PIONEERS
MICHAEL TAYLOR University of Heidelberg, Center for American Studies
Abstract: Many scholars mark Cooper as the master myth-maker of American imperialism, arguing that he portrays frontier violence as progress. This paper questions the critical consensus. By retracing the violence depicted in The Pioneers, this paper unravels an ecological argument coupled with a psychoanalytical motif that Cooper employs to warn against unharnessed American aggression, not to celebrate it. Keywords: violence, native Americans, American imperialism, ecology, psychology
1. Introduction A pale finger flushes with adrenaline as it strokes the steel trigger of a rifle. The buck bounds; the pigeon flushes; the Native chief charges; the adrenaline explodes. And with this explosion, James Fenimore Cooper ensconces himself in the American literary canon. Since his canonical induction, foundational literary critics, as early as D.H. Lawrence and on through Richard Slotkin, interpret Cooper’s literary explosions as blatant attempts to mythologize the American frontier as a catalyst to divinely-destined American imperialism. When criticizing The Pioneers, such critics concentrate on Chingachgook’s death and the creation of Natty Bumppo—Leatherstocking—as the quintessential American hero as two sure manifestations of Cooper’s pro-imperialist myth. Other less consensual critics, however, suggest that rather than advancing the already pervasive imperial myth, Cooper problematizes nineteenth-century America and its imperialist ideologies (Fanuzzi 1993:38). Despite such interpretive anomalies, the majority of critics continue to argue that The Pioneers glosses over, masks, and even celebrates the violence of American empire-building (Permaul 2006:9-17). Yet, by aligning with the critical anomaly, an analysis of the violence portrayed in The Pioneers exposes a more critical portrait of American imperialism than most critics conclude. Rather than celebrating violence, Cooper employs ecological metaphors and explores the psychological effects of committing violence in order to combat the literal violence waged against nature and the Native Americans. By doing so, Cooper does not advance the already prominent myth of divine deracination; he violently demythologizes it. Critics cringe at the fact that Cooper inundates hundreds of pages with violence, exterminates the last of the Mohican tribe, only to conclude his novel as a Shakespearean comedy. Adopting Slotkin’s (2000:564) assessment of nineteenth- century American literary violence, Nadesan Permaul (2006:12) insists that the motto of The Pioneers reiterates Tacitus’ tirade on ancient Rome after conquering Britain: “They make desolation and call it peace.” Permaul and Slotkin both argue
that The Pioneers depicts the desolation of nature and the Native Americans only to call the desolation peace. Deriving the motto, however, solely from a novel’s dénouement, trivializes the novel’s exposition, rising and falling action, and climax. Instead of interpreting The Pioneers through such an Aesopian lens,— searching for a single, conclusive moral—dissecting the novel’s introduction and body as equally determinant, reopens an intriguing critical discourse on Cooper. Though Cooper concludes The Pioneers by entrusting the future of the American frontier to certain white settlers, he does not conceal nor mythologize the desolating violence of American imperialism; he exposes and problematizes it. Slotkin (2000:4) initially describes what he interprets as Cooper’s Roman tactic as a “failure to recognize and deal with the real mythological heritage of [his] time and people.” Permaul (2006:15) again extends Slotkin’s assessment and contends that beyond simply failing to recognize the reality of the frontier conflict, Cooper strategically conceals it, concluding, “Those who must be excluded from the romance to make its charming mythology work for the audience are effectively removed from the shape and rise of the new American people and national identity.” As Permaul asserts, Cooper’s novel progresses through a series of effective removals. Early on in the novel, Squire Jones describes the forthcoming removals as he presents the frontier project to the inquiring Elizabeth Temple. “We must run our streets by the compass,” Jones exclaims, “and disregard trees, hills, ponds, stumps, or, in fact, anything but posterity” (Cooper 1853:199). Jones’ definition of Templeton’s frontier project sounds familiarly Roman, but nowhere throughout the novel does Jones embody Cooper’s views on the frontier and the proper process of American expansion. Instead, Cooper repeatedly condemns Jones’ blind use of his imperial compass.
2. Removals 2.1. First Removal: The Trees
The novel’s series of removals commences with the trees as Billy Kirby, the town’s leading lumberjack, enters the neighboring forest. Cooper (1853:208) writes, “[S]electing one of the most noble for the first trial of his power . . . , the heavy and brisk blows that he struck were soon succeeded by the thundering report of the tree.” Here Cooper employs two key terms that invite a metaphoric interpretation of the trees’ removal: “noble” and “power.” The term “noble” intimates a victim more human than arboreal, while the term “power” reveals Kirby’s reason for removal. After ennobling Kirby’s first victim and connecting Kirby to an imperial power struggle, Cooper (1853:208) then further personifies the falling tree: “[I]t came, first cracking and threatening, with the separation of its own last ligaments, then threshing and tearing with its branches the tops of its surrounding brethren, and finally [met] the ground.” Through his personification, Cooper transforms the otherwise routine felling of trees into the battleground between two races, one noble, and the other powerful. Kirby then, like the Romans of old, “march[es] away under the blaze of the prostrate forest, like the conqueror
of some city, who, having first prevailed over his adversary, applies the torch as the finishing blow to his conquest” (Cooper 1853:208). Cooper’s depiction of Kirby, this Romanesque conqueror, mirrors critics’ claims of making desolation and calling it peace. Like Jones, however, Kirby never embodies Cooper’s concept of American expansion. Cooper describes the fallen trees as “noble,” a term ubiquitous in nineteenth-century rhetoric to describe the Native Americans. Along with the more obvious epithet, trees themselves were also a common literary symbol for the Native Americans. Similarly personifying the symbolic arboreal victims of American imperialism, nineteenth-century poet, Lydia Howard Sigourney (1854:83-84), writes:
Man’s warfare on the trees is terrible. / He lifts his rude hut in the wilderness, / And, lo! The loftiest trunks, that age on age / were nurtured to nobility . . . / fall with a thunder sound to rise no more. . . . / He lifts his puny arm, / and every echo of the axe doth hew / the iron heart of centuries away. . . . / And uptorn [sic] roots and prostrate columns mark / the invader’s footsteps.
Like Cooper, Sigourney depicts the felling of the frontier forest as the violent removal of a noble race. Whether this particular, ecological poem lends interpretation as a metaphor for the removal of the Native Americans is uncertain, although Sigourney grants voice to Native Americans elsewhere in her works (Zagarell 2005). It is no coincidence, however, that Cooper employs the trees as the literal and symbolic victims of his novel’s first removal, for the trees share the ennobling epithets of their “ancient inhabitants” (Cooper 1853:144)
2.2. Second Removal: The Pigeons
The second removal comes about much less as a proof of power than out of the thrill of the kill, introducing a psychological aspect to Cooper’s already ecological argument. Waking early to organize their attack, the Templeton settlers gather their ammunition and hurry to the hills. Anxiously, they waylay, anticipating their enemies’ advance. The pigeons— the settlers’ enemies—soon crest the hill and the settlers immediately fusillade:
Arrows, and missiles of every kind, were in the midst of the flocks; and so numerous were the birds, and so low did they take their flight, that even long poles, in the hands of those, on the sides of the mountain, were used to strike them to the earth. (Cooper 1853:268)
Here, Cooper transforms the frontier sport of shooting into a brutal bloodbath, revealing the American settlers’ unrestrained killer instinct. As the arrows, missiles, and poles prove insatiate to the settlers’ excited aggression, Jones,
the holder of the imperialist compass, arrives at the frontlines wielding a cannon. The arrival of the new artillery “collect[s] all the idle spectators to the spot, who being mostly boys, [fill] the air with cries of exultation and delight” (Cooper 1853: 269). While the settlers shout with excitement, Natty approaches and surveys the battlefield, from which “none pretended to collect the game, which lay scattered over the fields in such profusion as to cover the very ground with the fluttering victims” (Cooper 1853: 269). Disgusted with the settlers’ unharnessed excitement, and absolute prodigality, Natty declaims, “This comes of settling a country! . . . The Lord won't see the waste of his creatures for nothing, and right will be done to the pigeons, as well as others, by and by” (Cooper 1853: 270). Through Natty’s castigation, Cooper transforms the frontier sport into a sermon against the prodigal, passion-filled violence of the American settlers while alluding also to the reality of other frontier victims. A cannon-worthy flock, now understood as a metaphor for all other victims of frontier violence, soon appears over the hill and the temptations of the trigger become so overwhelming that even Judge Temple, the novel’s animal activist by mouth, “forg[ets] the morality of Leatherstocking . . . , and, in common with the rest, [brings] his musket to a poise” (Cooper 1853:273). The flock comes in range; the cannon and muskets fire; the victims fall; and the settlers celebrate, “Victory! . . . , Victory! We have driven the enemy from the field" (Cooper 1853: 274). As the settlers celebrate, however, Cooper (1853: 274) delves into the psychological process of Judge Temple’s remorseful rebuttal:
Not so . . . , the field is covered with them; and, like the Leatherstocking, I see nothing but eyes, in every direction, as the innocent sufferers turn their heads in terror. Full one half of those that have fallen are yet alive; and I think it is time to end the sport, if sport it be.
By juxtaposing Temple’s immediate compunction with his and his fellow settlers’ prior excitement, Cooper concatenates a psychological element to his already ecological argument. As Temple turns to leave the battlefield, Cooper (1853: 274) then bolsters his argument with a motto that is less imperialist than most critics assert:
Judge Temple retired towards his dwelling with that kind of feeling that many a man has experienced before him, who discovers, after the excitement of the moment has passed, that he has purchased pleasure at the price of misery to others.
The key term here is excitement. In each of the novel’s removals, Cooper dissects the excitement of committing violence and analyzes its effects on the aggressor while simultaneously unmasking the desolation of imperialist violence. Cooper’s analysis of Judge Temple’s immediate regret emphasizes the novel’s motto and the prophetic forewarnings against adrenaline-based expansion.
Cooper’s motto does not mask the cruel realities of the American frontier—unless metaphor and psychoanalysis have become literary devices to conceal rather than reveal—nor does it advance the violent myth of American imperialism. Similar to the tree metaphor, placing the pigeon battle into its literary context provides an enlightening interpretation of the pigeons as another metaphor for the Native Americans. In 1827, four years after the publication of The Pioneers, frontier novelist, Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1842:69), employs a similar metaphor in her novel, Hope Leslie, to express a Native American’s recollection of the Pequot War. Sedgwick writes, “Some of our people . . . mounted the palisade, but they were shot and dropped like a flock of birds smitten by the hunter’s arrows.” Then describing the battle’s aftermath, she continues, “The bodies of our people were strewn about the smouldering [sic] ruin, and all around the palisade lay the strong and valiant warriors, cold, silent, powerless as the unformed clay” (Sedgwick 1842:69). Sedgwick’s depiction and diction parallels Cooper’s pigeon battle. Both apply a flock of birds. Sedgwick’s victims are valiant; Cooper’s are noble. Sedgwick’s are strewn about; Cooper’s are scattered. Sedgwick’s victims are powerless; Cooper’s flutter about. Sedgwick seems to have understood Cooper’s pigeon metaphor and embraces it as a simile in her own writings. By interpreting Cooper’s pigeons, as Sedgwick seems to, they become a powerful metaphor of The Pioneers’ underlying, yet ever-present, Native American victims.
2.3. Third Removal: The Fish
Having conquered the fields and the skies, the American settlers set off to take control of the water as Cooper repeats his ecological-psychological argument against American imperialism. Reaching the lakefront at dusk, the settlers set off furtively across the water’s surface in preparation for another surprise attack on their next victims. When their positioning is precise, Squire Jones sounds the attack. The settlers drop their nets and paddle furiously shoreward. As the nets near the shore, “an occasional flutter on the water announce[s] the uneasiness of the prisoners it contain[s]” (Cooper 1853:283). Excited at the sight of their impending victory, Jones commands, “Haul in, my lads . . . , I can see the dogs kicking to get free” (Cooper 1853: 283). Obeying Jones’ command, Kirby, the conqueror of the trees, becomes “inflamed beyond the bounds of discretion at the sight, and forgetful of the season, the wood-chopper rushe[s] to his middle into the water, and beg[ins] to drive the reluctant animals before him from their native element” (Cooper 1853: 284). Following Kirby’s lead, and again caught up in the excitement of the moment, Judge Temple—Marmaduke—again succumbs to the temptations of the trigger. “‘Pull heartily, boys,’ crie[s] Marmaduke, yielding to the excitement of the moment, and laying his hands to the net, with no trifling addition to the force” (Cooper 1853: 284). But as the exciting moment of victory passes, Cooper (1853: 284) repeats anew the novel’s motto:
But when the feelings of the moment were passing away, Marmaduke took in his hands a bass, that might have weighed two pounds, and after viewing it a moment, in melancholy musing, he turned to his daughter, and observed, “This is a fearful expenditure of the choicest gifts of Providence.”
Through Judge Temple’s repeated regret, Cooper reiterates his motto against adrenaline-driven imperialism. He depicts the American settlers as selfish, impulse killers, driven by passion, pride, and possession. Contrarily, he depicts the fish as helpless prisoners and godly gifts. While depicting the fish, Cooper (1853:181) also inserts the key term, “dog,” alluding to Jones’ earlier description of the Native Americans, and the more obvious phrase, “native element.” This terminological juxtaposition of the attacked and the attackers parallels that of the trees and the pigeons. And as such, the fish’s removal acts as a final metaphor to foreshadow the novel’s final removal of the Native Americans.
2.4. Final Removal: The Native Americans
Instead of attributing any significance to Cooper’s ecological metaphors or his analysis of Judge Temple’s post-violence psychology, critics continue to claim that through The Pioneers’ final removal, Cooper glorifies the need to remove the Native Americans for the cause of spreading American civilization. Labeling Cooper as the master myth-maker of American imperialism, Slotkin (2000:473) concludes, “For the American writer, the conflict of cultures meant the replacement or extermination of the Indian.” In other words, Cooper solves the frontier conflict of cultures through what Frederick Jackson Turner (1986:6) terms a “disintegration of savagery.” As Slotkin and many critics since argue, Cooper clearly removes savagery from the American frontier. As he removes the Native Americans, however, he reveals an even more detrimental force of civilized savagery rampant among the American settlers, one of unrestrained, adrenaline-driven violence. From the trees, to the pigeons, to the fish, and now on to the Native Americans, Cooper reveals the inhumanity of the American imperialist project against nature and its Natives. Perhaps his revelations of reality are masked, as critics argue, but only behind metaphors laced with key terms ubiquitous throughout nineteenth- century Native American rhetoric. Cooper’s final removal of the Native Americans comes in the form of Chingachgook, the last survivor of the great Mohican tribe. Critics continue to build the bulk of their argument against this final removal. It is important, however, to reconsider the series of metaphoric removals, and how Cooper removes Chingachgook, in order to move beyond the obvious fact that Chingacghgook is removed. In the moment of Chingachgook’s death, instead of concealing his suffering, Cooper confides Chingachgook’s tragic past to the soon-to-be heiress of Templeton, Elizabeth Temple. Entrusting Elizabeth with his final testimony against American imperialism, Chingachgook inquires:
Where are the blankets and merchandise that bought the right of the Fire-eater? . . . [A]re they with him in his wigwam? Did they say to him, Brother, sell us your land, and take this gold, this silver, these blankets, these rifles, or even this rum? No; they tore it from him, as a scalp is torn from an enemy; and they that did it looked not behind them, to see whether he lived or died. (Cooper 1853:442)
In this final revelation, Cooper does not silence Chingachgook’s suffering, removing him clandestinely from the novel. Instead, Chingachgook empties his suffering soul, and, not adhering to Reverend Grant’s Christian admonitions, begins “chanting a kind of low dirge, in the Delaware tongue, using the deep and remarkably guttural tones of his people” (Cooper 1853: 452). Chingachgook sings his own requiem, providing the novel’s most sanctimonious scene. As the flames engulf him, the last of the Mohican tribe is removed from the American frontier, but Cooper does not mask nor glorify the reality of Chingachgook’s lifelong suffering under the arm of American imperialism. Cooper reveals the reality of anti-Native American violence at the novel’s climax, atop the mountain appropriately entitled The Vision. In Slotkin’s assessment of Chingachgook’s death and the novel’s festive finale, he concentrates on the incineration of Chingachgook, but draws little connection to the simultaneous burning of Templeton’s frontier Vision. Instead, Slotkin (2000: 491) presents The Vision as a sacrificial pyre, arguing that Cooper appropriates the Mohican myth of national regeneration through kingly sacrifice to promote a republican regeneration through sacrificing the Native King. As Slotkin asserts, the novel’s imagery indeed attributes a certain sacrificial reverence to Chingachgook’s passing. Slotkin, however, fails to recognize that Chingachgook is not the American arsons’ only victim. For the same flames that envelop Chingachgook simultaneously incinerate Templeton’s imperial Vision. Thus, Cooper presents the removal of the Native Americans as a simultaneous removal of the imperialist ideals Templeton represents. Such a reinterpretation of Chingachgook’s death does not suggest that Cooper opposes American expansion or the possibility and even necessity of adopting other forms of spreading civilization. But in The Pioneers, Cooper delivers an ecological and psychological argument against the prodigal violence of excitement-driven expansion. Returning to the novel’s first removal of the trees—now understood as a metaphor for the Native Americans—Cooper (1853:243) explains, “Little is known concerning the properties of the tree itself . . . how much it may be improved by cultivation.” This early statement signifies Cooper’s support of America’s republican ideals and their spreading across the continent. The Vision’s burning, however, at the moment of Chingachgook’s greatest revelation and sacrificial suicide, signifies Cooper’s campaign against thoughtless, adrenal Americanism. Understanding Chingachgook’s death as coinciding with the death of Templetonian imperialism, invites one to also reinterpret the novel’s metaphoric battles and removals that lead up to Chingachgook’s climactic killing. Cooper does not call killing peace; he reveals the violence that had been occurring under the cultural and political misnomers of peace and progress.
3. The Quintessential American: Natty Bumppo
After the novel’s series of removals, one controversial character remains: Natty Bumppo. Critics argue that Natty’s survival and sunset stroll into America’s next frontier bolsters Cooper’s myth of expansion through destruction. D.H. Lawrence (1998) introduces this imperialist interpretation of Natty when he concludes, “[Y]ou have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Including Natty in his similar summation of America’s mythic heroes, Slotkin (2000: 565) suggests:
Set the statuesque figures and their piled trophies in motion through space and time, and a more familiar landscape emerges—the whale, buffalo, and bear hunted to the verge of extinction for pleasure in killing and ‘scalped’ for fame and the profit in hides . . . ; the Indian debased, impoverished, and killed in return for his gifts; the land and its people, its “dark” people especially, economically exploited and wasted; the warfare between man and nature, between race and race, exalted as a kind of heroic ideal.
Natty, of The Pioneers, however, does not fit Slotkin’s categorization. Slotkin’s conclusion proves tenable in that Natty kills, scalps, and as Slotkin (2000:499) observes, even receives his Native name, Leatherstocking, from his unmatched skill in battle. Natty, however, never exploits nor desolates. Natty fights against, and finally abandons the exploitation and prodigality of the American settlers; he never encourages them. And through juxtaposing Natty to Judge Temple and the other Templeton settlers, Cooper furthers his argument against the “pleasure in killing.” Cooper’s Natty is, as Lawrence asserts, hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. These traits, however, are in no way those which set Natty apart from the typical white settler, nor are they those which Cooper elevates. To include Natty in Slotkin’s summary, therefore, simplifies the complexity of Natty’s character in The Pioneers. Critics assail Cooper’s depiction of Natty because of his stoicism, his almost flawless ability with the rifle, his mammoth strength, and his unwillingness to conform; but Cooper emphasizes Natty’s controlled application of these qualities in contrast to the settlers’ constant unrestraint. Transgressing the critical consensus, Nicole de Fee (2008: 5) concludes:
Natty's distinct brand of American-ness is someone who does not identify with or promote colonialism or imperialism, and whose roots are connected to the indigenous people of the land, and who, in the end, is white. He is the one, theoretically, with whom Cooper's audience should identify; he is the American.
Nicole de Fee avoids associating Natty with the killer image other critics have simplified him to. She recognizes his whiteness, but disassociates him with the
white settlers and their imperialist frontier project. Despite his whiteness, de Fee’s Natty connects with, learns from, and protects nature and the Native Americans. De Fee’s Natty is the Natty seen earlier condemning the pigeon massacre. Aligning with de Fee, it is precisely Natty’s ability to connect with nature and the Natives, which makes him a mythic American hero; not his hardness, isolation, stoicism, nor “pleasure in killing.” Cooper’s mythic, all-American trailblazer coincides with The Pioneers’ happy ending to suggest a sense of optimism in the new American ideals that Natty will then carry across the continent. But, it does not support impassioned imperialism. Contrary to Sercan Bercowitch’s (1981:14) assertion, through Cooper’s ecological metaphors, psychoanalysis of Judge Temple’s post-violence regret, and creation of Natty as the quintessential American, Cooper transforms the frontier into a barrier against the already violent threshold of American imperialism. Neither Natty nor the novel’s conclusion call desolation peace; they reveal the desolation beneath what their contemporaries labeled peace. They then instill the frontier with still white, but new, staid leadership.
4. Conclusion
For in the end, Oliver Edwards, a man not above the learning of an Indian (Cooper 1853: 95), claims his title as the heir of Templeton, not with an ignorant excitement to continue the current frontier project, but as one having already been injured by Judge Temple’s imperialist rifle. He assumes his position as one whose closest friends—Natty and Chingachgook—have been killed or ostracized because of his now subordinates’ unwillingness to assimilate with and cultivate nature and its Natives. And by his side stands Elizabeth Temple, the only character to whom Chingachgook entrusts the tragic reality of his people’s past. It is also she, who early on in the novel provides the scathing sarcasm against Squire Jones’ imperialist project with her retort: “Where are the beauties and improvements which you were to show me?” (Cooper 1853:199) As critics note, Oliver and Elizabeth are still white, but they maintain a vision of beauty and improvement much different than Squire Jones’ imperialist compass. Their American vision is one of admiration, friendship, and cultivation. They stand against unchecked, excitement-driven violence, against unrestrained aggression. Together, Oliver and Elizabeth form Cooper’s idea of the American frontier. They do not attain their position through power or violence. And they accept their position melancholically not victoriously, because of the loss of Oliver’s friends and Elizabeth’s saviors. Although The Pioneers concludes with a wedding scene of celebration, the celebration is precluded by a series of continual condemnation. Returning to the beginning of the novel, as to better understand the end, Cooper announces The Pioneers’ nonviolent motto, which he then repeats each time Judge Temple relapses to his rifle, each time he succumbs to the exciting temptations of the American imperialist trigger. As the novel’s first buck bounds, first finger flexes, and first rifle explodes, an argument ensues concerning who
buckled the buck. After a lengthy discussion, Oliver Edwards—the rightful heir of Templeton—unravels the case, explicating the precariousness of Judge Temple’s imperialist rifle:
“You know, sir, you fired in this direction—here are four of the bullets in the tree.” The Judge examined the fresh marks in the bark of the pine, and shaking his head, said, with a laugh—“You are making out the case against yourself, my young advocate—where is the fifth?” “Here,” said the youth, throwing aside the rough overcoat that he wore, and exhibiting a hole in his under garment, through which large drops of blood were oozing. (Cooper 1853: 23-24)
Then announcing the novel’s motto, Judge Temple exclaims, “Good God! . . . Have I been trifling here about an empty distinction, and a fellow-creature suffering from my hands without a murmur?” (Cooper 1853:24). Judge Temple’s declaration of regret becomes a motif, which reappears each time he accedes to the temptations of the trigger. By retracing Judge Temple and his accompanying motif throughout the novel’s violent removals, Cooper reiterates a motto that counterpoints the current critical consensus. Cooper reveals that American imperialism is much more than “one neighbor wanting to enter the house of another” (Cooper 1853:401). It is an unwelcomed guest, forcing his way into the house of another, taking what is not his, and then burning his host’s house to the ground; who by doing so, simultaneously burns his own house. Through a series of metaphoric, ecological removals and a repeated analysis of Judge Temple’s post- excitement regret, Cooper problematizes the prodigal violence of American imperialism; he does not mythologize it. Reinterpreting The Pioneers as a series of ecological metaphors coupled with a repeated psychoanalytical motif as a deliberate foreshadowing of the final, literal removal of the Native Americans; and juxtaposing Natty Bumppo’s control to the environing white settlers’ unrestraint, challenges the critical consensus that The Pioneers mythologizes divinely-destined American imperialism. Through his metaphors and psychoanalysis, Cooper already adheres to Slotkin’s (2000: 565) enlightening suggestion and places the American myth’s victims in motion to reveal the cruel reality of American imperialism. Cooper neither waxes over, masks, nor places racial exclusion in the background of The Pioneers (Permaul 2006:9-17). Nor does he validate the separation of non-whites from the American settlers, the disintegration of the colored, nor preach the providence of racial conflicts (Permaul 2006:13). The Pioneers does not form an American “fortress of denial” (Permaul 2006:13); it offers an open house of at least attempted honesty. Yet, despite Cooper’s ecological and psychological arguments against American imperialism, Slotkin (2000: 564) goes on to blame Cooper, as the nineteenth- century’s most prominent myth-maker, for creating an incessant imperial myth, writing:
But the cycle of the myth never really ends. The animal skins on the wall, the tree stumps in the yard, the scalp bounty money in the bank, and the pervasive smell of burning are proofs of what we have been; and they suggest that we still will play,
in concept or action, the same role in dialectical opposition to a new Indian, a new social or political antithesis . . . . Men ‘make a wasteland and call it peace.
Slotkin’s summary of the underlying American myth rings true today, but it is not uniquely American, nor did Cooper create it. It is an imperial myth, repeated by every empire since the beginning of time. Through the violence waged against nature in The Pioneers, now understood both literally and metaphorically as the imperialist violence waged against the Native Americans, Cooper condemns America’s repetition of this timeless myth. He psychoanalytically demythologizes the excitement of expansionary violence, and through ecological metaphors, unmasks the desolation being passed off to the public as peace. In The Pioneers, Cooper calls for a new myth led by a new mythic hero, still white, but one of restrained power, promoting cultivation, not extermination.
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