The Tuscarora have “too much Mingo blood, for one who consorts altogether with the Delawares,” Natty says in The Pathfinder, adding: “I always keep my limbs free, when near a Frencher, or Mingo.” When Chingachgook finds a “Latin cross,” or French crucifix, Pathfinder says it “foretell[s] deviltry and wickedness.”

Captivity is a central plot device throughout the Leatherstocking Tales, which reinforces Natty and Chingachgook’s friendship. They repeatedly rescue each other and their allies from captivity, risk their lives for each other, and fulfill both the Christian and Delaware ideals of spiritual friendship. Spiritual friendship in both cultures stipulated that a man was willing to “lay down his life” for a friend, according to John 15 and John Heckewelder’s history of the Delawares, a major source for Cooper, from which he obtained the name “Chingachgook” and his understanding of the Delaware tribe. Saving a friend’s life was less an act of will than of God’s design, however: “Look at the head of the Big Sarpent,” Natty says in The Pathfinder; “you can see the mark of a knife, all along there by his left ear; now, nothing but a bullet from this long rifle of mine, saved his scalp that day. . . . When the Mohican squeezes my hand, and intermates [intimates] that I befriended him in that matter, I tell him, no; it was the Lord.” The Lord was on their side, facilitating their friendship.

The spiritual nature of friendship permeates the Leatherstocking Tales. Natty and Chingachgook are antinomians and prophets—Natty’s very name suggests Nathan, the prophet in the court of King David. Unlike the civilized characters, they find God not in a book or doctrine, but “in the wilderness,” as Natty says: “There I seem to stand face to face with my master.” In fact Natty is proud of never having read a book. He is one of the great anti-intellectuals of American literature, and believes that the Christian Bible—and every other book—obscures the true voice of God. A “reader of books” is “a believer of printed lies.” Some men read them to convince themselves that there is a God; but they “deform” God’s works as well as themselves and society. The most learned men of the Leatherstocking Tales are grotesque characters. David Gamut, the New England psalmodist in Last of the Mohicans; the naturalist Dr. Battius in The Prairie; and the treasonous Lieutenant David Muir in The Pathfinder are all steeped in philosophy and doctrine rather than God. And they are ambitious: the greatest folly of those who read books is “in striving to rise to the level of one he can never equal, be it in goodness, or be it in power,” Cooper writes. Book learning led to ambition, which was the bane of Christian faith and friendship.

Cooper’s religion of nature precluded the possibility of a heaven on earth or an indwelling God who could dismantle sin. Sin was a permanent fact of life. “Salvation” for Natty meant not a kingdom of God on Earth, but rather the ability of all humans, with God’s help, “to find a pardon for their wickednesses”—“that is the essence of the white man’s religion.” In The Pathfinder Cooper summarizes Natty’s character by likening him to “Adam . . . before the fall, though certainly not without sin.” It is a telling line, for even as a prelapsarian Adam, Natty is not free from sin. Sin dwells within the body and amid nature; it cannot be dismantled on earth. For Natty and Cooper, a world without sin was a dangerous delusion. They adhered to rigid distinctions between heaven and earth, past and present, civilization and savagery, white skin and dark.

 

Cooper faced a major dilemma when he wrote The Pathfinder, for he had already killed off his central hero. In The Prairie, set in 1803 near the Mississippi River, Natty dies facing west, an old man with his Indian friends at his side. His grave, Cooper emphasizes, “is carefully watched by [Indians] to the present hour.” To resurrect Natty, Cooper went backward in time, much as he brought Chingachgook back to life in Last of the Mohicans, after killing him in The Pioneers. Cooper set The Pathfinder a few years after 1757, when Last of the Mohicans is set, with Natty and Chingachgook in their mid- to late thirties. This trajectory means that they generally move from old age to youth, experience to innocence, death to rebirth, which inspired D. H.