The Last of the Mohicans (novel by James Fenimore Cooper) | Introduction & Summary | Britannica (2024)

The Last of the Mohicans, the second and most popular novel of the five-volume Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper, first published in two volumes in 1826. In terms of narrative order, it is also the second novel in the series, taking place in 1757 during the French and Indian War.

Brief overview

The principal character of The Last of the Mohicans is Natty Bumppo, also called Hawkeye, now in middle life and at the height of his powers. The story tells of brutal battles with the Iroquois and their French allies, cruel captures, narrow escapes, and revenge. The beauty of the unspoiled wilderness and sorrow at its disappearance, symbolized in Hawkeye’s Mohican friends, the last of their tribe, are important themes of the novel.

Summary and analysis

The pivotal set piece of The Last of the Mohicans is the massacre at Fort William Henry during the internecine French and Indian War, as the North American portion of the worldwide Seven Years’ War was known. This is the “factual” event around which Cooper, the first internationally renowned American novelist, builds a compelling tale of wilderness adventure.

Drawing heavily on the American genre of the Native American captivity narrative, he created a template for much American popular fiction, particularly the western. Frontiersman Natty Bumppo, whom the French call La Longue Carabine (the long rifle), had already been introduced as an old man in Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823); here he appears in middle age, as Hawkeye, a scout working for the British, along with Chingachgook and his son, Uncas, two respected members of the Mohican tribe of the Hudson River valley in the British colony of New York who become his companions. Having crossed paths with Cora and Alice Munro, the daughters of a British colonel who are betrayed by their Huron guide, a wily warrior named Magua, Bumppo and friends spend the rest of the novel rescuing them from captivity, escorting them to safety, or pursuing them through the wilderness.

Cooper’s racial politics are conservative; though the novel raises the possibility of interracial romance between Uncas and the genteel Cora (who has a Black mother), the prospect is quashed. Cooper laments the destruction of the wilderness, and of the Native peoples who inhabit it, but all are shown to succumb inevitably to progress, typical of the ideology of 19th-century America.

Cooper’s The Prairie, published in 1827, depicts Bumppo at the end of his life. The prequel to The Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, was published in 1841. Like the rest of the Leatherstocking Tales, The Last of the Mohicans proved immensely popular in the United States and Europe, where it was widely translated. Although Cooper’s literary style was lampooned by none other than Mark Twain, and although Cooper, with his aristocratic leanings, came under criticism for seeming to look down his nose at the bumptious ways of frontier settlers, The Last of the Mohicans is full of action-packed set pieces, moments of tender romance, and memorable descriptions of both people and places.