James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier: The Pioneers as History

American Quarterly

, Vol. 9, No. 1. 

(Spring, 1957), 72 

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and artificial objects and the customs of the inhabitants.”

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 Yet these objects and customs are 

critical to an understanding of life in the early Republic. In teaching this book as part of an 

“American History and Literature” class at Florida State University during the five semesters 

prior to writing this thesis, I was constantly amazed at how rich the text was as an historical vein 

to be mined for insights into early American science and religion, political and social thought, 

and culture. It was in the course of teaching this material that I decided to use my thesis to 

further examine how The Pioneers can be used to interpret and understand American History. 

In this paper, I will show how Cooper presents a picture of America struggling in its 

infancy. Gordon S. Wood describes the period as “a social and cultural transformation as great as 

any in American history, a transformation marked by the search for an American identity and by 

the climax and fall of the Enlightenment in America.”

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 On one hand, America was a new nation, 

still bound in many ways to the old world of Europe. In the midst of the scientific discovery and 

political experimentation born of the Age of Reason, Americans were trying to discover their 

own identity and to approach and conquer their new continent in a rational manner. On the other 

hand, despite their insecurities about being a new nation, Americans also approached their new 

land with a brash audacity that was later summed up with the term manifest destiny. Americans 

were not conquering a new land with set ideas and set institutions, but rather were developing 

new ways of seeing themselves and the world as they were simultaneously imprinting their 

stamp on a landscape that already had its own history. This notion of a preexisting context for 

American settlement of North America has often been neglected.  

In the 1970s, there was a surge of interest in studying early America in its complete 

context. In “Whose Indian History?” Daniel Richter recounts how William Fenton in 1957 called 

for a “marriage of history and anthropology in a new ‘ethnohistory’ of native-European 

relations.” In 1975, almost two decades later, Francis Jennings published his “paradigm-

shattering” The Invasion of America.

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 “Such works promised to revolutionize early American 

historiography: comfortable assumptions about the peaceful transit of Western Civilization to the 

Howling Wilderness, it seemed, could no longer be supported…”Nevertheless, he bemoaned, 

                                                 

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 Cooper viii. 

4

 Gordon S. Wood, ed., The Rising Glory Of America, 1760-1820 (Boston: Northeastern University Press; 1971, 

1990) 1 

5

 Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (New York: Norton, 

1976) 

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despite scholarship devoted to establishing the continuum of history in North America, much 

historical study remains locked in notions of the European “discovery” of America