A reflection of indian life in the works of fenimore cooper

Chapter I. Fenimore Cooper’s biography and literary works

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   Fenimore cooper’s biography
   

James Fenimore Cooper was an American writer of the first half of the 19th century. His historical romances depicting colonist and Indigenous characters from the 17th to the 19th centuries created a unique form of American literature. He lived much of his boyhood and the last fifteen years of life in Cooperstown, New York, which was founded by his father William Cooper on property that he owned. Cooper became a member of the Episcopal Church shortly before his death and contributed generously to it. He attended Yale University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society.
After a stint on a commercial voyage, Cooper served in the U.S. Navy as a midshipman, where he learned the technology of managing sailing vessels which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. The novel that launched his career was The Spy, a tale about espionage set during the American Revolutionary War and published in 1821. He also created American sea stories. His best-known works are five historical novels of the frontier period, known as the Leatherstocking Tales, which introduced the iconic American frontier scout, Natty Bumppo. Cooper's works on the U.S. Navy have been well received among naval historians, but they were sometimes criticized by his contemporaries. Among his more famous works is the romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece. Throughout his career, he published numerous social, political, and historical works of fiction and non-fiction with the objective of countering European prejudices and nurturing an original American art and culture.
James Fenimore Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, to William Cooper and Elizabeth (Fenimore) Cooper, the eleventh of 12 children, half of whom died during infancy or childhood.
Shortly after James' first birthday, his family moved to Cooperstown, New York, a community founded by his father on a large piece of land which he had
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bought for development. Later, his father was elected to the United States Congress as a representative from Otsego County. Their town was in a central area of New York along the headwaters of the Susquehanna River that had previously been patented to Colonel George Croghan by the Province of New York in. Croghan mortgaged the land before the Revolution and after the war part of the tract was sold at public auction to William Cooper and his business partner Andrew Craig. William Cooper had selected and surveyed the site where Cooperstown would be established. He erected a home on the shore of Otsego Lake and moved his family there. Several years later he began construction of the mansion that became known as Otsego Hall, completed when James was ten.
Cooper was enrolled at Yale University at age 13, but he incited a dangerous prank which involved blowing up another student's door—after having already locked a donkey in a recitation room. He was expelled in his third year without completing his degree, so he obtained work in 1806 as a sailor and joined the crew of a merchant vessel at age 17. He obtained the rank of midshipman in the fledgling United States Navy, conferred upon him by an officer's warrant signed by Thomas Jefferson.
William Cooper died when James was 20; all five of his sons inherited a supposed-large fortune in money, securities, and land titles, which soon proved to be a wealth of endless litigation. He married Susan Augusta de Lancey at Mamaroneck, Westchester County, New York on January 1, 1811, at age 21. She was from a wealthy family who remained loyal to Great Britain during the Revolution. The Coopers had seven children, five of whom lived to adulthood. Their daughter Susan Fenimore Cooper was a writer on nature, female suffrage, and other topics. Her father edited her works and secured publishers for them. One son, Paul Fenimore Cooper, became a lawyer and perpetuated the author's lineage to the present.
At the age of 17, Cooper joined the crew of the merchant ship Sterling as a
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common sailor. At the time, the Sterling was commanded by young John Johnston
from Maine. Cooper served as a common seaman before the mast. His first voyage took some 40 stormy days at sea and brought him to an English market in Cowes where they sought information on where best to unload their cargo of flour.¹ There Cooper saw his first glimpses of England. Britain was in the midst of war with Napoleon's France at the time, so their ship was immediately approached by a British man-of-war and was boarded by some of its crew. They seized one of the Sterling's best crew members and impressed him into the British Royal Navy. Cooper thus first encountered the power of his country's former colonial master, which led to a lifelong commitment to helping create an American art independent culturally as well as politically from the former mother country.
Their next voyage took them to the Mediterranean along the coast of Spain, including Águilas and Cabo de Gata, where they picked up cargo to be taken to London and unloaded. Their stay in Spain lasted several weeks and impressed the young sailor, the accounts of which Cooper later referred to in his Mercedes of Castile, a novel about Columbus.
After serving aboard the Sterling for 11 months, Cooper joined the United States Navy on January 1, 1808, when he received his commission as a midshipman. Cooper had conducted himself well as a sailor, and his father, a former U.S. Congressman, easily secured a commission for him through his long-standing connections with politicians and naval officials. The warrant for Cooper's commission as midshipman was signed by President Jefferson and mailed by Naval Secretary Robert Smith, reaching Cooper on February 19. On February 24, he received orders to report to the naval commander at New York City. Joining the United States Navy fulfilled an aspiration Cooper had had since his youth.
Cooper's first naval assignment came on March 21, 1808 aboard
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¹"Biography of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)". American Studies at the University of Virginia.
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the USS Vesuvius, an 82-foot bomb ketch that carried twelve guns and a thirteen-inch mortar.  For his next assignment, Cooper served under Lieutenant Melancthon Taylor Woolsey near Oswego on Lake Ontario, overseeing the building of the brig USS Oneida for service on the lake. The vessel was intended for use in a war with Great Britain which had yet to begin. The vessel was completed, armed with sixteen guns, and launched in Lake Ontario in the spring of 1809. It was in this service that Cooper learned shipbuilding, shipyard duties, and frontier life. During his leisure time, Cooper would venture through the forests of New York state and explore the shores of Lake Ontario. He occasionally ventured into the Thousand Islands. His experiences in the Oswego area later inspired some of his work, including his novel The Pathfinder.
After completion of the Oneida , Cooper accompanied Woolsey to Niagara Falls, who then was ordered to Lake Champlain to serve aboard a gunboat until the winter months when the lake froze over. Cooper himself returned from Oswego to Cooperstown and then New York. On November 13 of the same year, he was assigned to the USS Wasp under the command of Captain James Lawrence, who was from Burlington and became a personal friend of Cooper's. Aboard this ship, Cooper met his lifelong friend William Branford Shubrick, who was also a midshipman at the time. Cooper later dedicated The Pilot, The Red Rover, and other writings to Shubrick. Assigned to humdrum recruiting tasks rather than exciting voyages, Cooper resigned his commission from the navy in spring 1810; in the same time period he met, wooed, and became engaged to Susan Augusta de Lancey, whom be married on January 1, 1811.
When reading a contemporary novel to his wife Susan, he decided to try his hand at fiction, resulting in a neophyte novel set in England he called Precaution . Its focus on morals and manners was influenced by Jane Austen's approach to fiction. He anonymously published Precaution which received modestly favorable notice in the United States and England. By contrast, his second novel The Spy was inspired by an American tale related to him by neighbor and family
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friend John Jay. It became the first novel written by an American to become a bestseller at home and abroad, requiring several re-printings to satisfy demand. Set in the "Neutral Ground" between British and American forces and their guerrilla allies in Westchester County, New York, the action centers around spying and skirmishing taking place in and around what is widely believed to be John Jay's family home "The Locusts" in Rye, New York of which a portion still exists today as the historic Jay Estate.
Following on a swell of popularity, Cooper published The Pioneers, the first of the Leatherstocking series . The series features the inter-racial friendship of Natty Bumppo, a resourceful American woodsman who is at home with the Delaware Indians and their chief Chingachgook. Bumppo was also the main character of Cooper's most famous novel The Last of the Mohicans , written in New York City where Cooper and his family lived. The book became one of the more widely read American novels of the 19th century. At this time, Cooper had been living in New York on Beach Street in what is now downtown's Tribeca.²
In 1823, he became a member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. In August of that same year, his first son died. He organized the influential Bread and Cheese Club that brought together American writers, editors, artists, scholars, educators, art patrons, merchants, lawyers, politicians, and others.
In 1824, General Lafayette arrived from France aboard the Cadmus at Castle Garden in New York City as the nation's guest. Cooper witnessed his arrival and was one of the active committee of welcome and entertainment.
In 1826, Cooper moved his family to Europe, where he sought to gain more income from his books, provide better education for his children, improve his health, and observe European manners and politics firsthand. While overseas, he
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² Lounsbury, Thomas R. (1883). James Fenimore Cooper. Houghton, Mifflin. p. 149.
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continued to write. His books published in Paris include The Prairie, the third Leather-Stocking Tale in which Natty Bumppo dies in the western land newly acquired by Jefferson as the Louisiana Purchase. There he also published The Red Rover and The Water Witch, two of his many sea stories. During his time in Paris, the Cooper family became active in the small American expatriate community. He became friends with painter Samuel Morse and with French general and American Revolutionary War hero Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. Cooper admired the patrician liberalism of Lafayette, who sought to recruit him to his causes, and eulogized him as a man who "dedicated youth, person, and fortune, to the principles of liberty."
Though most renowned as a prolific novelist, he did not simply retire to his study after the success of The Spy. Between 1822 and 1826 he lived in New York City and participated in its intellectual life, founding the Bread and Cheese Club, which included such members as the poets Fitz-Greene Halleck and William Cullen Bryant, the painter and inventor Samuel F.B. Morse, and the great Federalist judge James Kent. Like Cooper himself, these were men active in both cultural and political affairs.
Cooper’s own increasing liberalism was confirmed by a lengthy stay in Europe, where he moved for the education of his son and four daughters. Those years coincided with a period of revolutionary ferment in Europe, and, because of a close friendship that he developed with the old American Revolutionary War hero Lafayette, he was kept well-informed about Europe’s political developments. Through his novels, most notably The Bravo, and other more openly polemical writings, he attacked the corruption and tyranny of oligarchical regimes in Europe. His active championship of the principles of political democracy (though never of social egalitarianism) coincided with a steep decline in his literary popularity in America, which he attributed to a decline in democratic feeling among the reading—the propertied—classes to which he
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himself belonged.
Cooper's distaste for the corruption of the European aristocracy, especially in England and France, grew as he observed them manipulate the legislature and judiciary to the exclusion of other classes. Cooper entered the lists as a political writer in a series of letters to Le National, a Parisian journal. He defended the United States against a string of charges brought by the Revue Britannique. For the rest of his life, he continued skirmishing in print, sometimes for the national interest, sometimes for that of the individual, and frequently for both at once. This opportunity to make a political confession of faith reflected the political turn that he already had taken in his fiction, having attacked European anti-republicanism in The Bravo . Cooper continued this political course in The Heidenmauer and The Headsman: or the Abbaye of Vigneron . The Bravo depicted Venice as a place where a ruthless oligarchy lurks behind the mask of the "serene republic". All were widely read on both sides of the Atlantic, though some Americans objected that Cooper had apparently abandoned American life for European—not realizing that the political subterfuges in the European novels were cautions directed at his American audiences. Thus The Bravo was roughly treated by some critics in the United States.
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