James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier: The Pioneers as History

The Course of Empire and the Frontier 

 

 

If Cooper’s legacy is clear today, he also made an indelible mark on the early naturalists 

of his time. Two years after The Pioneers was published, according to MacDougall, Thomas 

Cole visited the Cooperstown area and painted landscapes that included areas Cooper had 

described. Cole inspired others, who later came to paint the wilderness of upstate New York, 

leading to the formation of the Hudson River school “whose landscapes depicting the wilderness 

dominated American art for half a century.”

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Interestingly, one Cooper scholar has posited that The Pioneers is part of Cooper’s own 

literary version of Cole’s “Course of Empire.”  

The Pioneers

 (1823) also traces American civilization's rise from savage state to 

destruction, but while 

The Last of the Mohicans

 focused mainly on the first stage and 

The Spy

 mainly on the shift from savage state to pastoral, 

The Pioneers

… introduces 

those stages as past history and concentrates mostly on the approaching shift from 

pastoral state to consummation and then destruction. 

Mt. Vision, rising above the town of Templeton and Lake Otsego, dominates the 

novel's setting and action. Most of the key events take place on the mountain…It is 

the essence of the pastoral state brought to fruition…

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The notion of the “course of empire” is important because it implies an inevitable cycle 

in which man tames nature (although nature ultimately bats last). The part of the cycle Cooper 

seems intrigued by is the conquering of nature by man. Fortunately, Cole recognizes that there 

are inhabitants of the “savage state” who will be displaced by the arrival of the “empire” and so 

too does Cooper.  

Despite his concern for the environment and celebration of rugged individualists like 

Natty, Cooper is well aware that growth is inevitable and there will soon be no room for the 

Nattys of the world. Where then, do they go? In John’s case, they vanish – die off. But for Natty, 

there is always a frontier to follow. That Natty is ultimately forced to leave Otsego and head 

westward is sad on one hand, but it also evokes further romantic visions of American pioneering 

spirit, as well as the notion of the frontier presented by Frederick Jackson Turner. 

                                                 

247

 MacDougall, 1990  

248

 Ian Marshall, “Cooper's  ‘Course of Empire’: Mountains and the Rise and Fall of American Civilization in 

The 

Last of the Mohicans

, 

The Spy

, and 

The Pioneers”

 1989.   

 

---

 

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Turner contended that American development has exhibited not merely advance along a 

single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line.” Each 

return to the primitive allows for a “rebirth.” Not only does this allow for “new opportunities,’’ 

Turner wrote, but this constant contact with the “simplicity of primitive society [furnishes] the 

forces dominating American character…In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the 

wave-- the meeting point between savagery and civilization…The most significant thing about 

the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land.”

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In Turner’s scheme, Natty is the nexus between those two worlds of savagery and 

civilization. Drawing a comparison to Sir Walter Scott’s title character in Waverley, George 

Dekker wrote that Natty “mediates between Old world and New World primitives.”

250

 If this 

reading places Natty in an awkward position, at least it doesn’t implicate him as an agent in the 

expansion of civilization as Donald Ringe does below.  

 

Instead, it is preferable to see Natty as the last representative of the historical New World, 

fleeing from civilization rather than spreading it. When he is asked what he has seen from the 

edge of the Catskills, he responds, “Creation…all creation lad.”

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 When he decides to ultimately 

leave Templeton, he tells Oliver, “Why, lad, they tell me that on the big lakes there’s the best of 

hunting, and a great range without a white man on it unless it may be one like myself.  I’m weary 

of living in clearings, and where the hammer is sounding in my ears from sunrise to sundown.  

And though I’m much bound to ye both, children—I wouldn’t say it if It was not true—I crave to 

go into the woods agin—I do.”

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 Fittingly, the novel concludes with Natty’s departure and this 

sentence: “He had gone far toward the setting sun—the foremost in that band of pioneers who 

are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent.”

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