Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read online

  Table of Contents

  FROM THE PAGES OF THE DEERSLAYER

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

  THE WORLD OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER AND THE DEERSLAYER

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  PREFACE TO THE LEATHERSTOCKING TALES [1850]

  PREFACE TO THE DEERSLAYER [1850]

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  CHAPTER XXIX

  CHAPTER XXX

  CHAPTER XXXI

  CHAPTER XXXII

  ENDNOTES

  APPENDIX - Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses

  COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

  FOR FURTHER READING

  TIMELESS WORKS. NEW SCHOLARSHIP. EXTRAORDINARY VALUE.

  FROM THE PAGES OF THE DEERSLAYER

  On all sides, wherever the eye turned, nothing met it but the mirrorlike surface of the lake, the placid view of heaven, and the dense setting of woods. So rich and fleecy were the outlines of the forest, that scarce an opening could be seen, the whole visible earth, from the rounded mountaintop to the water’s edge, presenting one unvaried hue of unbroken verdure.

  (page 29)

  “They call me Deerslayer, I’ll own; and perhaps I desarve the name, in the way of understanding the creatur’s habits, as well as for sartainty in the aim; but they can’t accuse me of killing an animal when there is no occasion for the meat or the skin. I may be a slayer, it’s true, but I’m no slaughterer.”

  (page 49)

  Deerslayer—or Hawkeye, as the youth was then first named, for in after years he bore the appellation throughout all that region—Deerslayer took the hand of the savage, whose last breath was drawn in that attitude, gazing in admiration at the countenance of a stranger, who had shown so much readiness, skill, and firmness.

  (page 112)

  “Natur’ will have its way”

  (page 149)

  In a bark canoe, they were totally without cover, and Indian discretion was entirely opposed to such a sacrifice of life as would most probably follow any attempt to assault an enemy, entrenched as effectually as the Delaware. Instead of following the ark, therefore, these three warriors inclined towards the eastern shore, keeping at a safe distance from the rifles of Chingachgook.

  (page 3 3 0)

  “Ought the young to wive with the old—the paleface with the redskin—the Christian with the heathen? It’s ag‘in reason and natur’.”

  (page 464)

  James Fenimore Cooper

  BARNES & NOBLE CLASSICS

  NEW YORK

  Published by Barnes & Noble Books

  122 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10011

  www.barnesandnoble.com/classics

  The Deerslayer was first published in 1841.

  Published in 2005 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction, Notes,

  Biography Chronology, Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading.

  Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

  Copyright © 2005 by Bruce L. R. Smith.

  Note on James Fenimore Cooper, The World of James Fenimore Cooper and

  The Deerslayer, Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading

  Copyright © 2005 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

  Portrait of James Fenimore Cooper provided courtesy of

  the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced )r transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, ,including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Barnes & Noble Classics and the Barnes & Noble Classics

  colophon are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

  The Deerslayer

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-211-6

  ISBN-10: 1-59308-211-8

  eISBN : 97-8-141-14336-0

  LC Control Number 2005920752

  Produced and published in conjunction with:

  Fine Creative Media, Inc.

  322 Eighth Avenue

  New York, NY 10001

  Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

  Printed in the United States of America

  QM

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

  James Fenimore Cooper was born September 15, 1789, in Burlington, New Jersey, to William Cooper and Elizabeth Fenimore Cooper. In 1790 the family moved to the frontier country of upstate New York, where William had established a village he called Cooperstown. Although cushioned by wealth and William’s position as a judge, the Coopers found pioneer life to be rugged, and only seven of the thirteen Cooper children survived their early years. Profoundly affected by the challenges of frontier living, James would repeatedly draw on his childhood experience in The Pioneers and many of his other novels.

  Cooper was educated by private tutors and at Yale, where he enrolled in 1803; he was expelled in 1805 after setting off an explosion that blew off another student’s dormitory door. As a midshipman in the U.S. Navy, he served at an isolated post on Lake Ontario and in a relatively leisurely assignment in New York City, where he met his future wife, Susan Augusta De Lancey, daughter of a wealthy family. In 1811 he resigned his commission to marry her.

  According to family lore, Cooper fell into writing on a dare: One evening he threw down a novel in disgust, saying he could write a better book himself; when Susan challenged him and reminded him that he could barely stand to write a letter, Cooper wrote his first novel, Precaution, published in 1820. Encouraged by favorable reviews, Cooper wrote other books in quick succession and was soon regarded as a major voice in America’s emerging literary tradition. He eventually published thirty-two novels and was the first American to make a living as a professional novelist. Natty Bumppo, who appears in The Deerslayer and the four other Leatherstocking Tales that Cooper published between 1823 and 1841, became one of America’s favorite fictional heroes. Cooper and his family lived in Europe for seven years but returned to America in 1833. Eventually settling in Cooperstown, Cooper remained on the American literary scene as a prolific writer of political tracts, naval histories, and works of fiction. He died in Cooperstown on September 14, 1851.

  THE WORLD OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER AND THE DEERSLAYER

  1789 The twelfth of thirteen children, James Cooper is born on September 15 to Judge William Cooper and Elizabeth Fenimore Cooper in Burlington, New Jersey. George Washington is inaugurated president of the United States.

  1790 The Coopers move to the frontier country of upstate New York, where William had founded Cooperstown a few years earlier. In his novels, James will repeatedly draw on his early frontier experiences.

  1803 James Fenimore Cooper enters Yale.

  1805 Cooper is expelled from Yale for blowing off a fellow student’s door with gunpowder.

  1806 Coo
per works as a sailor on the Stirling, a merchant vessel. His travels take him to Spain and England.

  1808 Cooper joins the Navy, making Atlantic passages and serving at an isolated post on Lake Ontario.

  1811 Cooper marries Susan Augusta De Lancey, the daughter of a wealthy family in Westchester County, New York. The couple, plagued by financial troubles for the next several years, moves to various towns in New York State before buying a country home near Scarsdale, where they settle with their seven children.

  1812 The United States declares war on Great Britain.

  1814 British troops set fire to Washington, D.C. Francis Scott Key writes “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  1819 Washington Irving’s tale “Rip Van Winkle” appears.

  1820 After accepting a challenge from his wife to write a book, Cooper pens Precaution, a novel of manners. The Missouri Compromise draws the line between free states and slave states.

  1821 The Spy, a historical romance set during the American Revolution, is published, establishing Cooper as a major literary figure.

  1823 Cooper publishes The Pioneers, the first of the five Leatherstocking Tales, which are set in the 1700s, both before and after the American Revolution, and tell the life of hunter, trapper, and scout Natty Bumppo, known as Leatherstocking. The books follow Natty through various periods of his life, but not in chronological order.

  1826 The Last of the Mohicans, the second Leatherstocking Tale, is published ; Natty aligns himself with Uncas, the Indian of the title, and works as a scout in the British army. The Cooper family moves to Europe, and resides in Paris, Switzerland, Belgium, and England for the next seven years.

  1827 The Prairie, the third novel in the Leatherstocking series, is published ; Natty Bumppo dies among the Indians west of the Mississippi, where he has been driven by the advancing line of pioneers.

  1829 Cooper publishes Notions of the Americans, a reflection on his native land and one of six books he writes while living abroad.

  1833 Cooper returns to the United States.

  1834 Cooper writes A Letter to His Countrymen, in which he criticizes American provincialism and announces his retirement from writing fiction. He publishes Sketches of Switzerland, one of his many travel narratives.

  1837 In response to hostile treatment in the Whig press, Cooper instigates a series of libel suits, in which he remains entangled for years to come.

  1838 Feeling financial strain, Cooper resumes fiction writing with Home as Found and Homeward Bound, which combine adventure with reflections on American society. On the so-called Trail of Tears, thousands of Cherokee Indians die during their removal from ancestral lands in Georgia.

  1839 Cooper publishes The History of the Navy of the United States of America. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is published.

  1840 The Pathfinder, the fourth Leatherstocking book, appears; it takes place in 1760 during the French and Indian War.

  1841 Cooper publishes The Deerslayer, the last of the Leatherstocking Tales; it describes Natty Bumppo’s youth, when Natty and his friend live with the Delaware Indians and fight the Hurons.

  1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, written by Douglass, appears.

  1846 Cooper publishes Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers.

  1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is published.

  1851 James Fenimore Cooper dies in Cooperstown on September 14, 1851.

  INTRODUCTION

  James Fenimore Cooper’s literary reputation has undergone striking vicissitudes over the years. Hailed in his lifetime ( 1789-1851 ) as America’s first great novelist and lionized throughout the Western world, he fell into the literary doldrums at the end of the nineteenth century (in his own country at least) and languished there for many years. So complete was his fall that he became almost an object of ridicule among critics and literary commissioners. Later generations found it hard to imagine that he had once been an icon in the American literary canon. More recently, however, there has been a revival of interest in Cooper and a reconsideration of his literary reputation.

  His death in Cooperstown on September 14, 1851, and a memorial service held the next month in New York City brought tributes from Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Henry Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and other leading American men of letters. In Europe, Thackeray, Balzac, Goethe, Scott, Lafayette, Carlyle, Sand, and Sue were among the many admirers of Cooper’s writings. So were, later, Joseph Conrad, who paid tribute in particular to Cooper’s seafaring works, and D. H. Lawrence, who was so inspired by Cooper’s treatment of the frontier that he came to spend several years living in the American West. Cooper was probably even more popular in Europe than he was in his own country, and he earned much of the money he made as America’s first successful professional writer from overseas sales of his works.

  A controversialist, Cooper provoked unease from his countrymen as well as veneration. His popularity waned after his return to America in 1833 from a seven-year absence spent traveling in Europe ; upon his return, he criticized the materialism and crassness he saw in America that had changed for the worse. He was not afraid to join in political fights and to hit back at enemies—he became something of a public scold in his later years, and he emulated his father’s recourse to the courts to redress wrongs. He stirred the ire of Whig newspaper publishers who had always distrusted him and disliked, in particular, his novels Homeward Bound ( 1838 ) and Home as Found ( 1838 ) . He was variously assailed at different times for being too Jacksonian and hostile to authority, and for being too aristocratic and class conscious. It is doubtful, however, whether Cooper really felt comfortable with any political party, and his political ideas certainly did not add up to a coherent political philosophy. He was nominally a Jackson Democrat but had a strong distrust of populist sentiments and of demagogues who stirred up the uneducated masses. Although a charming and gregarious man in his youth, Cooper came to be almost a recluse in later years and at times displayed a gift for making enemies. Many of the attacks on Cooper, though, were libelous, for he won the suits he instituted.

  Cooper was wedded to his upstate New York region but was also a cosmopolitan who traveled widely; he was a romantic spinner of tales but also a realist who closely observed social mores, manners, and class status even in his novels set in the wilderness. Cooper was an optimist but one with a paranoid streak and a dark side. He lived mostly in the company of women but wrote mostly about men, male friendships, and heroes who broke free of or who never knew the bonds of domesticity. Cooper was as hard a man to understand for his contemporaries as he is for us now. Was he a reactionary or a man ahead of his times, an apologist for white America or a champion of Native Americans? Did he affirm the conquest of the wilderness or was he an early ecologist? As Robert Emmet Long comments, “Two centuries after his birth, he remains an American enigma” (James Fenimore Cooper, p. 13; see “For Further Reading”).

  Yet for all of the controversy his life stirred, Cooper’s literary reputation remained largely intact until the end of the nineteenth century. He was, indeed, a cultural icon in a broad sense. His fiction redefined the past for the country, invented the idea of the Western frontier, and gave Americans a mythic sense of themselves and their destiny. He was a patron of the visual arts. Cooper’s writings stimulated interest in American history and fostered the professional writing of history, even though his novels often subordinated historical reality to archetype and myth. His interest in the Navy was genuine and was grounded in firsthand experience, and he was familiar with many of the personages he wrote about in The History of the Navy of the United States of America ( 1839) , which was a classic study of its kind. Cooper’s friend George Bancroft, the distinguished Harvard historian, interpreted the American Revolution in terms similar to the story lines and subtexts of Cooper’s novels dealing with the revolution, and he patterned his style of narrative history writi
ng after Cooper’s narrative techniques. Moreover, Cooper did much to fashion and to expand the popular audience for his novels (and for the writers who followed him).1 His works were issued and reissued after his death.

  The decline in Cooper’s literary reputation in America can be dated, ironically, from one such reissue of Cooper’s works; for it gave rise to the satirical 1895 Mark Twain assault on Cooper as a stylist and novelist, which was published in the North American Review under the title “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (the Appendix to this edition reprints Twain’s essay). Fulsome tributes from Professor Thomas Lounsbury of Yale and Professor Brander Matthews of Columbia had accompanied the publication of the handsome new edition (the 1895-1896 Mohawk edition) of Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales. This was too much for Mark Twain, and apparently helped to precipitate his famous critical assault on Cooper. There were, said Twain, “some people who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they’re all dead now.” And further: “Now I feel deep down in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English in The Deerslayer is the very worst that even he ever wrote.”

  Twain cited, with brilliant invective, a catalogue of Cooper’s of fenses, which to Twain included such matters as inflated diction, grammatical errors, inconsistencies, ridiculous feats of marksmanship displayed by his characters, unnatural dialogue, and habitual violations of eighteen out of nineteen rules for effective fiction. Twain claimed to have found 13 0 solecisms and misuses of words in a random perusal of The Deerslayer, a total lack of plot that in the end “accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air,” and wooden characters who do not develop. Twain makes particular fun of the portrayal in chapter IV of The Deerslayer of six incompetent Indians. While trying to attack Deerslayer and his companions riding in a slow-moving ark, they misjudge the jump from the tree branch and end up in the water as the ark sails away The reader is invited to peruse Twain’s parody, which we include as an appendix to the present edition.