James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier: The Pioneers as History

The Pioneers,” 

places their relationship into the context of Cooper’s 

own internal conflict. Cooper, he wrote, “operates in the throes of two irreconcilable forces, his 

love for the untamed wilderness -- the ideal of the individual living in harmony with nature: and 

his love for frontier society -- the ideal of society conquering and taming nature.”

26

 In New 

World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans Through 

Whitman, Cecelia Tichi describes the need for society to tame nature as “central to the survival 

of America’s historic mission.”

27

 

While these writers were examining the relative merits of each side of this conflict, others 

have questioned whether the conflict is itself nothing more than a fictional literary construct. 

In “The Pioneers, Or the Sources of American Legal History: a Critical Tale,” Brook 

Thomas argues that The Pioneers romanticized individualism in regard to the law and imagined a 

law based on the “fiction of self-sufficient individualism.”

28

 In Fatal Environment: The Myth of 

the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, Richard Slotkin also places The Pioneers within a 

succession of mythic novels of the American west, arguing that the perpetuation of these myths 

was used to justify race and class based oppression in all areas of American society.

29

 

                                                 

22

 Stephen Railton, Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University 

Press, 1978) 91 

23

 Railton 92 

24

 Railton 95 

25

 George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (Cambridge: University Press, 1987) 

26

 John Kandl, “Natty and the Judge: The Pictorial Development of an Ambivalent Theme in 

The Pioneers,”

 

Originally published in 

James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art

, Papers from the Bicentennial 

Conference, July 1989  

27

 Cecelia Tichi, New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans Through 

Whitman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) 174 

28

 Brook Thomas, The Pioneers, Or the Sources of American Legal History: a Critical Tale,” 

American 

Quarterly

, Vol. 36, No. 1. (Spring, 1984): 111 

29

 Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization (New York: 

Atheneum, 1985) 

---

 

9 

Similarly, while Cooper may have been creating a myth of the individual, he also may 

have been creating a mythic sense of the wilderness. In “A Puritan in the Wilderness: Natty 

Bumppo's Language & America's Nature Today,”

30

 Paul K. Johnston argues that The Pioneers 

played a key role in creating the romanticized vision of wilderness that William Cronon 

cautioned against in “The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.”

31

  

“Cooper's 

The Pioneers

 is a crucial text in American cultural history in that it served to 

transform the Puritans' Biblical notion of wilderness into the secularized yet nevertheless still 

sacred notion of wilderness that became increasingly important in American culture in the 

nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” he wrote.

32

 

Others have praised Cooper as an avant garde environmentalist. In “James Fenimore 

Cooper: Pioneer of the Environmental Movement,” Hugh C. MacDougall wrote that “