progress that inevitability pushes the frontier westward.
Cooper can envelop this situation convincingly because it is history extending into his own.
lifetime: during the 1820's and 1830's the United States policy of Removal was continually shifting.
the Indians to areas west of the Mississippi River. As a son of an eighteenth-century rationalism.
Cooper believed that everything had its "place", a belief that stratified society and even.
government. It was this conviction that led him through his spokesman Hawkeye to insist upon the.
rightness of Indian "gifts" and white "gifts" and upon the inelegance even after the death of a union.
between Uncas and Cora. At the same time Cooper was heir to the idea of progress which in.
America became "manifest destiny" to press civilization all the way to the Pacific Ocean. When the.
force of progress challenged the condition of "place", the following event too often gave at its.
foundations and the result was tragic turmoil that simply used and sometimes destroyed the tribes.
of "savage" Indians, that predetermined the fatality of love crossing the racial line.
The novel, never meant to be realistic in any strict sense, is of course filled out with an.
excess of other customs and motifs. Cooper's appreciation for primary nature is obvious in the.
choice of a vibrated phrasing and the descriptive accuracy of his scenes. When he goes into detail.
about tracking fugitives through forests, he is both recognizing and fulfilling the typical American.
interest in know-how. Features of the idealistic novel with its exceedingly emotional view of.
experience abound. For the story of The Last of the Mohicans, the episodic adventures are the.
appropriate fictional clothing, while the traditional emotional love represents the charming piping. .
The vibrant thematic life underneath all this, with an ultimately doomed Hawkeye at the center, is.
the condition of the frontier with its heroics, its bloodshed, and its tragedy.
