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Cooper's Eloquent Indians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John T. Frederick
John T. Frederick*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Ind.
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Extract

In the recurrent derogation of Cooper's Indian characters as unrealistic and idealized, their figurative language has been the chief specific ground of attack. In most cases, it has been the only concrete issue raised. Thus General Lewis Cass—whose condemnation inflicted lasting damage because of his eminence as Indian fighter and Indian agent—delivered his major broadside against Cooper incidentally, in the course of an article of almost fifty pages devoted to consideration of the current status (in 1828) of study of the Indian languages. After quoting from The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie some twenty figurative expressions, he declared: “This is not the manner in which Indians talk, nor is it the manner in which any people talk.” Further consideration of the language which Cooper had put into the mouths of his Indian characters brought Cass to his damning and often quoted conclusion: “His Uncas, and his Pawnee Hardheart … have no living prototype in our forests. They may wear leggins and moccasins, and be wrapped in a blanket or a buffalo skin, but they are civilized men, and not Indians.” Another critic who knew Indians at firsthand, William Josiah Snelling, in reviewing the autobiography of Chief Black Hawk in 1835, found the authenticity of the work “unquestionable” except for the figurative language employed in it—blame for which he proceeded to lay on Cooper. “The only drawback upon our credence is the intermixture of courtly phrases, and the figures of speech, which our novelists are so fond of putting into the mouths of Indians. … The term pale faces, often applied to the whites in this book, was, we think, never in the mouth of any American savage, excepting in the fanciful pages of Mr. Cooper. There are many more phrases and epithets of the like nature, and we only mention them, because we think it time that authors should cease to make Indians talk sentiment.” Even more formidable authority was ranged against the authenticity of Cooper's Indian characters, and on the same grounds, by Francis Parkman's dictum in his survey of Cooper's work shortly after the novelist's death: “his Indian characters … it must be granted, are for the most part either superficially or falsely drawn.” The only concrete reason given by Parkman for this condemnation was that “the long conversations which he puts into their mouths, are as truthless as they are tiresome. Such as they are, however, they have been eagerly copied by a legion of the smaller poets and novel writers; so that, jointly with Thomas Campbell, Cooper is responsible For the fathering of those aboriginal heroes, lovers and sages, who have long formed a petty nuisance in our literature.“ Some ninety years later, John T. Flanagan emphasized the attacks of Cass and Snelling on the figurative language of Cooper's Indians, with special reference to The Prairie, adding as his own conclusion: ”Admitting … literary convention … one can yet reject as unnatural the tropes of the Indians.“ James Grossman, who in his James Fenimore Cooper (1949) accepts in general the view that Cooper's Indians are idealized, observes of two major characters in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, the chief Conanchet and the Puritan Heathcote: ”Unfortunately the two derive their speech, if in different degree and with different authenticity, from the same model, the King James Bible“ (pp. 69–70). It remained for a European scholar to report ”the discovery … that the language of Cooper's Indians was modelled … on the style of Ossian.“ He concludes that Cooper's Indians ”are idealized; they are related to Scott's clan chieftains, Byron's pirates, and Ossian's Celtic heroes; all these figures are but phases of the same romantic movement. Cooper saw his Indians in the light of romantic idealism. … Cooper's Indian rhetoric is a poetic creation and not the speech of living men.“

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 71 , Issue 5 , December 1956 , pp. 1004 - 1017
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956

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References

1 “Structure of the Indian Languages,” No. Amer. Rev., xxvi (April 1828), 374, 376.

2 “Life of Black Hawk,” No. Amer. Rev., xl (Jan. 1835), 69–70.

3 “The Works of James Fenimore Cooper,” No. Amer. Rev., lxxiv (Jan. 1852), 150.

4 “The Authenticity of Cooper's The Prairie,” MLQ, ii (Mar. 1941), 104.

5 Georg Friden, James Fenimore Cooper and Ossian, Essays and Studies on Amer. Lang, and Lit., Amer. Inst, of the Univ. of Uppsala, viii (Uppsala and Cambridge, Mass., 1949), p. 55. Friden follows S. B. Liljegren in an earlier volume in the same series, The Revolt Against Romanticism as Evidenced in the Works of S. L. Clemens (Uppsala, 1945), p. 60: “That the language of Cooper's Indians was a poetic creation and not the real thing, was pointed out at once by the critics of The Last of the Mohicans. Some of the critics were very harsh with the author, but none seems to have found out his source, viz. Ossian.”

6 (Philadelphia, 1865), p. 129. An earlier ed. of the same work carries the title, Pages and Pictures, from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, with Notes by Susan Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1861). The Rev. John Heckewelder's History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations had appeared as a part of the Transactions of the Amer. Philos. Soc. (Philadelphia, 1818), and in a separate ed. (Philadelphia, 1819). The Journal of a Voyage to North America of Rev. P. F. X. de Charlevoix was pub. in London in 1761, again in 1763 under the title Letters to the Dutchess [sic] of Lesdiguieres, and again in Dublin in 2 vols., under the first-named title, in 1766. Of the Select Works of William Penn, a compilation first pub. in London in 1771, a new ed. (in 3 vols.) appeared in London in 1825. New eds. of Captain John Smith's True Travells and of his Generall History of Virginia, New England, etc., were printed at Richmond, Va., in 1819. The most accessible “Elliott” for Cooper's use would have been John Eliot, A Grammar of the Massachusetts Indian Language (Boston, 1822), a new ed. with notes by Peter S. Du Ponceau and John Pickering. He may, however, have obtained one or more of the 17th-century tracts of Eliot and his associates. Cadwallader Colden's History of the Five Indian Nations (New York, 1727; London, 1747, 1750, 1755) was a major source for almost all subsequent books about Indians. Henry Nash Smith, in his introd. to The Prairie, Rinehart ed. (New York, 1950), and E. Soteris Muszunska-Wallace in “The Sources of The Prairie,” AL, xxi, 191–200, have shown that Cooper certainly used in writing that novel the work of Edwin James, comp. Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains … Under the Command of Stephen H. Long, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1823). The “Lang” of Susan's reminiscences may therefore safely be identified as this work. The History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clarke, ed. Nicholas Biddle but with the name of Paul Allen on the title page, had appeared in Philadelphia in 1814. Of Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages from Montreal, etc., first pub. in London in 1801,4 eds. had appeared[in the U. S.: 2 in 1802,1 in 1803, and 1 in 1814.

7 N. F. Adkins, “The Bread and Cheese Club,” MLN, xxvii (Feb. 1932), 74.

8 Fifth ed. (Providence, R. I., 1936), pp. 132 et passim.

9 Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc, 3rd Ser., iv (Cambridge, 1834), 44.

10 Louise Phelps Kellogg ed. (Chicago, 1923), i, 286; ii, 76.

11 (New York, 1922), Introd., i, xxxvi, liiv.

12 Mark Van Doren ed. (New York, 1928), p. 406.

13 Rev. William C. Reichel ed., Hist. Soc. Penn. (Philadelphia, 1876), p. 137.

14 Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories, ed. Milo M. Quaife (Chicago, 1921), p. 76.

15 The Last of the Mohicans, Introd., p. vi. This and all subsequent references to Cooper's novels are to the ed. called Cooper's Novels, Illustrated by Darley, 32 vols. (New York: W. A. Townsend & Co., 1859–61).

16 Lewis and Clark (New York, 1922), ii, 121.

17 “Indians of North America,” No. Amer. Rev., xxii (Jan. 1826), 99 n.

18 Mohicans, p. 389; James Buchanan, Sketches of the History, Manners, and Customs, of the North American Indians (New York, 1824), i, 61; Deerslayer, p. 247; Colden, i, 167.

19 Colden, ii, 107; Mohicans, p. 379; Oak Openings, p. 427.

20 Colden, i, 70, 219, 131, 136, 49, 63, 221.

21 Wept, p. 374; Mohicans, p. 313; Wept, p. 367; John Long's Voyages and Travels, ed. Milo M. Quaife (Chicago, 1922), p. 140.

22 Heckewelder, p. 139; John Long, p. 222; Colden, ii, 70; Prairie, p. 456; Chainbearer, p. 95.

23 Eliot, p. 47; Edward Winslow, Good Newesfrom New England (London, 1624), quoted in G. F. Willison, The Pilgrim Reader (Garden City, 1953), p. 206; Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Travels in ike Central Portion of the Mississippi Valley (New York, 1825), p. 365; Wept, p. 290; Oak Openings, pp. 168, 457.

24 Narrative of an Expedition to the Source of St. Peter's River … Stephen E. Long, comp. by William H. Keating (Philadelphia, 1824), ii, 169.

25 Colden, ii, 85; Heckewelder, p. 66.

26 “Indians of North America,” p. 93.

27 Colden, ii, 107,106; Mackenzie, Voyages from Montreal, ed. Charles W. Colby (Toronto, 1927), p. 128.

28 John Long, p. 128; Charlevoix, i, 345.

29 “Indians of North America,” p. 90, n.

30 Heckewelder, p. 192; John Long, p. 83; Colden i, 130.

31 Colden, ii, 211.

32 Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, The Indian Tribes of North Ametica, ed. Frederick Webb Hodge (Edinburgh, 1933), i, 165, 233. The 1st ed. of this work was published at Philadelphia, 1837–44.

33 Pages 460, 359, 367, 372, 374, 361, 262.

34 Pages 347, 138, 189.