Neither involves whites killing Indians. The first half climaxes with the account of the slaughter of defenseless white men, women, and children at Fort William Henry by the Indians allied with the French. At the end of the second half we hear “the shrieks and cries of hundreds of women and children” when Delaware Indians loyal to Uncas destroy “the whole community” of a neighboring Iroquois tribe in a failed attempt to rescue Cora. But perhaps the most chilling scene in the novel is the one that follows this battle: the depiction of these Delawares at the funeral ceremony they hold for Uncas and Cora. In a series of descriptions the narrator suggests that these Indians are already dead, more a cemetery than a living tribe: Their grief “seemed to have turned each dark and motionless figure to stone,” and “even the inanimate Uncas appeared a being of life, compared with the humbled and submissive throng by whom he was surrounded.” In the novel’s final paragraph, Tamenund, the aged patriarch of this people, explains what they are submitting to: the will of God, or as he puts it, “the anger of the Manitto.” “The pale-faces are masters of the earth,” he adds, and it is time for the Indians to “go.” The story Cooper tells about Uncas, then, opens with the epitaph that Chingachgook prematurely hangs on his son and ends with Tamenund’s valedictory consent to the disappearance of his race, putting a frame around the erasure of the Indians that keeps it entirely in the past, where the only responsibility white readers have is to shed a tear for a tragedy they had nothing to do with. Of course, in 1826 most of the worst crimes against the Native American population—President Jackson’s “Indian Removal” policy and the Trails of Tears, for example, or the western “Indian Wars” of the last third of the nineteenth century—were still to come. A “narrative of 1829,” as John McWilliams reminds us in his book-length study of Cooper’s novel, would include Jackson’s use of the myth Cooper created to justify the removal legislation that, in 1838, allowed his successor, Martin Van Buren, to use 7,000 federal soldiers to force 15,000 nonconsenting Cherokee to “go,” to leave the land guaranteed them by treaty and undertake the thousand-mile march across the Mississippi on which more than 4,000 of them died. Reading the novel and mourning the noble but providentially doomed “last Mohi can” allowed contemporary Americans to affirm their compassion while ignoring the real victims of their national policies. That is the self-serving fiction we must not read uncritically.

Having said that, however, it is equally crucial to note that the novel itself is not simply an endorsement of white American history. Mohicans is the second of Cooper’s so-called Leatherstocking Tales, the five novels that he published between 1823 and 1841 featuring Natty Bumppo (called Hawkeye most of the time in this novel, and also referred to as Leather stocking throughout the five novels). The novels were not written in chronological order: Natty is an old man in the first of them, The Pioneers, and is youngest in the fifth, The Deerslayer, which is set a dozen years before the events of Mohicans. And Natty’s role is not the same in all the novels: In the last two, Cooper tries to involve him more directly in the romance plot by depicting him as in love and beloved. But Natty remains profoundly single, a liminal figure whose relationship to both white and Indian cultures is saturated with ambivalence. For example, at the end of this novel every other surviving white character retreats “far into the settlements of the ‘pale-faces,‘ ” goes back from the wilderness to civilization and the rules of the society that the colonists are building in the new world. But Natty, who has lived most of his life among the Delaware, chooses to remain in the woods with Chingachgook. Yet as readers of the novel have many opportunities to note, Natty does not identify himself with the Indians either: His insistent (and, for many readers, annoying) refrain about being “a man without a cross” does not mean he isn’t a Christian, but rather that, as he puts it in his first scene in the novel, “I am genuine white”; that is, both of his parents were white. In his actions as a “warrior,” Natty most commonly serves the interests of the other white characters in the Tales, and reviewers and readers from the start have perceived him as the American equivalent of an epic hero. But in fact he repeatedly rejects the values and aspirations of white society. As a series focused on this alienated hero, the Leatherstocking Tales are written from a perspective both inside and outside official history, and simultaneously affirm and challenge the American quest to settle and civilize the continent.

Hawkeye and Chingachgook are already deep in a discussion about the morality of that project when we first meet them in chapter III. As Natty says there, “every story has its two sides,” and he listens open-mindedly while Chingachgook protests the destruction of his people at the hands of superior force. Two chapters later, Natty himself rebukes Duncan as a representative of the race that has “driven [the] tribes from the sea-shore.” Cooper inherited the theme of civilizing the wilderness not just from his American society but also from his father, Judge William Cooper, the founder of Cooperstown, who claimed to have been responsible for settling more acres of American forest than any other man of his time. Given this relationship, it is not surprising that Cooper’s feelings and ideas about this theme are so conflicted. The unresolved tensions inside the Tales about the moral costs and individual consequences of building an imitation of European civilization on the ruins of both the Native American culture and the natural environment give the series much of its power. Set in the world of Cooper’s own childhood in Cooperstown, The Pioneers probably takes the most subversive stance toward the nation’s (and his father’s) official faith in progress. In that novel Chingachgook, though old and enfeebled by drink, is angrier about the extermination of his culture, and Leatherstocking is often prophetically eloquent in the judgments he pronounces against the “wicked and wasty ways” of white society. The Last of the Mohicans, on the other hand, puts considerably less pressure on America’s ideological status quo. While most of The Pioneers is set inside the raw forms of a new settlement, from which point of view the natural life embodied by the Indians and by Natty can be romanticized, nearly all of Mohicans takes place in the depths of a wilderness where terror seems to lurk behind almost every tree and bush; the worlds of nature and the Indians are aligned with the dangerous forces of Gothic fiction rather than the restorative virtues of Wordsworthian Romanticism.

Cooper’s decision in this second Leatherstocking Tale to pair Chingachgook and the Delaware/Mohicans with another group of Indians, Magua and the Mingoes/Iroquois, similarly tilts the novel’s ideological balance toward society. If the Mohicans can be aligned with the Romantic trope of the Noble Savage, Magua derives from a combination of the archetypal Gothic villain, Milton’s Satan, and the New England Puritans’ association of Indians with the powers of evil in the howling wilderness. But here, too, the novel is complex: Even Magua’s story has its other side. In the scene in chapter XI in which Magua informs Cora that he will spare her sister, Alice, if she will put herself at his mercy by becoming his wife, he makes a case for being seen as the real victim. Like the Indian nation Chingachgook describes for Natty in chapter III, Magua says he was once a good and happy man, until the coming of the whites, with their “fire-water” and other evils and injustices, turned him into a scarred exile with a righteous grievance.