After Mabel and Dew-of-June affirm their vow of friendship:

June passed her arm fondly around the slender waist of Mabel, and pressed her to her heart, with a tenderness and affection, that brought tears into the eyes of our heroine. It was done, in the fond caressing manner of a woman, and it was scarcely possible that it should not obtain credit for sincerity, with a young and ingenuous person of the same sex.

Given this affection, it is no wonder that men threaten their friendship: Natty tries to imprison Dew-of-June and warns Mabel to be wary of her. And Arrowhead lusts after Mabel and would kill his wife if he discovered their friendship.

Interracial friendship becomes an alternative domestic sphere. It replaces family as the source of value and the site of the home, and preserves purity of blood, preventing the creation of a mongrel America. But it doesn’t last: Mabel and Dew-of-June’s friendship ends in death. At the novel’s end, Dew-of-June is being cared for by Mabel; but with her husband dead and her tribe decimated, she dies from a broken heart. Mabel regenerates herself through her friendship with June, clarifying her sense of virtue and enabling her to distinguish between noble men like Jasper, whom she marries, and ambitious scoundrels such as Lieutenant Muir. Natty facilitates Mabel’s marriage to Jasper; in this sense, he marks a path to a white nation that will contain their progeny.

One of the rich ironies in The Pathfinder, and the Leatherstocking Tales as a whole, is the resilience of interracial friendships. In each tale a friendship ends: Chingachgook dies in The Pioneers; Uncas in The Last of the Mohicans; Natty in The Prairie; Dew-of-June in The Pathfinder; and Hetty Hutter in The Deerslayer. These deaths highlight the precarious nature of interracial friendship. Yet whether the series is read in the order Cooper wrote them or in the order of Natty’s life, at the end of each tale an interracial friendship remains, and the final message is one of hope and reconciliation.

In their friendship, Natty and Chingachgook (and to a lesser extent Mabel and Dew-of-June) exemplify this message of reconciliation. They are American holy men (or women), living simply in their temple of Nature, heeding the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, fending off sin with their rifles, and shunning the trappings of wealth and civilization. God is Natty’s love, binding him to Chingachgook, and hunting is their sacrament, Natty’s equivalent of the Eucharist. They hunt not for sport or profit, but to redeem the sins of the wilderness and civilization. Their religion of nature was ideally suited to the American landscape of the 1820s and 1830s. It was seductive and comforting in the way that it explained the past and foretold the future, and thus exonerated the crimes of whites against their dark-skinned brethren. It was also very bloody.

—John Stauffer

PREFACE

FOLLOWING THE ORDER OF EVENTS, this book should be the third in the series of the Leather-Stocking Tales. In The Deerslayer, Natty Bumppo, under the sobriquet which forms the title of that work, is represented as a youth just commencing his forest career as a warrior, having, for several years, been a hunter and so celebrated as already to have gained the honor of the appellation he then bore. In The Last of the Mohicans he appears as Hawkeye, and is present at the death of young Uncas, while in this tale, he reappears in the same war of ’56, in company with his Mohican friend, still in the vigor of manhood and young enough to feel that master passion to which all conditions of men, all tempers, and we might almost say, all ages, submit, under circumstances that are incited to call it into existence.

The Pathfinder did not originally appear for several years after the publication of The Prairie, the work in which the leading character of both had closed his career by death. It was, perhaps, a too hazardous experiment to recall to life, in this manner and after so long an interval, a character that was somewhat a favorite with the reading world, and which had been regularly consigned to his grave, like any living man. It is probably owing to this severe ordeal that the work, like its successor, The Deerslayer, has been so little noticed—scarce one in ten of those who know all about the three earliest books of the series have even a knowledge of the existence of the last at all. That this caprice in taste and favor is in no way dependent on merit, the writer feels certain; for, though the world will ever maintain that an author is always the worst judge of his own productions, one who has written much and regards all his literary progeny with more or less of a paternal eye must have a reasonably accurate knowledge of what he has been about the greater part of his life. Such a man may feel that too high an estimate of his relative merits as relates to others, but it is not easy to see why he would fall into this error, more than another, as relates to himself. His general standard may be raised too high by means of self-love, but, unless he be disposed to maintain the equal perfection of what he has done, as probably no man was ever yet fool enough to do, he may very well have shrewd conjectures as to the comparative merits and defects of his own productions.

This work, on its appearance, was rudely and maliciously assailed by certain individuals out of pure personal malignancy. It is scarcely worth the author’s while, nor would it have any interest for the reader, to expose the motives and frauds of these individuals, who have pretty effectually vindicated the writer by their own subsequent conduct. But even the falsest of men pay so much homage to truth as to strive to seem its votaries. In attacking The Pathfinder, the persons alluded to pointed out faults that the author, for the first time, has now ascertained to be real; and much to his surprise, as of most of them he is entirely innocent. They are purely errors of the press, unless, indeed, the writer can justly be accused of having been a careless proofreader. A single instance of the mistakes he means may be given in explanation of the manner in which the book was originally got up.

The heroine of this tale was at first called “Agnes.” In the fifth or sixth chapter this name was changed to “Mabel,” and the manuscript was altered accordingly. Owing to inadvertency, however, the original appellation stood in several places, and the principal female character of the book, until now, has had the advantage of going by two names! Many other typographical errors exist in the earlier editions, most of which, it is believed, are corrected in this.

There are a few discrepancies in the facts of this work, as connected with the facts of the different books of the series.