Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by James Fenimore Cooper Read Free Book Online Page A

sun, far from the graves of his parents near the sea and far from his beloved forests.
    The novel ends, in a shift of perspective, fifteen years later when Deerslayer, Chingachgook (Hist has died in the meantime), and Uncas, the son of Hist and Chingachgook, revisit the scene of the previous action. They are stirred by memories and experience feelings of melancholy They find the ark wrecked and the castle in ruins, but Deerslayer finds a ribbon of Judith’s attached to the wreckage of the ark and ties it to his rifle. Deerslayer has a pang as he thinks of Judith. She is still on his mind when he inquires about her at a nearby garrison, and a soldier “who had lately come from England, was enabled to tell our hero, that Sir Robert Warley [the British officer of fifteen years before] lived on his paternal estates, and that there was a lady of rare beauty in the lodge, who had great influence over him, though she did not bear his name” (p. 522). Natty “never knew” whether this was Judith or some other victim of that officer, nor “would it be pleasant or profitable to inquire.” The friends make their way in silence toward the Mohawk “to rush into new adventures, as stirring and as remarkable as those which had attended their opening career on this lovely lake.” But lest we miss the larger point of this dark narrative, Cooper begins his final sentence with the admonition: “We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true....”
     
    Bruce L. R. Smith is a fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University He previously was a professor of government at Columbia University (1966-1979), a deputy assistant secretary in the U. S. Department of State (1779-1880), and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. (1980-1996). He is the author or editor of sixteen scholarly books, and he continues to lecture widely in the United States and abroad. He annotated and wrote the introduction for Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove in the Barnes & Noble Classics series.

Notes
    1 On Cooper’s influence and his role in generating an audience for fiction, see James D. Wallace, Early Cooper and His Audience, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
    2 Mark Twain forcefully expressed his views on the American Indian in Roughing It ( 1872). He also began a sequel to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), in which Huck and Tom, after reading a Cooper novel, go into the Indian territory to befriend the benevolent Indians portrayed in the novel, only to discover that the Indians were drunks, rapists, and criminals, and were generally treacherous.
    3 Nina Baym disputes the whole notion that there was a unique American form, the romantic or the American Gothic style, and finds that America, in the antebellum period produced readers, reviewers, and authors similar to what prevailed in Britain during the period. See Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.
    4 Leslie Fiedler, “Introduction” to The Deerslayer, New York: Modern Library, 2002.
    5 “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Defenses: Twain and the Text of the Deerslayer,” in Joel Myerson, ed., Studies in the American Renaissance (1988), pp. 401-417.
    6 Seven of the thirteen children lived into adulthood. Between 1813 and 1819. all of James Cooper’s older brothers died, leaving him with the responsibility of caring for a number of widows and orphaned children and for settling his father’s debt-ridden estate.
    7 The story of this remarkable figure is told in Alan Taylor’s excellent William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (see “For Further Reading”), which also includes much valuable material on James Cooper’s early life.
    8 Alan Taylor disputes the legend in William Cooper’s Town (pp. 363-370) . He argues that the attack, if it