“Who made [Magua] a villain?” he asks. That is a question with enormous subversive potential, but Cooper’s narrative doesn’t give it much chance to resonate. Magua is so single-mindedly and ruthlessly determined to destroy the happiness of these two young women who have never harmed him, his eyes burn so steadily with his thirst for vengeance, that as the narrator says near the end, “it would not have been difficult to have fancied the dusky savage the Prince of Darkness, brooding on his own fancied wrongs, and plotting evil.”

It is significant that Cooper labels Magua a “dusky savage” and sees this term as a synonym for satanic. The white characters, including Hawk eye, and the narrator himself repeatedly describe the Mingoes in terms like these that deny them their humanity: “beasts of prey,” “hellhounds,” “devils,” “fiend,” “monster.” For much of the novel the Mingoes whoop far more often than they speak, and when they scream it sounds, the narrator says, “as if the demons of hell had possessed themselves of the air.” Most of their actions trace out a pattern of racially incendiary moments: They gorge themselves on raw food and even drink human blood “freely, exultingly, hellishly” ; more than once we witness the dark hand of a Mingo stroking the blond hair of a white woman as a prelude to scalping her, while during the first atrocity at William Henry a “savage” wantonly kills a white “infant,” then tomahawks the mother. The rescue mission in the novel’s second half actually takes the narrative into a Mingo village, which allows Cooper to give his white readers a chance to look closely at Native American culture on its own ground. But although Cooper read primary sources to research his Indian novels, especially the accounts of John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary who had both a Christian and a proto-anthropological respect for the customs of the tribes he lived among, the novel’s Mingo village is built out of white prejudice and exists only in the imagination of Cooper and his culture. Even Mingo women and children are “hags” and “dark spectres,” and the first time we are shown the whole village gathered together, the scene looks like this:

The place ... resembled some unhallowed and supernatural arena, in which malicious demons had assembled to act their bloody and lawless rites. The forms in the background looked like unearthly beings, gliding before the eye and cleaving the air with frantic and unmeaning gestures; while the savage passions of such as passed the flames were rendered fearfully distinct by the gleams that shot athwart their inflamed visages (p. 245).

If it’s “not difficult” to see Magua as Satan, it’s impossible not to recognize this Indian village as hell on earth.

The five chapters that the novel spends inside the Mingo encampment (chapters XXIII-XXVII) are paired with two (chapters XXVIII and XXIX) that take us into the neighboring Delaware village. In a sense, this is even where the narrative leaves us in its last chapter, with Natty and Chingachgook at the Delaware funeral for Uncas and Cora. In his account of the Delawares and their social behavior, Cooper relies much more on Heckewelder, on both his facts and his spirit of cross-cultural respect. But while the Delaware community is shown to be dignified, just, ordered, devout, and willing to revere and serve white womanhood (which the novel consistently defines as the epitome of civilized grace), the members cannot transcend their historical fate. In the novel’s opening paragraphs the narrator talks about the futility of the French and Indian War, in which two European powers fought for “the possession of a country that neither was destined to retain.” At the end the fighting is between Mingoes and Delawares. The Mingo village is entirely destroyed, but in the first paragraph of the last chapter it is the Delawares who are described as “a nation of mourners,” and it is their own inevitable extinction as well as Uncas that they mourn for. England and France, Delawares and Mingoes all lose—but, of course, out of these losses Cooper’s United States of (white) America is being born. While some citizens of that new country protested loudly against Cooper’s sympathetic portrait of the Delawares, his decision in this novel to provide two antithetical types of “Indians” proved very popular with the mass of his readers. Because the tribe that adopts Hawkeye is so noble, white readers can grieve over their passing. Because the rest of the Indians, however, are so monstrous, they must be destroyed to make the continent safe for civilization, and while (in the novel at least) the work of their destruction is not done by white hands, white readers need have no compunctions about rejoicing at their extermination. History is made up of losses as well as gains, the novel says; the end of the Indians is an occasion for sorrow and celebration but not at all for guilt.

Thus, even as a fantasy, Cooper’s fiction arises from the brute facts of American history, although the colonial setting disguises the way the novel is a response to America’s own empire-building: the imperialist subjugation of the native population that became known, within a generation after the novel was published, as “Manifest Destiny.” Almost half of Cooper’s thirty-two novels are, in one way or another, about the process of civilizing the wilderness. Most of these are still well worth reading, for in their troubled dramatizations of one of our culture’s constitutive acts they hold up a mirror to our own deeply mixed feelings about the stories we tell about that process as well as the ones we continue to repress. As the “wildest” of Cooper’s dramas of the wilderness, however, The Last of the Mohicans projects a psychological as well as sociohistorical fantasy onto its dark woods and its “dusky savages.” In this respect it has a lot in common with The Heart of Darkness (1902), the novel about European powers in the African jungle that Joseph Conrad published at the start of the twentieth century. Conrad wrote very admiringly about Cooper’s sea fictions but may not even have recognized the relationship between his novel and this one. Heart of Darkness is often cited as one of the originating texts of Modernism, while Mohicans seems, to many readers at least, most “historical” in its own aesthetic: its prose style, its fussy and intrusive omniscient narrator, its reliance on literary conventions like “villain” or “light” and “dark” heroines. Thematically, however, Cooper’s novel verges on the same question that suggests “the horror” at the center of Conrad’s: whether “civilized” and “savage” are really not racial or ethnic or historical antonyms, but instead two interchangeable labels for all human beings. The darkness at the heart of Conrad’s “Africa” symbolically represents the deepest truth about human nature. Similarly, the “savage wilderness” into which Cooper’s novel plunges us can be interpreted as the realm of our dark passions.

The plot of Mohicans looks compulsively straightforward. Like most American novels in the 1820s, it was published in two volumes. In each volume the heroines are kidnapped, leading to a pair of rescue missions and ending with a pair of massacres. At the center the novel intersects history in its three-chapter account of the 1757 siege and surrender of Fort William Henry, but most of the story occurs in the archetypal, timeless world of villains who abduct heroines and heroes who rescue them.