James Fenimore Cooper and the Pull of the Woods

James Fenimore Cooper and the Pull of the Woods:Enriching New York State MemoriesByDennis J. Carroll Any time spent in New York State, particularly as a child, sleigh riding its hills, walki

 

James Fenimore Cooper and the Pull of the Woods:

Enriching New York State Memories

By

Dennis J. Carroll

 

 

     Any  time spent in New York State, particularly as a child, sleigh riding its hills, walking through its spongy spring thaws and new growth, swimming its lakes and fishing it's streams, seeing its autumn leaves or its snow-filled forests and meadows, ensnares him or her forever and provides sensory experiences through which subsequent memories are filtered. There is a direct connection between nature and time, the writers who describe it or the artists who paint it. Yes, Sullivan County spoiled me with its mountains, forests, brooks, lakes and rivers and formed my basis for comparison in the jungles of Central America, the forests of Europe, the woods of North Carolina and, given New York State quarries, even the sandstone monuments and deserts of the Southwest.

        It is impossible for me to travel through New York State today and not remember, and it is because of these experiences that reading about this area is always such a vivid and rich adventure.

     In the winter of 1826, James Fenimore Cooper first published The Last of the Mohicans, the world's first exposure to his native woodsman, Natty Bumpoo, a white man raised by the Delaware Indians. Bumpoo is Cooper's archetype appearing in all five of the Leather Stocking Tales. He is called Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans and by other names such as Deerslayer, Leather Stocking, Pathfinder, the trapper and the old man in the other tales.

     What the Eighteenth Century world didn't know at the time was that while The Last of the Mohicans was the first of the Leather Stocking Tales published, in reality, it was third in the story line, The Pioneers and The Prairie would follow and then Cooper would go back and write the first two in the series.

     As a young boy Cooper-later referred to as the American Sir Walter Scott by his contemporaries and probably our first American novelist-came from Burlington, New Jersey where he was born in 1789, to what would be called Cooperstown, named after his father a Congressman and judge who moved the family there in 1790, next to Otsego Lake, the area is the setting for The Pioneers.   

     New York State lakes figure largely in four of the Leather Stocking Tales:  Lake George called Horicon   in The Last of the Mohicans, Otsego called Glimmerglass in The Deerslayer and Ontario in The Pathfinder.  Cooper's settings have survived the centuries and places, like the woods where much of the French and Indian War-although his use of history is more artistic than factual (Colonel Monroe the commanding officer of Fort William Henry probably had no daughters and the Iroquois fought on the side of the British and not the French as Cooper would have it-took place and the backdrop of the plot for the Last of the Mohicans, exist and still lend naturalism and reality so many years later.

     Driving upstate, the highway sign reads Leather Stocking Region and as Gary Fallesen quotes from  The Pioneers, in Peak Experiences: Hiking the Highest Summits in New York County by County " ‘near the center of the state of New York lies an extensive district of country. . .whose surface is a succession of hills and dales. . .of mountains and valleys.' " In the author's words, a place where "‘Centuries of summer suns had warmed the tops of the same noble oaks and pines. . .' "

     There is universality to this region, the mountains, streams, lakes, swamps and woods aesthetically pull on sense and memory.  It was, after all The Last of the Mohicans which inspired the painter Thomas Cole, a founding member of the Hudson River School, to depict what was occurring in the Europe's Romantic Period in Art and Literature by portraying what Cooper inspired in at least one painting , the "Landscape Scene from ‘The Last of the Mohicans.' "He painted what Louise Minks states in The Hudson River School. . . " that  "journeys into. . . the Catskills of New York were considered spiritual experiences bringing one closer to God."  It was and is a place as Minks, quoting William Cullen Bryant, ". . . over scenes of wild grandeur . . . aerial mountain tops with their mighty growth of forest never touched by the ax, along the banks of streams never deformed by culture, and into the depth of skies bright with the hues of our own climate, skies such as few but [Thomas] Cole could ever paint, and through the transparent abyss of which you might send an arrow out of sight."

     New York State was part of the territory belonging to The Iroquois Nation comprised of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas and later the Tuscaroras.  In its vastness, as anyone who has tramped its woods, swam its lakes or climbed its mountains can attest,  there is the privacy  and solitude of space to think, reflect and perhaps see glimpses of the greatness of  nature in ourselves.  Yet how did Cooper the writer do this for his audience then and the countless others who followed?

     One of the most memorable scenes in The Last of the Mohicans takes place behind a waterfall, a place which actually exists.  It is called Glen's Falls, located on the Hudson before it becomes a navigatable river, close to its source, a place visited by Cooper and a group of friends in the summer of 1824.

According to his daughter Susan Cooper, one of the group said, "here was the very scene for a romance." As Daniel Peck in the introduction to New Essays on The Last of the Mohicans states: "While the scenes of Glens Falls may have served Cooper as the initial impetus for writing The Last of the Mohicans, the narrative and symbolic meanings he invested in this site, and in the novel's larger geography as well, came from his own interior landscape. . . . It involved Cooper's dreaming his way backward from the deteriorated falls and tourist structures he found at the site in 1824 to a true wildlife setting. The erasure and reconfiguration of the landscape . . . among the deepest sources of Cooper's powers as a novelist in The Last of the Mohicans, and in his other fiction as well."

     In Tusten Township--in Sullivan County-- a mile or so down Beaver Brook Road, Beaver Brook Lake becomes a waterfall before it continues on as a brook until it eventually flows into the Delaware and in springtime, while not huge, it is impressive to a child nonetheless.  When I first read The Last of the Mohicans, my point of reference for a waterfall was this place.  When an Iroquois warrior tried to drop from a tree branch into a flatboat in The Deerslayer, I visualized the woods down in the gully along Airport road in Yulan and for Cooper's numerous Canoe rides I drew upon paddling along the shoreline of Bodine and Washington Lakes.

     As James Grossman says in James Fenimore Cooper: A Biographical and  Critical Study, "the author is not writing autobiographically of the world he saw at the age of four but of the world he missed and of what he must have heard in childhood. . .the haunting quality of something just around the corner from memory." As for example, in The Pioneers there is . . . the cold of winter, the warmth of household fires, Christmas cheer in the tavern, night fishing on the lake. . ."  The strong pull of nature, which affected James Fenimore Cooper, remains strong enough over time to enrich youthful memories formed in those special places of upstate New York and often returned to in my mind.

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