Even Oliver Edwards, the mysterious and cultivated young man who temporarily shares the modest wigwam of Leatherstocking and Chingachgook, concurs with Elizabeth Temple when she says that, even if they wanted to, they could not “convert these clearings and farms, again, into hunting-grounds, as the Leatherstocking would wish to see them.” Similar forms of resigned nostalgia helped convince white settlers—and readers of Cooper’s novel in the 1820s and beyond—that their displacement of Indian tribes was, if lamentable, nevertheless inevitable and irreversible, a belief that was to some extent self-fulfilling.

Oliver Edwards, as it turns out, represents yet another kind of claim on Temple’s Patent. His uncertain origins and motives—sources of great curiosity and dramatic tension throughout most of the novel—turn out to be linked closely to the pre-Revolutionary property and estates of the Royalist family of Temple’s friend Edward Effingham. Temple was able to gain legal title to the Patent because it was one of many such estates confiscated during the Revolution. In the violent seizure by rebel Colonials of Royalists’ property, there was, as Cooper’s novel makes plain, a deeply ironic echo of the violence previously used by the British to dispossess American Indians of their lands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like Chingachgook, Oliver Edwards (who many in the novel believe to be a blood relative of Chingachgook) stands for preexisting property claims that new American laws have vitiated. The justice of these dispossessions is centrally at issue in The Pioneers.

The law of property was centrally at issue in Cooper’s own life as well. His father, William, like Judge Temple in The Pioneers, was a Quaker from the middle colonies who moved his family to Otsego Lake after acquiring a large tract of land formerly owned by a British Loyalist. After William’s death in 1809, his estate, valued at roughly $750,000 (tens of millions in 2006 dollars) was divided among his six surviving children, mostly in the form of widely scattered and heavily encumbered land holdings. Bad investments, burdensome debts, and the economic depression following the War of 1812 steadily sapped the family fortune. When James Cooper (he added the “Fenimore” in 1826) began writing The Pioneers in 1821, he was still able to live the life of a wealthy gentleman farmer. But by the time of the novel’s publication, less than a year and a half later, he was virtually propertyless. Many readers believe that, during this period of financial calamity, Cooper wrote The Pioneers in order to imaginatively reclaim the patrimony that was slipping through his fingers.

The collapse of the Cooper family fortune played out against a backdrop of national and local debates over the laws of property. In 1821, as Cooper was writing his novel, New York State was rewriting its constitution, lowering property-holding requirements for voters, and thereby opting for a less paternalistic, more democratic form of government. But paternalistic conservatism remained a strong value for Cooper, and the central characters of The Pioneers reflect this. “The poor are always prodigal,” says Judge Temple, who believes, therefore, that the poor must be “protected” from their own extravagance and lack of foresight by lords of the soil like himself. Even the highly individualistic Natty Bumppo—who would become, thanks to The Pioneers and to the four ensuing Leatherstocking novels, one of the great mythic heroes of American democratic romance—spends much of his time and energy helping to restore the property of the family of the dispossessed British officer he dutifully served as a frontier scout before the Revolution. In his role in preserving hereditary rights and pre-Revolutionary interests, Leatherstocking turns out to have a great deal in common with Cooper in his own real-life struggle to preserve his father’s estate and to defend the claims of landholding elites. Leatherstocking’s idiosyncratic nature (he’s a town-shunning illiterate woodsman who snaps his fingers in the face of property rights while nevertheless championing the cause of a dispossessed aristocrat!) owes much to the complexity of Cooper’s own shifting, uneasy relation to what often seemed like contradictory democratic and republican values. Did American individualism require less government, or more? Was universal suffrage good or bad for agrarianism? What about the commercialization of agriculture? Did the leveling of society promote civic virtue, or moral degeneration? Should concentrations of family wealth be discouraged by law and by custom, or should hereditary inheritance be zealously protected?

Despite the Cooper family’s money troubles of the early nineteenth century, the success of James Cooper as a novelist soon made him a wealthy man again, and with his earnings as a writer he continued throughout his life to pursue the reacquisition of old family property—pursuits that resulted in various public disputes and lawsuits, as well as a series of novels, published in the 1840s, that championed the interests of landed proprietors and opposed tenant rights. Cooper’s intensive study of political history and time spent living in Europe strengthened his allegiance to republican principles, which he praised at length in Notions of the Americans (1828), a Jeffersonian paean to the “natural” aristocracy of the independent farmer, the justice of the popular will, and the sovereignty of the law. But his return to the U.S. after seven years abroad (he and his family lived chiefly in Paris from 1826 to 1833) was profoundly disillusioning. What had looked from afar like the bastion of freedom had, from Cooper’s perspective, become a country where unchecked, coercive egalitarianism threatened the liberty of the individual.

Two novels published in 1838, Homeward Bound and Home as Found, extended Cooper’s deeply ambivalent quarrel with democracy and the Jacksonian transformation of American society (D. H. Lawrence wrote that Cooper “felt the democratic American tomahawk wheeling over his uncomfortable scalp all the time”) by extending the story of the Effingham family begun in The Pioneers. These two novels are, indeed, sequels to The Pioneers—much more truly than most of the other Leatherstocking novels, which are prequels rather than sequels (the one exception is The Prairie, in which Natty Bumppo dies). Homeward Bound and Home as Found are extensions, not of Leatherstocking’s story, but of the Effingham family’s—the story of the descendants of the British Major Effingham, whose confiscated estate becomes Templeton in The Pioneers. They are stories of the disappointments of homecoming, disappointments Cooper himself experienced upon his return from Europe. He found home—Cooperstown in particular—to have changed into something recognizable only in its declension from its former state, which, for Cooper, was largely a state of mind: an expression of deep-rooted longings under the pressure of present anxieties.

One thematic hallmark of The Pioneers is its obsession with change, with mutability. The seasonal transformations of the landscape, the more abrupt changes wrought by storm and fire, the bloom and decay of human life, the slapdash construction of a booming frontier town, the unceasing alterations to ways of living that new people, new laws, new tastes, and new threats required—Cooper describes all of this with wonderful detail and deep pathos.