Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

The Last of the Mohicans resembles the early “captivity narratives” of Mary Rowlandson and John Harris in form. Natty is in his prime in this novel, and the much more violent action of this story, which takes place in 1757 , contrasts with the other Leatherstocking tales. In The Prairie, Cooper both jumps forward in time to 1812 and transports the setting some 500 miles west of the Mississippi to portray the then uninhabited prairie. Natty is now an octogenarian as Cooper invents the idea of the West in the novel. This is no edenic scene where Indians ; British, French, and Dutch landowners; farmers; and white hunters contend for rights to the land and strive to live together. In the featureless prairie, nature seems to have already been vanquished and to have no further claims against the march of progress. The Indians have been weakened and pushed aside, and seem to have only enough energy left to attack and further decimate each other. Civilization marches into a vacuum and leaves behind a wreckage.

The first three Leatherstocking novels, however, resemble each other in that they deal in archetypes and large themes of history and legend, and do not focus centrally on the spiritual growth or consciousness of the individual character. In these Natty Bumppo plays a secondary rather than the leading role. In The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, while the myths of America’s origins hover over the story like the mists on Lake Glimmerglass, the individual characters are more “real” in that they become the center of attention. In particular, Natty Bumppo’s mental processes and emotional growth are placed in the foreground, and the large historical forces recede into the background. That is, the characters have become more real by virtue of being more truly fictional. Cooper, feeling himself liberated from the desire to instruct and from the self-imposed duty to proclaim and define the national identity, lets his imagination roam more freely. In doing so, he exhibits his full gifts as a storyteller. He also, I think, more truly captures the spirit of America, our moral contradictions and dilemmas, our aspirations and our failures.

The Deerslayer, the “darkest” of the Leatherstocking novels, is the earliest in terms of the chronological setting of the series. It is set in the environs of Lake Otsego (Glimmerglass) in the period 1740-1745, when Natty Bumppo is in his early twenties. In the fashion of the Hollywood “prequel,” Cooper takes us back to the beginning to show Natty’s early development; in doing so he provides a perspective on all of the subsequent events in the series. Inevitably, The Deerslayer is self referential, or reflexive, since the reader cannot help knowing something of what will happen (or has already happened to Natty in the previous novels). One views events through a layer of anticipation or irony as the novel calls to mind an episode from an earlier novel. When Natty tells Hetty Hunter that he will not be buried in Lake Glimmerglass but probably in “a forest grave,” we know that he will not have his wish but will be buried on the plains. When Uncas, the young son of Deerslayer’s Indian friend Chingachgook, is briefly introduced at the end of The
Deerslayer
as a future great chief of his people, we know that he will die in battle (has already died) in The Last of the Mohicans. When Judith Hutter proposes marriage to Natty toward the end of The Deerslayer, the reader knows that it can never happen. For Natty is fated to live alone, except for the company at times of male companions and comrades-in-arms. When he renounces the one woman he truly loves, Mabel Dunham, in The Pathfinder, we know that he cannot have loved another at some earlier point. Natty is too true and too honest, and is incapable of dissembling—as much as we might wish that he could be just a little fallible and more human.

The Deerslayer opens in the midst of a deep forest, the leafy surface of which “lay bathed in the brilliant light of a cloudless day in June” (p. 13). Two men are calling out who “had lost their way, and were searching in different directions for their path.” The different paths aptly suggest the different natures of Natty Bumppo—whose sobriquet is “the Deerslayer” because of his uncanny marksmanship—and the trapper Henry March who has the suggestive nicknames of Hurry Harry, Hurry Skurry, or just Hurry. The two have decided to travel together to the Lake Glimmerglass area after encountering each other on the way. Hurry Harry’s aim is to find an old crony Thomas Hutter, to pass the time with him and do some trapping. Hurry is, as always, in a hurry but does not necessarily have a clear goal in mind. Deerslayer is on a mission to meet up with his Delaware Indian friend Chingachgook, so that they can rescue the latter’s betrothed, who has been kidnapped by a band of hostile Indians of the Huron or Iroquois tribe. Hurry Harry, as his nickname suggests, not only wants everything now, but lacks altogether any larger sense of duty or morality. He has utter contempt for all Indians and considers them to be an inferior species.

To what, or to whom, is the Deerslayer loyal? This is a more dif ficult question. D. H. Lawrence has described Natty as an American Odysseus embarked on an epic journey.
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To Balzac he was “a magnificent moral hermaphrodite, born between the savage and the civilized states of man, who will live as long as literature endures” (cited in Wallace, Early Cooper and His Audience, p. 168). Natty’s identity vexes even himself, starting with the question of his name. When he meets Hetty Hutter and is asked his name, he introduces himself with a string of names: his given name Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo and the names given him by the friendly Delaware Indians—Straight-tongue, the Pigeon, the Lap-ear, and finally the Deerslayer. Deerslayer’s parents died while he was very young. He was raised a Christian by Moravian missionaries who worked closely with the friendly Delaware Indians. At age fourteen, he went to live with the Indians. He never learned to read or write, so he couldn’t recognize his name if he saw it. But he is quite a linguist, being fluent apparently in several Indian dialects. To the Indians of his boyhood, and now to the hunters and colonial authorities, he answers to the name of Deerslayer. He will also soon acquire the sobriquet of Hawkeye, given him by the dying Indian warrior the Lynx, whom he has mortally wounded in his first encounter with the enemy. Though Natty, or Deerslayer, feels a profound reverence for, and is completely at home in, the forest, he is not a Natural Man, a Noble Savage, or an Adam, notwithstanding the edenic setting and his love of the Glimmerglass forest. His appreciation of nature is refracted through a layer of self-consciousness; he admires nature almost as if viewing a work of art, as if beholding nature’s beauty while being caught in a Wordsworthian “spot in time.”
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Moreover, Natty is not a man who lives wholly unattached to human society. He is bound to society by virtue of having grown up in or near a settlement, and he makes his living through the scouting services he renders to clients from society Deerslayer is thus a more social being than either Hurry Harry or old Tom Hutter, both of whom are true loners. But even they depend on society when they buy or trade for certain goods or, in the case of the hideous scheme they contrive, seek Indian scalps for the bounties they can get from the colonial government. Unlike Harry and Tom, however, Natty has interests that lie beyond the economic or social. He knows that the French and Indian War of 1744 (King George’s War) is being waged, and he wishes, like Achilles or Odysseus, for glory in battle. He longs for the chance to prove himself in war, and not merely to display marksmanship in shooting deer and to show his prowess as a hunter. The novel’s full title is The Deerslayer: or The First War-Path. Settlements, towns, clusters, forts, and all the manifestations of civilization are not to Deerslayer’s liking, with their advances, forest clearings, comforts, “improvements,” and other signs of material progress, but he knows that civilization must, or at any rate will, advance. Moreover, he knows that it has some legitimate claims. Yet he has an innate sense of a moral order that is “higher” than society itself, partly the product of his Christian upbringing. Although not handsome, in contrast to Hurry Harry, Deerslayer’s “expression ... of guileless truth, sustained by an earnestness of purpose, and a sincerity of feeling” (pp. 14—15) endears him and renders him remarkable to all who meet him, though his penchant for telling the truth can be an irritant as well. Natty does not know (yet), though readers of The Pioneers and The Prairie know, that his moral outlook and purity of purpose will prove to be incompatible with the march of civilization, and will cause an irreparable breach between him and society.

Although The Deerslayer is not free of authorial intrusions, Cooper for the most part lets the story tell us how, and how far, Natty’s acute moral awareness puts him at odds with the imperatives of civilization. Deerslayer’s moral stature is revealed through his relations with the other characters and through the many encounters that test his virtue. Cooper is not as explicitly didactic here as he is in some of his other novels. The novelistic action brings out the moral dimensions, and leaves the reader to grapple with the choices that arise for Deerslayer and his confreres. Although Cooper leaves no doubt about how he feels about such actions as Harry March’s random shooting of an Iroquois girl or the British soldiers’ massacre of Indian women and children, he provides no easy authorial resolutions and leaves us to wrestle with the stark moral dilemmas. The reader must decide whether the costs of “progress” are morally acceptable, and whether Natty’s virtues are practicable in the real world.

The story unfolds in a straightforward fashion. Deerslayer and Hurry Harry, after finding each other in the opening scene in the forest, decide to look for the Thomas Hutter family. They retrieve a canoe Harry has previously hidden in a hollow log, and they paddle out to the fortress home that Hutter has built on piles driven into the shoals on a shallow point of Lake Glimmerglass (far enough offshore to afford a strong defensive position). Hutter and his daughters are not at Muskrat Castle, as the structure is known, but have gone off on the ark, a separate floating home that is usually anchored or parked at the castle. Deerslayer and Harry locate Hutter trapping in the river that flows from the lake. The whole entourage in chapter IV makes a narrow escape from Chief Rivenoak and his Indian companions (in the episode parodied by Mark Twain).

After Deerslayer and his companions hightail it back to the capacious and nearly impregnable castle, Hutter, a gruff old trapper and ex-pirate, teams up with Harry March to hatch a scheme that causes Deerslayer to be thrown into the first of the many moral crises he will face. Hutter and March want to sneak out at night in a canoe, attack the Indian camp at which, they have determined, the women and children have been left temporarily unguarded, and make their escape back to the castle bearing the scalps of many of these Indians. British, French, and Spanish colonial authorities in North America of fered bounties on the scalps of unfriendly Indians, and paid their Indian allies just as they paid mercenary troops in Europe. Natty, of course, will have none of it. He argues vociferously against white men engaging in scalp taking and refuses to have anything to do with the scheme:

Natty’s reasoning is interesting. It would be a mistake to regard him as a modern human rights advocate. He does not regard scalping as wrong under all circumstances for all peoples. He has the notion of “gifts” to which he refers at numerous points in the novel. There are white “gifts” and Indian “gifts” as well as male and female “gifts.” While it is wrong for whites to scalp their enemies, it is not wrong for Indians to take the scalps of warriors they have defeated in honorable battle, because it accords with the Indian desire to not have to go alone into the next world. It is even all right for Indians to take white scalps, provided only that the victim is dead before the scalp is removed.

Deerslayer understands and accepts different values, it seems, and is thus an ideal candidate for reconciling the clash of norms that inevitably accompanies the settling of the American wilderness by diverse groups of white settlers, colonial authorities, and indigenous natives. However, the notion of the gift, as frequently invoked by Deerslayer, is ambiguous. Gifts evidently are partly rooted in nature, in human nature as well as in the natural order. One is entitled to do what one’s nature allows. But the gift is also connected to the social order, and the social orders of the white and of the red man may conflict. The various social hierarchies within and among the ranks of the white man and within and among the numerous Indian tribes are also noteworthy. There is no way to reconcile or to weigh the merits of the respective groups other than by the standard of power.

The requirements of Nature and of Civilization are evidently at odds, but Cooper has no way of resolving their respective claims. He seems simultaneously to affirm and to condemn the conquest of the American wilderness by transplanted Europeans. It is wrong for civilization to encroach too palpably upon the beauty and tranquility of nature, but white settlers must be free to build towns and to clear the forests. Natty, in The Deerslayer, has a feeling that there is a natural fitness of things, an order both in nature and in the social world that can be grasped and can help guide our actions. The idea is summed up well in a remark to Judith Hutter when they are in a canoe and she hears a fish jump or something stir in the water:

Natty’s sense of the fitness of things rubs off on Judith and helps to shape her evolution from a vain young woman enamored with glitz and show to a serious and appealing figure. Indeed, Judith is perhaps Cooper’s most appealing female character; only Cora, in The Last of the Mohicans, has comparable vitality. We like Judith better as the novel progresses, and this capacity for growth makes her ultimate fate the more poignant. Tom Hutter’s other daughter, Hetty, is strikingly different from Judith. Judith is beautiful, dark-haired, and intelligent, while Hetty is a feeble-minded blond with plain good looks. But Hetty is a saintly figure; her belongings on a peg in the castle in chapter II evoke in Deerslayer a warm, repressed memory of his long dead mother. While Deerslayer appears in some ways as guileless and saintly as Hetty, there is a crucial difference: He can function in the world, in the woods if not in society, while she is as a child, helpless and dependent on others. Natty, furthermore, will prove himself as a warrior, a man who thrives on fighting. Hetty knows the Bible well, quotes from it freely and often, and weaves her way through the narrative delivering uncomfortable truths at awkward moments until she falls victim to a stray bullet in the climactic battle at the novel’s end.