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Essay on James Fennimore Cooper
The creation of the famous Leather stocking saga has cemented his position as our first great national novelist and his influence pervades American literature. In his thirty-two years (1820-1851) of authorship, Cooper produced twenty-nine other long works of fiction and fifteen books - enough to fill forty-eight volumes in the new definitive edition of his Works. Among his achievements:
The idea that the American Indian was doomed to fade away wherever he came into contact with European settlers was certainly a well-established one in the early 19th Century. The principle reasons for this belief (aside from, in many circles, a good deal of wishful thinking) was that:
1) Indians seemed unwilling or unable to adapt successfully to the newly dominant European economic and social systems (not that those who did best at it, like some of the Cherokee, reaped much advantage from their success).
2) Where Indians persisted on the fringes of settler culture (which was, of course, where most people saw them) their social degradation seemed all too obvious, typified by their tendency towards alcoholism.
3) It was an observable fact (even without any appreciation of the effects of European disease vectors to which Indians were terribly susceptible) that the numbers of Indians in settler-populated areas seemed to diminish rapidly.
4) Persistent beliefs in White and/or European superiority, and economic and social interests that furthered such beliefs certainly played an equally important part in this.
Cooper estimated that, in 1828, there were only some 120,000 Indians within the then-limits of the United States, from Atlantic to Pacific. He endorsed a plan, which he stated had been detailed by a recent report of the Indian Office that Indians be encouraged to migrate west of the Mississippi, where they should be given in perpetuity a formal United States Territory, with the right to send delegates to Congress....
