cooper james fenimore the last of the mohicans

The British owned the Thirteen Colonies which lined the Atlantic seaboard. During the 1750s the French government of King Louis XV asked their military forces to penetrate into the area of the River Ohio with a view to connecting up to the Mississippi and the vast territories bordering the river as it flows south towards the Gulf of Mexico, the huge expanse the French called Louisiana. The French lived mostly as hunters and traders and got on well with the Indians of the area. Along the St Lawrence they had built the towns of Quebec and Montreal. As the 1750s opened the French possessed the territory they called ‘New France’, roughly all of present day Eastern Canada, centred on the long St Lawrence Waterway which penetrates the continent from the Atlantic at Newfoundland towards the Great Lakes. It is a true ‘historical novel’ in the sense that it is set against actual historical events. Last of the Mohicans takes us back forty years before The Pioneers, to the 1750s.

Cooper’s melodramatic style and use of comedy.

a summary of the plot, which also contains digressions about:.

a detailed account of the historical background to the novel.

At the end of The Pioneers Chingachgook dies and Leatherstocking ups sticks and heads west into the wilderness. In it we meet a cross-section of the settlement’s comic characters and Leatherstocking, the wizened 70-year-old who lives apart from society in a hut in the woods with his devoted Indian friend, Chingachgook, now known as ‘Indian John’, also 70 or so years old and feeling his age.

The first in the series, The Pioneers, is an essentially comic novel set in a small settler village in upstate New York at Christmas 1793 and then through the year of 1794. The Last of The Mohicans is the second in James Fenimore Cooper’s series of ‘Leatherstocking’ novels, so called because they all feature the tall, honest frontiersman and friend of the Indians, Nathaniel ‘Natty’ Bumppo, also known as Leatherstocking, Hawkeye and the Deerslayer, among other nicknames.

“Hold!” shrieked Cora, following wildly on his footsteps “release the child! wretch! what is’t you do?” (Chapter 17) “Never! strike if thou wilt, and complete thy revenge.” He hesitated a moment, and then catching the light and senseless form of Alice in his arms, the subtle Indian moved swiftly across the plain toward the woods. “Magua is a great chief!” returned the exulting savage, “will the dark-hair go to his tribe?” “Monster! there is blood, oceans of blood, upon thy soul thy spirit has moved this scene.” The Indian laughed tauntingly, as he held up his reeking hand, and answered: “It is red, but it comes from white veins!”

Cooper james fenimore the last of the mohicans