James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier: The Pioneers as History

 [Part Four: October, 1794. Epilogue] 

Chapter 41: 

[The End of the Story] Between August and October Edward Oliver Effingham and 

Elizabeth Temple have been married, and Edward's grandfather has died. Natty and Ben Pump 

had to return to jail, but were soon pardoned by the Governor and freed. Hiram Doolittle, duly 

compensated for his troubles, has moved on west, and Monsieur Le Quoi has returned to Paris. 

In mid-October, Oliver asks his bride Elizabeth to walk with him on the east side of the lake. 

Elizabeth worries about the Grant family, but her husband says Judge Temple has arranged for 

Rev. Grant to become Minister of a church in the Hudson Valley, where he will be comfortable 

and Louisa can meet appropriate suitors. They arrive at the site of Natty Bumppo's cabin, where 

they find two gravestones which Natty is vainly trying to read. Oliver reads them for him: one is 

that of his grandfather, Major Oliver Effingham, with an inscription saluting the devotion of 

Nathaniel Bumppo who had cared for him in old age. The other is of John Mohegan, the last of 

his people. Natty says that since the Indians are now all gone, it is time for him to leave as well; 

he plans to seek the wilderness of the Great Lakes. He refuses to accept any money, shoulders 

his rifle, calls his dogs, and departs, "the foremost in that band of Pioneers, who are opening the 

way for the march of the nation across the continent," and is never seen in Templeton again. 

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75 

 

REFERENCES 

 

 

 

Works Cited: 

 

Books

: 

 

Adams, Charles Hansford, “The Guardian of the Law”: Authority and Identity in James 

Fenimore Cooper, (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1990) 

Bailyn, Bernard, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of 

Harvard University Press, 1967) 

Banning, Lance, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca: Cornell 

University, 1978) 

Beard, Charles A., An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New 

York: Macmillan, 1935)  

Beatty, Charles, The Journal of a Two Months Tour; With a View of Promoting Religion among 

the Frontier Inhabitants of Pennsylvania and of Introducing Christianity among the Indians To 

the Westward of the Alegh-geny Mountains, (Edinburgh: MacCliesh and Ogle, 1799) 

 

Berkin, Carol, First Generations: Women in Colonial America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996) 

 

Boynton, Henry, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Century, 1931)

 

 

Bruun, Erik and Crosby, Jay, eds., Our Nation’s Archive: A History of the United States in 

Documents (Black Dog and Leventhal, 1999) 

 

Cohen, I. Bernard, Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of 

Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Madison (New York: Norton, 1995) 

 

Cooper, James Fenimore, The Pioneers (New York: Signet Classic Books, 1964) 

 

Cott, Nancy F., The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835, 2nd 

ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997)  

 

Countryman, Edward; A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society 

in New York, 1760-1790 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989) 

 

Cronon, William; Changes In the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England 

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) 

 

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76 

Darnell, Donald, James Fenimore Cooper: Novelist of Manners, (Newark: University of 

Delaware Press, 1993), 45-6 

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

Farragher, John Mack, ed., Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner (New York: Henry Holt and 

Company, 1994) 

Griffiths, Nicholas and Cervantes, Fernando, Eds.; Spiritual Encounters: Interactions Between 

Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of 

Nebraska Press, 1999) 

Grossman, James, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: W. Sloane, 1949) 

Hatch, Nathan O.; The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University, 

1989) 

Heffner, Richard, ed., Democracy In America by Alexis de Tocqueville (Penguin Books, 1956) 

Heimert, Alan, Religion and the American Mind, From the Great Awakening to the Revolution 

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966)  

James, Janet Wilson; Changing Ideas About Women in the United States, 1776-1825 (New 

York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1981) 

 

Jennings, Francis, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest 

(New York: Norton, 1976) 

Josselyn, John, An Account of Two Voyages to New England (London: Widdows, 1674) 

Kerber, Linda, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca: 

Cornell University Press, 1970, 1980) 

 

-----------Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: 

University of North Carolina Press, 1980)  

Kett, Joseph F., The Formation of the American Medical Profession: The Role of Institutions, 

1780-1860, (New Haven: Yale University, 1968) 

 

Kim, Sung Bok, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664-1775 

Reprint ed. (Raleigh: University of North Carolina, 1987) 

 

Lambert, Frank, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton, N.J.: 

Princeton University Press, 2003)  

Lawlor, Mary, Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West (New 

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000) 

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77 

LeBeau, Bryan, Religion In America to 1865 (New York: New York University Press, 2000) 

 

Long, Robert Emmet, James Fenimore Cooper, (New York: Continuum, 1990)  

 

Lounsbury, Thomas, James Fenimore Cooper (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882) 

 

Meinig, Donald W., “The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of 

History,” Volume 1, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) 

 

Merchant, Carolyn, Ecological Revolutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1989)  

 

Miller, Perry, Errand Into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University 

Press, 1956) 

Motley, Warren, The American Abraham: James Fenimore Cooper and the Frontier Patriarch 

(Cambridge: University Press, 1987) 

 

Nash, Roderick,

 

Wilderness and the American Mind, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) 

 

Norton, Mary Beth, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 

1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980)  

 

---------- Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Formation of American 

Society (New York: Knopf, 1996)  

Peardon, Thomas P. ed., The Second Treatise on Government, by John Locke (Indianapolis:, 

Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1952) 

Peterson, Merrill D. Ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977) 

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

Princeton University Press, 1978) 

Ringe, Donald, James Fenimore Cooper, Updated ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1988)  

Slotkin, Richard; The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of 

Industrialization (New York: Atheneum, 1985) 

Spiller, Robert, Fenimore Cooper: Critic Of His Times (New York: Milton, Balch and Co., 1931) 

Taylor, Alan, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early 

American Republic (New York: Vintage Books, 1996) 

 

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

Puritans Through Whitman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979)  

 

Twain, Mark, “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences” in How to Tell a Story and Other Essays 

(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897) 

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78 

Walters, Ronald G., America’s Reformers, 1815-1860, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978)  

 

Waples, Dorothy, The Whig Myth of James Fenimore Cooper  (New Haven: Yale, 1938) 

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

Press; 1971, 1990) 

----------The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York: Norton, 1969) 

--------- The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York; Knopf, 1992)