Lawrence to speculate that America (and the New World) regenerated the Old World with youth and innocence. But the reverse chronology also highlights the pastness of the past, emphasizing to readers that interracial friendships can never occur in the present.

Cooper considered The Pathfinder to be the best of the Leatherstocking Tales, and it richly complicates Natty’s character and the Leatherstocking Tales in general. It is the only book in the series that is set on land and sea—specifically “inland sea,” as the Great Lakes were sometimes called. Cooper had served in the navy and was stationed on Lake Ontario, where The Pathfinder is set. He had written a number of sea adventures, and in 1831 proposed a tale set on “the Great Lakes, with Indians intermingled.” This new, rather unusual setting conformed to Cooper’s understanding of Indian-white intermingling: it was always on a frontier, a subversive site that stood wholly apart from civilization.

More important, The Pathfinder is the only Leatherstocking Tale in which Natty Bumppo falls in love and seeks marriage and family. The critic Leslie Fiedler, building on the insights of D. H. Lawrence, famously described how Cooper helped to create a central myth of the American experience, based on “the tie between male and male,” one dark-skinned, one white:

[this tie] is taken for the very symbol of innocence itself; for it is imagined as the only institutional bond in a paradisal world in which there are no (heterosexual) marriages or giving in marriage. Paradisal, however, means for hardheaded Americans not quite real; and there is, in fact, a certain sense of make-believe in almost all portrayals of the holy marriage of males, set as they typically are in the past, the wilderness, or at sea—that is to say, in worlds familiar to most readers in dreams.

Yet Fiedler and many subsequent critics virtually ignore Natty’s love for Mabel Dunham and his desire to marry her. Mabel is smart and beautiful; like Natty she is athletic and guileless; and she loves the wilderness and refers to herself as a “frontier girl.” Even before Natty realizes that he is in love with Mabel, he acknowledges the virtue of marriage: “I have sometimes thought,” he tells Jasper, “that we all ought to seek for wives, for the man that lives altogether in the woods, and in company with his inimies [enemies], or his prey, gets to lose some of the feelin’ of” humanity.

Natty’s love for Mabel threatens his friendship with Chingachgook, which gets pushed to the margins in The Pathfinder. When he tells Mabel he loves her, he acknowledges that he ought to be with Chingachgook, “scouting on the Mingo trail.” But the plot revolves much more around his romance with Mabel than his friendship with Chingachgook. In his preface, Cooper explained why he downplayed Natty and Chingachgook’s friendship: “The Indian character has so little variety, that it has been my object to avoid dwelling on it too much, on the present occasion.” The passage reveals the degree to which race determined character for Cooper. But he is also being disingenuous in the sense that Dew-of-June, a Tuscarora and wife of Chief Arrowhead, replaces Chingachgook as the central and richly nuanced Indian character. And less than a year after publishing The Pathfinder, he again focused on Chingachgook’s friendship with Natty in The Deerslayer.

Natty’s love for Mabel threatens his skill as a hunter and is “unnatural.” He fears that “it isn’t wholesome” for someone like himself “to form friendships for women—young women in particular—as they seem to me to lessen the love of enterprize and to turn the feelings away from [one’s] gifts and nat’ral occupations.” His “delight” in being with Mabel makes his occupation as a hunter seem like “idleness and vanity.” Such feelings are symptoms of his love; and when Mabel spurns him, he breaks down “and the tears rolled down” his cheeks “like rain.” He vows never to love a woman “in that way” again (and doesn’t). Mabel helps him to realize that his value to society is limited to his gift for hunting and that his love for Mabel is “unwise” and “unnat’ral” precisely because it imperils his calling. His calling, like that of a priest or artist, is more than mere occupation; it is an all-consuming sacred pursuit, a replacement for wife and children. Significantly, the only other time he cries profusely is as an old man in The Prairie, when he learns that he is remembered and revered for his “art” as a hunter, his simplicity, and his ability to distinguish “good from evil.” Artistry and memory replace family as the source of generativity, and keep his name alive.

Natty’s calling emphasizes the priority of friendship over love, binding him to Chingachgook in ways that approach love and separate him from women. He is much more like Chingachgook than Mabel, despite their racial differences. And for Cooper, comparableness draws people together and problematizes heterosexual love. “Like loves like,” Natty tells Sergeant Dunham, Mabel’s father, “and my gifts are not altogether the gifts of Mabel.” The sergeant, who wants them to marry, disagrees: “If like loved like, women would love one another, and men also.” The narrator dismisses the sergeant’s statement, calling him “merely a scholar of the camp” and not of the wilderness. Like religion, love in the wilderness revolves around friendship and equality. Mabel recognizes this, for she continually defines her relationship with Natty as one of friendship, which is more virtuous than romance in the wilderness. For Cooper, friendship depends upon separate but complementary gifts and does not threaten the essential differences between whites and Indians, men and women.

Another way in which In The Pathfinder explores new novelistic territory is in developing an interracial female friendship between Mabel Dunham and the Tuscarora Dew-of-June. Such interracial female bonding was extremely rare, and Cooper would return to it in The Deerslayer . Mabel’s friendship with Dew-of-June echoes Natty and Chingachgook’s in its emphasis on homosocial affections, the willingness to sacrifice for a friend, and captivity as a catalyst of the bond. Dew-of-June saves Mabel’s life, betrays her husband, and risks her own life for her friend. Although her “heart,” “feelings,” and “husband” are Tuscarora, she sacrifices these loyalties for her spiritual sister: “don’t feel as Tuscarora—feel as gal—feel as squaw. Love pretty [Mabel] and put [her] in my bosom.” Captivity fuels their friendship. They affirm their devotion to each other while seeking refuge from Tuscarora warriors in the blockhouse. And their friendship depends on sentient as well as emotional and spiritual affections, much as it does for Natty and Chingachgook.