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The Pathfinder: Leatherstocking in Love

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2011

G. Dekker
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Extract

The Pathfinder (1840) is the only Leatherstocking tale in which Natty Bumppo at all resembles the wavering hero of a Scott novel. Here for the first and only time we see him waver between the life he has always led — untrammelled by property, responsible only to his own strict code and conscience, free to follow his own bent away from white European society — and the life of a border family man with all that that implies in terms of a wife who must be kept content with her lot, children.who must be properly educated, property which must be acquired and protected. Yet The Pathfinder is not in the least like a Waverley novel. It is not even very much like one of the earlier Leatherstocking tales. Why, more than a decade after burying Leatherstocking in The Prairie (1827), did Cooper revive him again? And why revive him in this particular way?

Type
Research Article
Information
Bulletin of the British Association for American Studies , Volume 10 , June 1965 , pp. 40 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © British Association for American Studies 1965

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References

1.For a full account of Cooper's interest in the sea and the U. S. Navy, see PhiIbrick, Thomas, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1961).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2.Cf. Letter to Smith Thompson (8th January, 1823), Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. Beard, J. F. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), Vol. 1, p. 90.v Professor Beard suggests, I think rightly, that Cooper's pledge to resign from the Navy was probably made before his marriage: Letters, Vol. 1, p. 25.Google Scholar
3.Letter to Henry Colborn (1st February, 1831), Letters, Vol. II, p. 53. Cooper also mentions this early plan for a novel about the Great Lakes in his preface to the first edition of The Pathfinder (London, 1840), vol. 1, p.v.Google Scholar
4.Smith, H. N., Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York, 1957: Vintage edition), p. 74.Google Scholar
5.Smith, Virgin Land, pp. 70–71.Google Scholar