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Episode 349: 'The Last of the Mohicans' by James Fenimore Cooper
00:33:29
John J. Miller is joined by Bradley J. Birzer of Hillsdale College to discuss James Fenimore Cooper's 'The Last of the Mohicans.'
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- [00:07]
John J. Miller
Hello and welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about the Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. I'm your host, John J. Miller of National Review, and you're listening to a production of National Review. Our guest is Bradley J. Berzer, a history professor at Hillsdale College, whose books include Russell Kirk, American Conservative, and In Defense of Andrew Jackson, as well as an edited volume, the American Democrat, and Other Political Writings by James Fenimore Cooper. He's podcasted with us previously on JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, and Shirley Jackson. He joins us in the studio as we record from Hillsdale College's campus radio station, WRFH in Michigan. Brad, welcome back to the Great Books Podcast.
- [00:51]
Bradley J. Berzer
Hey, John, it's great to be with you. I love doing this, and I was thrilled when you asked me to come back on. So, so good to be with you again.
- [00:57]
John J. Miller
Why is the Last of the Mohicans by James Fenmore Cooper a great book?
- [01:03]
Bradley J. Berzer
I knew you would ask that question, and my response is a complicated one. I think that in terms of literature, it is not a great book. But in terms of historical sense, ability and where it fits into the history of American literature, I think it's a truly great book. So I would separate those things. There are times in Cooper, and I've read the Last of the Mohicans a number of times, but there are times when you're reading him and you just have to kind of scratch your head and wonder what just happened. And there's even a story, it's probably apocryphal, but there's a story that he was suffering at one point from sunstroke when he wrote one of the battle scenes. And I can kind of believe it. But historically, this is really, to my mind, John, it is really the first great American novel. It's the first novel that deals explicitly with what it means to be an American, what the idea of America is, even though it's set before the founding period. So, yeah, that's my complicated way of saying, again, in a literary sense, it's not great, but in a historical sense, it's truly great.
- [02:20]
John J. Miller
We're gonna talk about all that, the complicated nature of its greatness, the characters, the story, and a lot more. Brad let's start with the subtitle of the Last of the Mohicans, which was written and published in 1826. The subtitle is a narrative of 1757. So we're going from the 19th century into the 18th century, and the novel begins with a lot of Scene settings. So tell us what was going on in America in 1757.
- [02:53]
Bradley J. Berzer
Well, it was chaos, absolute chaos, because we were at war with the French and at war with certain Indians, but not other Indians. And that comes through in the novel. You're never quite sure the Indians, the good guys or the bad guys. And some that seem to be bad are good. But, you know, the French and Indian War had started in America really as early as 1753. It was. And I'm always astounded by this. We don't often think about this because we only really know the North American theater. But it really was the North American theater of a world war. This is. Historians generally call this war the Great War for Empire. Because you have France and Britain fighting not only in North America, but they're fighting in the Caribbean, they're fighting off the coast of Asia. There are a number of battles throughout the globe. And I mean to the point where if someone were to say to me, brad, really, we should number this as World War I and World War I as World War II and World War II as World War III, I could understand that argument. We'll never do that, of course, because we've become too used our terms for these things. But the French and Indian War, what we call the French and Indian War, was this great global conflict going on between the two mightiest empires of Europe at that time.
- [04:14]
John J. Miller
And this story starts the Last of the Mohicans starts in upstate New York on a journey from Fort Edward to Fort William Henry, which are real places you can go visit them today, I think, and about 15 miles apart from each other. Who's on this expedition? What's going on in the tale from Last of the Mohicans?
- [04:35]
Bradley J. Berzer
Well, so, yeah, the background is that there are two young women, Alice and Cora Monroe is their last name. And they're visiting because their father is in charge of Fort William Henry, Colonel Monroe. And we get to know him quite a bit in the story. He's an interesting character, but they've come to America to visit him. Now, why they came in the middle of a war, it's never really answered. It makes for a great narrative, but. So we're introduced to a Southerner, very interesting, a guy by the name of Major Hayward. Good guy. Very good guy, solid character. But he's a Southerner. And Cooper has a problem with that. That's actually a huge part of the story. But the narrative is ultimately that Heyward is leading Cora and Alice to their father, but they also encounter all the. They encounter this evangelical by the Name of David, who is also just a fascinating character. He's kind of a God's fool and he's annoying and he's wonderful, all at the same time as a character. They are being led by an Indian named Magua, who turns out to be a very bad guy. And so they're being led into an ambush. And that's when we encounter then, our three great heroes of the story. Natty Bumppo, Shinga Shook and Uncas. But I have to say this, John, this is, as my grad school advisor, Dave Edmonds. Great, fantastic guy, hilarious, one of the funniest men I've ever met. But he used to always say, what really is Last of the Mohicans? It's the Terminator of the Woods. Right? That's really what it should be called.
- [06:24]
John J. Miller
And that captures the kind of excitement of this story. Right. There are fight scenes, battle scenes, ambushes, hideouts, all kinds of adventures in this book.
- [06:34]
Bradley J. Berzer
So many that at times it becomes really complicated to know where you are. You start thinking, well, am I in this battle scene or am I in this battle scene? What just happened? There's even one of my favorite moments in the novel. There's a moment where David, as this evangelical who's forsaken violence and so forth, but he's inspired by his namesake. He's inspired by King David. And so he has a slingshot. And it turns out that as a kid, he had practiced all the time with this slingshot. Well, at the end of the novel, in the second to last chapter, he kills a man, he kills an Indian with the slingshot. But it all happens within about two sentences. And I had to reread those two sentences at least three or four times to make sure I got it right. It's like, oh, yeah, David really did kill somebody. But it happens so quickly. Whereas other scenes of violence, you know, the tomahawk takes forever to move from the side of the person into the head of the opponent. And Cooper's just not consistent when it comes to fight scenes.
- [07:41]
John J. Miller
So there's an uneven quality to this scene.
- [07:44]
Bradley J. Berzer
It really is.
- [07:45]
John J. Miller
Let's turn to maybe the major character of the book called Natty Bumppo, whose name sounds like a cartoon character. He has a better nickname, which is Hawkeye. That sounds like a Marvel superhero or something. But who is Natty Bumppo?
- [08:02]
Bradley J. Berzer
Yeah, to me, John, he's the first truly American character in literature. And there are others who've argued that this is not just my argument. There was a famous book that came out in 1950 by Henry Nash Smith called Virgin Soil, in which he talks about basically the Natty Bumppo character. In all of American literature, we know that people like Mark Twain didn't like Natty Bumppo. I personally and I love Twain, John, don't get me wrong. But I personally think that Twain really wanted Huck Finn to be the first great American character. And I think he was beaten by a generation or two. He was beaten by Natty Bumppo. But Natty Bumppo is. He's known as the scout. He is the long rifle. He's known as Leather stocking. He's known as Hawkeye. There are all these different names that have been given to him because he is considered the most powerful figure on the frontier. And everybody either loves and adores or hates him and wants him dead because he is this nexus. And that's how I would really describe him. He is of English character. We know that his parents were indentured servants and they were killed right after arriving in America. Natty is then raised by the Mohicans. He's raised by the Delaware Indians. The Mohicans are a subset of the Delaware Indians. They are Christianized with. Without being Christian, if that makes sense. That is, they've been partially evangelized, but they haven't completely taken to Christianity. And so Natty to me is this great figure because, number one, he's English. Number two, he's raised by the Indians, and number three, he's somewhat Christian, but not entirely Christian. And so that gives him a certain aura. Now, interestingly enough, and I don't know how deep you want to get into this, John, but James Fenimore Cooper actually became much more religious himself as he got older. Very, very devoutly religious, as he became an older man, a member of the Episcopal Church, the Church of England, Again, just very devout. And so there are five Natty Bumppo stories.
- [10:26]
John J. Miller
And these are commonly called the Leather Stocking Tales. The Leather Stocking Tales. And this is not the first among them. This is the second. So number two, very briefly, what are the leather stocking tails and what is Natty Bumppo's journey through them?
- [10:39]
Bradley J. Berzer
Yeah, so there are five Leather Stocking tales. The first is called the Pioneers, and Natty's about 80 in that, which is why he also can't die in the Last of the Mohicans, because he really would have become a better character had he died in last. I mean, that would be my argument, that as a Western hero, he should have sacrificed himself for the party. But he can't die because there's already a novel about him as an 80 year old. But what's interesting, those are the first two novels, the Pioneers and then Last of the Mohicans. But then Cooper becomes really religious and he writes of Natty as a younger man in the other stories. Not always, because he also has a novel called the Prairie, where Natty is 90 and he's often the Dakotas, still very hale and very, very healthy at 90, but he's off in the Dakotas. But especially in the stories that deal with him as a younger man, he's much more evangelical and much more Christian. So that's just kind of a trick of the way the books were ordered, that Natty is really kind of quasi pagan in Last of the Mohicans, but is less so in these other novels.
- [11:51]
John J. Miller
And you can read the Last of the Mohicans on its own, right? You don't need to read the series.
- [11:55]
Bradley J. Berzer
Absolutely. There's no reason you'd have to read the other novels.
- [11:59]
John J. Miller
All right, let's talk about the Mohicans. Now, you mentioned these are Delaware Indians, and a couple of them are major characters in this book. Who are they? How do they connect with Natty Bumppo in the story?
- [12:10]
Bradley J. Berzer
So the story is that the Mohicans were a warrior tribe within the Delaware. And the Delaware always have this very high reputation among all American Indians. And this is not just Cooper making this up. This was true. The Delaware were always called the grandfathers of the American Indians. And so even their enemies respected the Delaware as the grandfathers of the Indians. And, you know, as historians, we don't know exactly why they were given this title, but it seems most likely that when there were really high cultured Indians in America in places like Cahokia, Illinois, where they had a town, what's now where they had a town of roughly 80,000 people around the year 1200, that probably the Delaware were the leaders of those people. And so it's probably a long oral memory that they would be remembered as the grandfathers of the Indians. Now that's a guess on the part of historians. We don't know that for certain, but that's where the Mohicans come from. And the background of the story to the Last of the Mohicans. And. And this, you do kind of have to know the other novels. The reason there are only two Mohicans left is because of a trick. The Delaware and the Mohicans had been the enemy of another tribe for ages, and they had always been equals with one another. The Delawares taking on this other tribe, the other tribe taking on The Delawares. It had always been essentially a kind of tit for tat. And at. At one point, the other tribe negotiates with the Mohicans and says to them, look, we both can agree that we're all warriors, but you are the better medicine men because you are the grandfathers of the tribe. And therefore, we make a proposal, and that is that we unite our tribes and we will stay the warriors and you will become the keepers of history and tradition. And so they do this. The Mohicans go along with this, and it's a. And it's the long game. And they go about 20 years until all of the Mohican warriors are either dead or decrepit. And then this other tribe attacks them and decimates them. So that's why we're left with only Shingak Shook and Uncas at the end of this.
- [14:35]
John J. Miller
Who are the last of the Mohicans. Right? Truly, these are our title characters.
- [14:40]
Bradley J. Berzer
Yeah, absolutely. And that's shown in the very last speech, of course, of the story. It's a huge part of the story that Shingak Shook as an older man, and he's not that old, in the Last of the Mohicans, he'd be about 40, 45. But he becomes the last because Uncas, his son, who should have been the next king of the Delaware, he should have been the next chief, is killed trying to save Korah.
- [15:08]
John J. Miller
So there's so much going on in the story. We don't need to get into every single plot point here because it'll become wildly complex if we even try. But we have an interesting situation where we have this cross cultural group in the American wilderness, in the middle of a war. What is Cooper telling us about America with this collection of people in this situation?
- [15:34]
Bradley J. Berzer
He's telling us everything. Actually, John and I think that this is a feature that scholars have not expressed, explored enough. It's funny as much as in our present day, here in 2024, as we're recording this, as much as people care about DEI and they care about diversity and political correctness and being woke, they miss something critical about the Republican. And I use small R Republican literature of the time. And we find out in the story, and at first, when we're introduced to the two daughters, the Monroe girls, we're introduced to Cora, who's older, and Alice. And we're always told that Cora is dark complected. We're told that she has raven like hair. Every time we encounter her, we get this description of her being dark in some way, but brilliant. She's absolutely brilliant. She's an incredible character. But then you have Alice, and Alice is not quite as strong. She's blonde, she's equally beautiful. But they don't look alike at all as sisters. And we find out in the middle of the story, but it's not until we get to the very middle of the story that Corah's mother was different from Alice's mother, and that Colonel Monro, when he had been in the West Indies, had had married a woman of African descent. And so Cora would have been something like an eighth black at the time. And, John, as we both know, if you're even partially black in the early 19th century or the late 18th century, you are considered black. So it's amazing that in the middle of this story, we discover that our heroine is actually a black woman. And that's incredible. And we find that even later, when she's being sacrificed, and there's the big Indian council, the huge famous scene at the Last of the Mohicans, the great chief Tameimand even says to her, because of the color of your skin, you will always be treated less than a dog in the wigwams of the white people. And she becomes the great heroine of the story. And I always find this. And when I teach this to my students, I always tell them, look, if this were really a great Western story that is a story in the Western tradition, Natty would die at the end of it. But it's Cora who dies at the end of it. And that did not go over well in America when this novel first came out. The idea that the heroine was a black woman offended many, many Americans. Cooper was hugely popular in Europe, unbelievably popular in Europe. I can't remember the exact numbers, John. I don't have them in front of me. But it was something like in the country of France, there were 17 different publishers publishing the Last of the Mohicans in what would become the German states. There were 30. It was published in Arabic, it was published in Farsi, all of these languages throughout North Africa and the Middle east and Europe. The book was absolutely huge. And so it took on an international character in a way that Cooper didn't have with his American audience. But, yes to your question, in this diversity, you've got Alice, who's the white English woman. You've got Cora, who would be considered black by the standards of her day. You have Hayward, who's a Southerner and would have grown up as a gentleman, meaning he would have owned slaves. But then you have Natty, Who's a poor person, a poor Englishman, but raised by Indians. And then you have the Indians. So it's, you know, by any standard, it's an incredibly diverse cast of characters.
- [19:39]
John J. Miller
So James Fenimore Cooper sounds like at least a small L liberal on questions of race and ethnicity. Is that accurate? And how does he treat the Indians specifically? What is his American view of these people?
- [19:54]
Bradley J. Berzer
Right. He's not as liberal. And yeah, I'll accept that word, John. I would call it Republican. And the reason I call it Republican is because you also have a great play from 100 years earlier called, Called Cato, a tragedy in which the hero of that story is also an African, a guy by the name of Juba, who kind of saves what's left of the Roman Republic after Cato commits suicide. And that was George Washington's favorite play. So my argument would be, and I'm speaking here just as Brad, but my argument would be that there's something in Republican literature that leans towards racial equality and tries to find, like we say in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal. But to use the word liberal is fine for that as well. I'm amazed at Cooper with the Indians because he's really Manichean. Some of the Indians he treats with the utmost respect and other Indians are barely above the level of animals. And so there are, even to my non politically correct ears, there are, I think, sometimes where I even got a little offended by, wait, come on. The Indian can't be quite that bad. But the way Cooper draws them out at times, they're either really good or they're really bad.
- [21:21]
John J. Miller
You mentioned this book's place in Western civilization. And, and when I heard that, I thought the West, I thought the American west almost. And this is a frontier novel. This was a kind of Western.
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Bradley J. Berzer
Oh, absolutely. Time.
- [21:35]
John J. Miller
Right. I mean, this is before cowboys and Indians and all those cliches and stereotypes. But this is, this is a frontier novel. And Cooper describes the vanishing of the frontier and nature and so forth. That's an important element of this book as well.
- [21:48]
Bradley J. Berzer
Oh, yeah. And Cooper was, you know, in the best, best sense, he was an environmentalist. And his daughter Susan Cooper was very famous as an environmentalist trying to protect what was left of the frontier. And there is an irony in this. We don't have mass migration into America really, until the 1840s, 1830s and the 1840s. But many people have credited Cooper's last to the Mohicans withdrawing so many Europeans to America. Now, we could never prove that statistically of Course, because no one was giving out forms saying what inspired you to come to America. But it does seem to be the case that a lot of Europeans read this, romanticized what was going on and then came to America. And so the irony is at one level, Cooper is doing his best to protect the frontier. At another level, his book is instigating the demolition of the frontier as well.
- [22:47]
John J. Miller
So what is his vision of America? And I mean this in two senses. First, the vision that he presents in the Last of the Mohicans. What does he imagine as an early American? Smaller Republican? What does he imagine for the future of his own country? But also, Brad, you're the editor of a volume of his non fiction writings called the American Democrat and Other Political Writings. This guy was not just a writer of fiction, not just a novelist. He wrote a lot of stuff. What did, what did James Fenimore Cooper think of America of his time and what did he project for it? What do you think about its future in this novel and elsewhere?
- [23:20]
Bradley J. Berzer
His he's very optimistic about America. There are things he doesn't like. He does not like the radical equality of democracy. And he's not really a Democrat in that sense. He is an old style Republican and he believes that there should be a more liberty than there should be equality. So he's a conservative and he even he uses that term. He says in America the true democrat is a conservative. And he's actually one of the first to use conservative in the way that we would use it today. And that term started catching on right around Cooper's lifetime and became big both in Britain and in America, and then finally gained real current currency around the 1890s, but was being used as early as the 1830s. Cooper served as a diplomat for America in Europe. He was an ambassador for a while. So he was actually representing the American people for almost 14 years when he was living abroad in Europe. And he was very famous when he was living abroad in Europe. But as you mentioned, John, he did write three books. One, the most famous is called, called the American Democrat. And many people, including H.L. mencken, have equated that book with de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. I would never go that far. Democracy in America is a much superior book to what Cooper was doing in the American Democrat. But they do have very similar themes as they're trying to figure out the American character. There's also a book he called called A Letter to My Countrymen. And then he's got one called Notions of an American. These were the three political Books he wrote, all of them really deal with extending the founding and the ideas of the founding, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. He's very much rooted in the founding tradition, in the very small r Republican tradition and promoting that into the 19th century. He wants to carry that on. So he is an opponent of radical democracy. And in places like New York, where he's from, he really objected to the laws that were called anti rent laws that were being used to take down people's personal property when they died and they were giving their property to their children. New York was passing laws that basically said you could not pass on all of your property to your children. It had to be divided. And Cooper thought that was too much. In fact, he thought not only did he think it was too much, he was so vocal about this that there was at one point a mob that showed up at his house to protest him. So this is he. He really did have strong convictions about this.
- [26:15]
John J. Miller
The Last of the Mohicans has been so popular over time, as you mentioned, it's been made the movies many times.
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Bradley J. Berzer
Right.
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John J. Miller
There's one movie though that really stands out as a great film of the Last of the Mohicans, 1992, starring Daniel Day Lewis. Brad, have you seen it? What do you think of it?
- [26:33]
Bradley J. Berzer
Have I seen it? I have seen it so many times. I have it basically memorized. I first saw it with my older brother in Boise, Idaho. We were going on a. We had gone on a. This is back when I was much younger. We used to go on two to three week camping trips and I was visiting my brother after one of these camping trips and we saw Last of the Mohicans. I love Michael Mann as a director. I think he's a great, great director. He's done a number of really fine films. Heat, for example, I think is one of the best cop criminal movies ever made. But the Last of the Mohicans from the early 90s was clearly the studio's response to the success of Dances With Wolves. And yet the movie itself deviates somewhat from the novel. It leaves out the evangelical character of David completely. There's no mention that Cora would be an African American, nothing like that. And rather than having Uncas fall in love with Korah, the movie has natty fall in love with corporations. And it works. It works really well. It's central to the story. And Russell Means, who was one of the most important anti FBI American Indian movement activists of the late 60s, early 70s who ran for the presidency on the Libertarian ticket at one point. Russell Means plays Shin Gok Shook. And of course, you've got Daniel Day Lewis, the son of C. Cecil Day Lewis, who had defeated C.S. lewis for the Chair of Poetry at Oxford. You've just got all of these amazing actors and characters coming in. And I think the screenwriters did a brilliant job, and they make it much more of a pro American, anti British story than what the original novel was. The original novel still questioned the wisdom of the Empire, but it didn't attack it in the way that the movie does.
- [28:36]
John J. Miller
We often say that the book is better than the movie. It's almost a rote statement you'll make with so many even good movies.
- [28:43]
Bradley J. Berzer
Right.
- [28:44]
John J. Miller
Is this a case where the movie's better than the book?
- [28:46]
Bradley J. Berzer
This is a case where the movie is better than the book. And what a weird thing to say, and I feel even a little guilty saying it, but I love the soundtrack, I love the acting. To me, it's a movie without a flaw. And for me personally, it would be in my top five best movies.
- [29:03]
John J. Miller
So we're turning this into the Great Movies podcast, apparently. Brad, how did you discover the novel the Last of the Mohicans? How did you come to know it as a reader?
- [29:11]
Bradley J. Berzer
So I took a course when I was at Notre Dame for undergraduate on the literature of the American west, and we read Willa Cather, and we read a number of things. We did not, interestingly enough, read Last of the Mohicans. I did not come to Last of the Mohicans until I saw the movie. And I was so taken with the movie, I picked up the book. My wife loves it as well, and we ended up naming our first child Nathaniel after Natty Bumpo. So this is some deep berser lore for you.
- [29:43]
John J. Miller
Now you're a history professor here at Hillsdale College.
- [29:46]
Bradley J. Berzer
Do you.
- [29:46]
John J. Miller
Do you assign the Last of the Mohicans to students to read and. And why and what do they make of it?
- [29:52]
Bradley J. Berzer
I do assign it. I actually assign it in a couple of different classes. So right now, this semester, I'm teaching Jacksonian America, which is essentially America from the War of 1812 to the Mexican War, so roughly Jefferson's and Madison's administration up to 1848. And I teach even though the Last of the Mohicans takes place before that, it's written in that time period. And I consider James Fenimore Cooper one of the most important figures of his era. He's truly a great Jacksonian man and a great literary figure, along with Edgar Allan Poe and then along with Washington Irving and soon Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller and others at the time, all of whom are contributing to this literary culture that's going on in early America. But I always tell my students, and this is always true, they will absolutely hate the first 50 pages of last of the Mohicans. But once they've gotten used to Cooper's really weird style, then they'll love it and they'll read it and they'll be excited by it all the way through the novel. And my prediction has always borne itself out. That is, that's exactly how the studio students respond. They struggle through those first 50 pages, and then they end up really embracing it. And it's funny, John. This year I showed a clip, and I don't do this much in classes. I showed a clip from the 1992 movie Last of the Mohicans. And my students were actually upset that David wasn't in the story, and they didn't really like that Natty had fallen in love with Cora. They actually liked the original story of Uncus and Cora being an item rather than what the movie did. So I was surprised by that because generally, if I show a clip from the movie, everybody loves the movie. But this year, that wasn't quite the case.
- [31:55]
John J. Miller
The bicentennial of the Last of the Mohicans is almost upon us, published in 1826. Last question, Brad. What's the case for reading this book now, almost 200 years later?
- [32:08]
Bradley J. Berzer
Well, there's certainly the historical case to be made, that it is the first great American novel. Even if. No, even if you're a Twain fan, you have to go back and give credit to the Last of the Mohicans. And it is the best of the five leather stocking tales. So I think that any American, especially as we approach this bicentennial, I think that. That any American would be proud to go back and see what our literary heritage is. And I'd be surprised if they don't recognize Natty Bumppo in a lot of John Wayne movies if they don't recognize him as a standard character in basically every Western that's ever been made. I think he really is that great figure, and I think he's the first great American literary figure.
- [32:59]
John J. Miller
Brad Berger, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about the Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper.
- [33:05]
Bradley J. Berzer
Absolutely. My pleasure, John. Always love talking with you.
- [33:08]
John J. Miller
You've just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books podcast and leave reviews of the show. That helps us keep this podcast going. Send me your ideas for future episodes. You can reach me through my website@hey, miller.com on Twitter, my handle is at hey, Miller. Last of all, special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week, the new episode of the Great Books podcast.