James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier: The Pioneers as History

Conclusion 

 

Writing of 19

th

 century Americans, Hyman Kuritz concluded that, “[T]he association of 

knowledge with its applications – its utility – was interwoven with a growing self-conception 

that the productions of the craftsman and the mechanic made possible a grasp of regularities and 

order in nature hitherto not even so conceptualized.” As Americans were beginning to conquer 

the laws of nature and physics, they were entering a different kind of undiscovered country. In 

this country, they believed, they could build their new nation not only on the pillars of a new 

social and political order, but also on one of dominion over nature. “The new men of science 

now raised the possibility that nature could not only be understood but could be altered to meet 

the needs of man.”

191

  

Certainly, Cooper recognized this tendency in the late 18

th

 century in the efforts of his 

father to apply science and reason to the sugar maple industry, a fact he mirrored in Temple’s 

                                                 

189

 Cooper 85 

190

 Cooper 85 

191

 Kuritz 259 

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46 

efforts. Americans like William Cooper hoped to apply knowledge to achieve the maximum 

yield on their investment, whether it was sugar from a tree or the development of an entire city. 

Again, there was an underlying imperative at work. Gordon Wood wrote that “Political and 

physical science seemed to be providentially linked, and technology became as important as 

virtue in achieving America’s realization of itself as a moral republic.”

192

 Although the tools at 

their disposal – the existing scientific knowledge – may have been lacking, they sallied forth 

undaunted in an effort to tame the land through reason and science.  

But there were also shortcomings to this approach, namely the infancy of their new 

knowledge and the imperfection of the institutions on which they were based. Cooper 

demonstrates this non-fatal flaw through the character of Todd, whose medical knowledge is 

revealed as inferior to Chingachgook’s, but not dangerously so. Nevertheless, as they had done 

via the religious conversions of the Indians, settlers disregarded existing practices to impose their 

own, even when they hadn’t nearly perfected those practices. 

 

 

 

                                                 

192

 Wood, Rising Glory 253 

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47 

CHAPTER 4: A CHANGING LAND