Deerslayer Helped Define Us All

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On his walks, Natty encounters two cultures, white and red. Modern multiculturalists might profit by pondering the combination of tolerance and sternness with which he views them. Cooper does not demonize Indians; when whole tribes are presented as villainous, this is a plot device, not a racial judgment (the French get the same treatment). Nor does Cooper worship Indians, in the manner of Dances with Wolves. Up to a point, he is a relativist. Good white men go to heaven when they die, while good Indians head for the happy hunting ground. Natty refuses to send either on their way minus scalps, because it goes against the grain of his "gifts," though he thinks it proper for Chingachgook to do so. But he recognizes a moral bottom line below which there is only one standard and one eternal judge. It is never proper to kill a man who is not trying to kill you, whatever you do with his hair afterward. Beyond human laws is natural law.

There is also human nature, which, as Cooper's tales present it, is a sorry thing. Sophistication doesn't improve it: the bloodiest deed in the Leatherstocking tales, a frontier My Lai, is the responsibility of a French aristocrat. Nor does the simple life guarantee innocence. Cooper's blackest villain is an Indian, his second blackest a hermit trapper who hunts scalps for bounty. The scene in which the trapper, scalped himself and dying, fears he may go to hell, is one of the most powerful Cooper ever wrote, and it owes its power to ethical earnestness as much as to gore and panic. "We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness," says Cooper in the homestretch of The Deerslayer, "and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true."

After an initial taste of bestsellerdom, Cooper's career wore itself out in feuds and lawsuits. But his vision, so bright in its highlights, so somber in its shadows, is not the product of mid-life crises. He had it all along.

America has had it all along too. We believe in freedom -- at the extreme, as passionately as Leatherstocking, who moves halfway across a continent in his 70s because he cannot bear the sound of axes felling trees. But do we believe in it because we are too good for anything less, second Adams who should not be trammeled by rules and regulations? Or do we believe in it because none of us is good enough to wield the power that accumulates in more regimented societies? In the prose of law, the tension between these polarities crackles over the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We are "created equal," with "certain unalienable rights," among which is "the pursuit of happiness," no less. We also have a government so designed that "rage" for "improper or wicked project((s))," as James Madison put it, may not easily sweep through it. In the poetry of action, that tension of the soul between the hero each of us aspires to be and the transgressors we too often are is captured in the Leatherstocking tales. Boys and college students don't know how good the saga they monopolize by default is.