The date is 6 August 1757 and the battle one of those historians retrospectively describe as turning points – the French army's siege of Fort William Henry during the Seven Years’ War. The scene is familiar, and any reader ever so slightly versed in the American classics will need no more than this to identify the climactic juncture of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. At the heart of Cooper's frontier romance, the memorable heroes – the self-reliant Hawkeye, the ever-vanishing ‘Indians’ – have receded from the scene, yielding to the spectacle of global warfare. The paradox is worth pondering: the pivot of Cooper's tale of rugged individualism, a text that has repeatedly been read as the illustration of that American ‘aversion to state authority’ (Gustafson 2011: 168), is a grandiose conflagration between two European imperial state powers flexing their fiscalmilitary muscles on the other side of the Atlantic. Have we missed something?

The fort, or what remains thereof, looms large in the eighteenth chapter of Cooper's romance, imparting a sense of tragedy to the scene. No matter how eager we may be to learn what has happened to our travelling companions, the scout, the girls, the Mohicans and their British allies, we are detained, forced to contemplate the smoking ruins of a military edifice in the wilderness. The choice to plant such a formidable silhouette on the threshold of what used to be the second volume of the romance merits pause and, I’d like to suggest, should prompt us to revisit some of the assumptions we have carried into our reading of Cooper's text.