The Myth of American Ability: Cooper's Leatherstocking, the

Frontier Tradition, and the Making of the American Canon Thomas

JordanBinghamton UniversityE-mail: tjordan1@binghamton.edu

Keywords:

Disability; Able-bodiedness; Frontier; Myth

Abstract

James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales have achieved canonical

literary status in the US academy and provide a representative example of the
frontier tradition in American writing. Through a close reading of Cooper's first
romance, I argue that America's longstanding frontier narrative is predicated
on the cultural projection of the able-bodied hero. In The Pioneers, Cooper
relies on dueling constructions of disability and able-bodiedness to distinguish
his white hero from his friend and Native American counterpart,
Chingachgook. While Chingachgook's disability provides the logic for his
eventual suicide and removal from the narrative, Natty Bumppo's strength of
character becomes registered through the physical perfection of his body. In
celebrating Natty Bumppo's passage from old age in The Pioneers to new
youth in The Deerslayer, the critical tradition surrounding the Leatherstocking
series has tacitly endorsed Cooper's corporeal hierarchy, suggesting that the
myth of the American frontier relies upon a much deeper myth of American
ability.

In this article, I argue that America's longstanding frontier narrative is

predicated on the cultural projection of the able-bodied hero. In following Natty
Bumppo from old age in The Pioneers to new youth in The Deerslayer, the
Leatherstocking tales provide a paradigmatic example of this broader cultural
phenomenon. James Fenimore Cooper turned to the wilderness of the frontier
in order to draw a unique portrait of American national identity, and his lasting
contribution to the American cultural mythos has been his frontier hero, Natty
Bumppo. Bumppo reflects the core qualities of the burgeoning American
character—rugged individualism, self-reliance, moral certitude in the face of
difficult ethical dilemmas, and freedom from the potentially stifling strictures of
society. These characteristics gain their force through his physical acts of
valor—the rescue of captive women, the winning of numerous shooting
competitions, and the reluctant killing of countless Native Americans in the
unique warfare of the frontier. As "a man without a cross," Natty Bumppo
became a symbol of the nation's white, Anglo-Saxon destiny, and his racial
purity became legible at least in part through the physical perfection of his
body. 1

Even as early as The Pioneers, Cooper deploys a binary opposition between

the disabled and the able-bodied in order to mark a point of separation
between Natty Bumppo and his Native American friend and counterpart,
Chingachgook. Here, Chingachgook occupies a disabled identity in order to
facilitate his ultimate removal from the novel. Chingachgook's physical frailty
is a narrative device that foreshadows his eventual suicide and symbolically
positions the end of the Native American race as the result of a process of
natural selection rather than violent British and US imperialism. In the midst of
the narrative action of The Pioneers, Cooper realizes that Natty Bumppo
cannot share the fate of Chingachgook, and it is in this novel that he first
begins to realize the mythic potential of what will become his most beloved
character. At the conclusion of the novel, Chingachgook dies and Bumppo
lives, and their alternate fates come to reveal the strange relationship between
disability and able-bodiedness—both symbiotic and parasitic—that continues
to captivate America's cultural imagination.

Cooper's problematic reliance on dueling constructions of disability and able-

bodiedness has become even more troubling as a history of Americanist
literary critics have tacitly endorsed his distinction. While nominating Cooper's
Leatherstocking series into the American canon, the myth-symbol school of
American literary critics relied upon Cooper's reversal of the natural aging
process to metaphorize the promise of the American nation. Bumppo's
transition from old age in The Pioneers (published in 1823) to new youth
in The Deerslayer (published in 1841) offered a convenient metaphor for the
unique character of America, one that contrasted to the assumed decadence
of the Old World. But by privileging youth over old age, these critics defined
the meaning of America around a corporeal hierarchy that privileged some
bodies over others, revealing a much deeper mythos underwriting the
American national identity: the myth of American ability. It is to this myth—
along with its firm belief that America attracted a race of man that could
achieve all that the rest of a darkened world could not—that so many of
America's defining literary motifs owe their genesis, including Emerson's self-
reliance, Franklin's belief in the perfectibility of man, and in the case of this
article, the frontiersman's rugged individualism.

The Pioneers: A Brief Overview

The Pioneers was never really intended to be Natty Bumppo's story, and he
remains largely incidental to the central narrative until the novel's conclusion.
Cooper refers to The Pioneers as a descriptive tale and his portrait of the
burgeoning town of Templeton is based upon his own home in Cooperstown,
New York. Above all else, Cooper depicts the growth of a small town at the
borders of the frontier in order to tell a uniquely American story of national
origins. The plot turns on a romance between Oliver Effingham and Elizabeth
Temple and the novel mirrors literary conventions established in Europe,
modeled most closely after the romances of Walter Scott.

Two conflicts animate the narrative action—one between Oliver Effingham

and Judge Temple and the other between Judge Temple and Natty Bumppo.
The conflict between Effingham and Temple emerges out of the historical
context of the American Revolution. At one time business partners, Temple,
the American, and Colonel Edward Effingham, Oliver's British father, part
ways amicably at the time of the revolution, when Temple retains the assets of
their shared business with Edward's consent. While Oliver believes that
Temple seized the American victory as an opportunity to take full control over
the Effingham estate and cheat him out of his inheritance, he learns at the
novel's conclusion that the Judge has been holding his estate in trust this
whole time, a fact that is clearly outlined in Temple's will. With the marriage of
Oliver and Elizabeth at the novel's conclusion, the conflict is resolved, erasing
any leftover enmity between Old World and New while attesting to the legal
status of America's independence.

John P. McWilliams explains the other central conflict of the novel by charting
the differences in the disputants' characters:

Leatherstocking exemplifies the just man in a Lockean State of Nature, [while]

Judge Temple must bring institutional justice to the State of Civilization.
[Temple represents] gentleman who relied upon property contracts, man-
made law, and votes to build a good society at demonstrable expense to
natural liberty, [while Bumppo represents] the individualist who, relying upon
himself and the wilderness around him, pursued without qualification the laws
of Nature's God. (57)

While Bumppo represents a profoundly ethical relationship to the natural

landscape and personal freedom from the strictures of institutional law,
Cooper ultimately positions Judge Temple as the ideal for the future of the
American republic. As Henry Nash Smith accurately concludes, "The
profundity of the symbol of Leatherstocking springs from the fact that Cooper
displays a genuine ambivalence toward all these issues, although in every
case his strongest commitment is to the forces of order" (62).

Each of these conflicts serve to mask the underlying dispossession of

America's Native American populations, represented in The Pioneers by
Bumppo's aging friend and chief of the Delaware tribe, Chingachgook. Eric
Cheyfitz has pointed out that for the majority of the novel, Oliver Effingham
appears to occupy a Native American identity, and even challenges Judge
Temple's right to the lands surrounding Templeton on the grounds of
indigenous land rights. Oliver emerges suddenly and mysteriously in the novel
and spends most of his time with Bumppo and Chingachgook, causing the
other townspeople to assume that he is a "half-breed," with one character
remarking that he "can never be weaned from the savage ways" (122). As
Cheyfitz explains, "[A]t the end of The Pioneers the opposition between
'Young Eagle' and the Judge, between Indian and white, that has sustained
the debate over land rights collapses, when it is revealed that Oliver Edwards
is the son and heir of Judge Temple's former silent business partner" (123).
Here, the uncertainty of Oliver's ancestry is revealed as a narrative ploy and
the novel affirms that property rights can only be legally disputed by white
men.

The critical tradition on The Pioneers has accurately read the novel as a text
about law and property in nineteenth-century America, what Cheyfitz refers to
as a "fiction about the law" (119). But as a cultural text, the novel cannot
simply rely on the letter of the law to affirm its central ideological positions;
rather, Cooper's characters and the narrative sequence of his novel are
carefully drawn to justify specific legal positions in cultural and affective terms.
Cooper sets his novel in 1793-1794, shortly after the Revolution, in order to
produce a fiction about the law that has its origin in the birth of the nation and
justifies the national spread West that was occurring more and more rapidly at
the time he was writing.

Anna Johnston and Alan Lawson's essay titled "Settler Colonies" helps to
explain what is at stake in Cooper's nationalist project. For Johnston and
Lawson:

historical definitions of "settler colonies" have relied on the presence of long-

term, majority white racial communities, where indigenous peoples have been
outnumbered and removed by colonial policies and practices. Thus countries
like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have traditionally been described as
"settler colonies," although it is also possible to make more complex
arguments about the inclusion of nations such as the US or South Africa, for
example. (361)

Cooper's novel is not, strictly speaking, concerned with the organizing

category of the "settler" and its ambiguous status as both "colonized and
colonizing"—by 1794, Judge Temple is the sovereign power of Templeton
(Johnston 363). But in the settling act, "there is a strategic disavowal of the
colonizing act. In this process, 'the national' is what replaces 'the indigenous'
and in doing so conceals its participation in colonization by nominating a new
'colonized' subject—the colonizer or settler-invader" (365). As Johnston and
Lawson explain:

The crucial theoretical move to be made is to see the "settler" as uneasily

occupying a place caught between two First Worlds, two origins of authority
and authenticity. One of these is the originating world of Europe, the Imperium
—the source of its principal cultural authority. Its "other" First World is that of
the First Nations whose authority they not only replaced and effaced but also
desired. (370)

The two seemingly disparate conflicts that run throughout The Pioneers can

be understood as alternative appeals to the different poles of authority and
authenticity that Johnston and Lawson describe. Again, Cooper's novel
appeals to literary authority through the form of the European romance, and
his narrative nominates Judge Temple as the patriarch of the nation through
the marriage of Oliver and Elizabeth, a marriage that symbolically unites the
Old World and the New. As the novel progresses, Natty Bumppo emerges as
the representative authority of the "First World" of indigenous inhabitants.
While the character of the New World was in large part defined by the settlers'
initial experiences with indigenous populations of Native Americans, Cooper
reveals the parasitic nature of this history, positioning Bumppo as "the figure
who is ready to step in when the native 'dies out'" (Johnston 364). Ultimately,
Cooper resolves conflicts in The Pioneers through the effacement and
replacement of "First World" forms of cultural authority with nationalist forms
of cultural authority that affirm a uniquely American mythos. By reading the
novel through the lens of disability studies, it becomes clear that Cooper is
only able accomplish this process of effacement and replacement by
appealing to the contrast between the disabled and able body. As a result,
Cooper's form of nationalism is deeply entrenched in what Tobin Siebers has
referred to as the "ideology of ability."

The Death of Chingachgook

While the final four Leatherstocking Tales are populated by a number of
Native American characters, The Pioneers sole indigenous representative is
Chingachgook, friend of Natty Bumppo and chief of the Delaware
tribe. 2 Chingachgook exists at the margins of Cooper's text, remaining
incidental to the central plot for much of the novel. Yet, his character still
serves an important narrative purpose as Cooper charts the passage from the
wild age of the frontier to the newly minted civilization represented by Judge
Temple. Eric Cheyfitz argues in "Savage Law" that the Johnson and Graham's
Lessee v. M'Intosh Supreme Court case of 1823 (the year of The
Pioneers publication), produced a legal fiction that denied Native Americans
property rights and allowed the government to claim legal title over their lands.
The Johnson v. M'Intosh ruling became "the cornerstone of the establishment
of federal Indian law," and in doing so, acted as a "preamble to the famous
Cherokee cases of 1831 and 1832 that limited the sovereignty of Indian
peoples to that of 'domestic dependent nations'" (Cheyfitz 110). Cooper's
novel corroborates this legal decision in no uncertain terms, but he is
simultaneously interested in mediating the cultural inheritance offered by the
indigenous inhabitants of the New World.

Cooper accomplishes both the legal and cultural work of Native American
dispossession through his depiction of Chingachgook in an effort to naturalize
the American spread West across the continent. Early descriptions of
Chingachgook reveal this fundamental goal:

As he walked slowly down the long hall, the dignified and deliberate tread of
the Indian surprised the spectators. His shoulders, and body to his waist, were
entirely bare, with the exception of a silver medallion of Washington that was
suspended from his neck by a thong of buckskin, and rested on his high
chest, amidst many scars. His shoulders were rather broad and full; but the
arms, though straight and graceful, wanted the muscular appearance that
labor gives to a race of men. (82, emphasis mine)

While the opening lines of this passage suggest the inherent nobility of
Chingachgook and the Mohican blood line, the final line reveals a far different
intention for Chingachgook's inclusion in the narrative. Here, Chingachgook's
slack arms suggest his inability to labor effectively in the new world. The
movement of the passage from the solitary and aging Chingachgook to "a
race of men" signals the broader failure of the Native American race to
properly settle and develop the land. This same logic is at the heart of
the Lessee v. M'Intosh decision: "…the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country
were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was
drawn chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their country
was to leave the country a wilderness" (Cheyfitz 117). The savage/civilized
binary that structures the Supreme Court decision and Cooper's description of
Chingachgook rests on the assertion that the "savage" inherently lacks the
ability to improve the physical landscape for civilization.

Later in the novel, Cooper suggests the limits of Native American nobility
through the voice of Natty Bumppo when Chingachgook has too much to
drink: "This is the way with all the savages; give them liquor, and they make
dogs of themselves" (158). For Cooper, the Native American psyche is fatally
flawed in a way that dooms their population to extinction. What is unique and
significant about his description of Chingachgook is that this inner deviance
becomes legible through the physical degeneracy of his body.
Chingachgook's slack arms reveal the fate of his people, a physical marker of
that more deeply rooted inability to contribute to the growth of a civilization.
Cooper refuses to narrate the violent extermination of the Native American
population, choosing here to age them out in a seemingly more natural and
humane way. It is for this reason that Chingachgook's old age is continually
emphasized throughout the novel—his ultimate fate is consciously marked
through descriptions of what can be referred to as his disabled body. This
depiction allows Cooper to conceal the power dynamics that structure his
relationship to Chingachgook beneath a discourse of paternalism—he
sympathizes with Chingachgook's failings and impending death without being
implicated in his fate. Cooper translates the failures he finds in the Native
American race onto Chingachgook's physical body, thereby marking
Chingachgook's passing out of his novel—symbolically the Native American
population passing out of his nation—as a natural phenomenon, a product of
his personal and private limitations rather than the result of the violent acts of
dispossession propagated by European Americans.

Thinking about Cooper's representation of Chingachgook in relation to

disability also provides critical insight into his death scene at the novel's
conclusion. As a fire breaks out and consumes the forest surrounding
Templeton, trapping Elizabeth, Oliver, and Chingachgook, Chingachgook is
the only character who chooses to forfeit his life to the flames without
resistance. As Elizabeth pleads with Chingachgook to move, Oliver explains,
"He considers this as the happiest moment of his life. He is past seventy, and
has been decaying rapidly for some time: he received some injury in chasing
that unlucky deer, too, on the lake" (391). Oliver relies on Chingachgook's age
and the rapid decay of his body to explain his seemingly irrational decision.
While Cooper has set this rationale in place from the opening scenes of the
narrative, Chingachgook is marked by physical injury one last time. 3 Here,
Chingachgook's death represents an author-assisted suicide, where Cooper's
decision to euthanize his aging Native American character has been
manipulated from the novel's opening by his racial and imperial
assumptions. 4 Further, the mysterious "injury" that Chingachgook receives
hunting the deer also links his death symbolically to the transgression of the
law. 5 While Judge Temple places Natty Bumppo on public display in the
stocks for his transgression, the sovereign author punishes Chingachgook by
removing him from the narrative altogether. That Cooper relies on a sudden
narrative contrivance to punish Chingachgook rather than the legal apparatus
outlined throughout the novel affirms that Chingachgook lacks the legal rights
of a citizen, but it also suggests that the law is incapable of perfecting the
Indian "nature" that Bumppo observes when Chingachgook drinks to excess.
On the surface of the novel, Cooper's resolution is meant to appear benign.
Chingachgook's willing death relieves Cooper of the burden of accounting for
the Native American claim to the frontier that shadows so much of the novel,
providing a "moment of Anglo-American wishful thinking about all Indians as it
masks in suicide Anglo-American homicide of Native Americans" (Cheyfitz
121).

Chingachgook's suicide is contingent upon the depiction of his disabled body

—his physical limitations are deployed as the key rationale for his decision to
die. Cooper is only able to exonerate himself from the Anglo-American
destruction of the Native American race by relying on the symbolic efficacy of
disability to signal decay, assuming his readers will accept the fact that the
type of life he affords Chingachgook is not really worth living. And this is not
the only time in Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales that disability discovers its
telos in death—the fate of Hetty Hutter in The Deerslayer exemplifies the logic
at work in Chingachgook's suicide even more plainly. Hetty is described
throughout The Deerslayer as "feeble-minded" and "mentally imbecile."
Hetty's death scene is strikingly similar to Chingachgook's:

When the assault was over, and the dead and wounded were collected, poor
Hetty had been found among the latter. A rifle bullet had passed through her
body, inflicting an injury that was known at a glance, to be mortal. How this
wound was received, no one knew; it was probably one of those casualties
that ever accompany scenes like that related in the previous chapter. (526)

No blame is cast for Hetty's death; she dies from a stray bullet off of Cooper's
pen. The mystery surrounding her bullet wound mirrors the mystery of the
injury Chingachgook suffers on the lake. The uncertainty of these scenes
signals the superficial means by which both romances are resolved, but
mystery is also meant to implicate a higher, more natural power of selection in
these characters' fates.

In removing Hetty from The Deerslayer, Cooper also reproduces the

paternalist discourse that painted his depiction of Chingachgook:

Thus died Hetty Hutter, one of those mysterious links between the material
and immaterial world, which, while they appear to be deprived of so much that
is esteemed and necessary for this state of being, draw so near to, and offer
so beautiful an illustration of the truth, purity, and simplicity of another. (535)

Cooper links Hetty's intellectual disability to the "truth, purity, and simplicity" of
a more spiritual plane of existence, but this gesture is undercut by the more
pressing assumption that she lacks what is "necessary for this state of being."
As the critical tradition surrounding Cooper's work suggests, Cooper's novel is
primarily invested in the affairs of men and women of this world rather than
any world beyond—his treatment of the burgeoning nation is secular rather
than religious. His final nod to the spiritual or even metaphysical implications
of Hetty's intellectual disability carries no real weight in the world he has
constructed in The Deerslayer. The real implications of her disability can be
affirmed only through her sudden death, the most pointed being that disabled
individuals lack the necessary abilities to own property. In the law written by
the Leatherstocking Tales, disability marks an exclusion from property rights
by designating types of people who are physically or intellectually incapable of
managing that property. Hetty's case simply lays bare the essential logic at
work in Cooper's depiction of Chingachgook in The Pioneers and the Lessee
v. M'Intosh decision rendered by the Supreme Court.

The Making of a Hero

When Cooper first sat down to write The Pioneers, it seems that his initial
intentions for Natty Bumppo were similar to those he held for Chingachgook. If
Chingachgook's fate—and by extension, the larger fate of the Native
American population in America—is naturalized through consistent
descriptions of his physical frailty, Bumppo's introduction really isn't all that
different. For much of the novel, he is depicted as an obstinate, elderly
frontiersman whose long, rambling stories trail off into nostalgia for his youth
and a former way of life. In such scenes, Bumppo is never meant to be our
hero. But as the novel unfolds, Bumppo's character gradually exceeds the
boundaries that Cooper's narrative initially imposes—he moves beyond the
marginal role prescribed for him and poses questions serious enough to
challenge the novel's resolution. His white identity also provides a stark
contrast to Chingachgook's Native American identity, a point that will be
emphasized repeatedly in the next of the Leatherstocking Tales, The Last of
the Mohicans. While Bumppo's age may have been intended to mark him as a
relic from a past way of life that was no longer tenable, it is his ability to hack
out a life on the frontier that becomes so appealing to Cooper.

For the last third of The Pioneers, Natty Bumppo is absolutely central to the
narrative, and figures most prominently in the final series of action sequences.
Bumppo rescues Elizabeth and Louisa from a deadly panther in the midst of
the forest, he wrestles the much younger Hiram Doolittle away from his home,
and he saves Elizabeth and Oliver from a wild fire that would have otherwise
taken their lives. In all of these sequences (as in earlier scenes where he
demonstrates his proficiency with a rifle), Bumppo's age becomes
inconsequential; in moments of particular danger and intensity, the reader is
able to glimpse a side of the Leatherstocking that does not match his seventy-
year-old frame. Nowhere is this more plainly demonstrated than at the
conclusion of The Pioneers when Bumppo pulls Chingachgook from the
flames: "Natty…seized the strips of the blanket, and with wonderful dexterity
strapped the passive chieftain to his own back; when he turned, and with a
strength that seemed to bid defiance not only to his years but to his load, he
led the way to the point whence he had issued" (396). In one way, this scene
dramatizes the conflict at work within Cooper's creative imagination—while
Cooper leaves Chingachgook to burn in the fire, he has created a character
who will not. At the same time, it is in this scene that Cooper finally realizes
Bumppo's full potential. Through most of the novel, Bumppo is positioned at
the borderline between two competing worldviews, one represented by
Chingachgook and the age of the open frontier and the other by Judge
Temple and the age of civilization. The critical resistance that Bumppo offers
Temple rests on what Johnston and Lawson referred to as the "first world" of
indigenous cultural authority, and in this way, Bumppo's critical insight is
always dependent upon his relationship to Chingachgook. In this final scene,
that relationship is inverted, where Chingachgook is flung to Bumppo's back
and hangs like a child, dependent upon Bumppo for his life. Here, the Lessee
v. M'Intosh decision and the later court decisions that would follow find their
perfect cultural allotrope—as Bumppo discovers his proper place in the
national imaginary, Chingachgook is removed to the position of "domestic
dependent." It is by no accident that these roles are corroborated by the
opposing physical states of the two characters' bodies—while Chingachgook
suffers his final mysterious wound, the power of Bumppo's character becomes
intelligible through the strength of his body.

Donald Pease writes in Visionary Compacts that "Cooper invented a figure

who was able to transform cultural dispossession—that of the Mohicans—into
a form of self-possession" (21). Bumppo's heroic attempt to save
Chingachgook's life is intended to render the Mohican dispossession benign;
instead of the Euro-American destruction of Native Americans, Cooper tells
the story of a white man risking all to save a doomed race. Bumppo becomes
the American heir to the frontier landscape above all else because of his
ability to survive at the borders of civilization. He demonstrates his self-
possession at the conclusion of The Pioneers not only through his physical
strength in rescuing Chingachgook but also his mental acuity in leading
Elizabeth and Oliver through the fire. Scenes like this will be repeated
throughout The Leatherstocking series, where Bumppo engages in long
philosophical digressions in the midst of the most dire of situations, affording
Cooper the chance to show his readers the difference between his hero's
capacity to reason and the animal spirits of his Indian foes.

Yet, it is only in the final passage of The Pioneers that Natty Bumppo passes
from an aging literary character to the mythic hero of the Leatherstocking
tales: "This was the last they ever saw of the Leatherstocking, whose rapid
movements preceded the pursuit which Judge Temple both order and
conducted. He had gone far towards the setting sun—the foremost in that
band of pioneers who are opening the way for the march of the nation across
the continent" (436). In this passage, Cooper is finally able to resolve the
conflict between Bumppo and Judge Temple that threatens the neat resolution
of the narrative; the oppositions between Bumppo and Temple, nature and
civilization, individualism and property, freedom and law, all dissipate. Instead,
Bumppo and Temple are revealed as ideological partners in the nation's
spread west; in fact, Bumppo is put in the service of Temple, blazing a trail
west for civilization to follow. Bumppo passes into myth as he passes out of
time, becoming the ideal of a type of American whose cultural value has not
been exhausted with the passage of any one historical epoch: the lone, heroic
frontiersman rejuvenating civilization through bloody conflict at its borders. In
passing from the realistic character of The Pioneers opening pages to the
mythic figure of the novel's conclusion, Bumppo's age is no longer of
consequence, revealing the representative frontier hero's identity as
necessarily able-bodied.
Natty Bumppo and the Critical Tradition

In Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence writes of James

Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, "[T]hey go backwards, from old
age to golden youth. That is the true myth of America. She starts old, old,
wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of the
old skin, towards a new youth. It is the myth of America" (58). Richard Slotkin
echoes these sentiments in Regeneration through Violence:

Leatherstocking, in the course of the cycle, passes from old age through
death (in The Prairie, 1827) into a new youth. Thus the legend of
Leatherstocking, as it unfolded for the American reader of 1820-45, was a
myth of renewal and rebirth of the hero. Moreover, the movement backward in
historical time to Leatherstocking's youth was accompanied by a movement
toward a more mythopoeic conception of the wilderness… (485)

Both Lawrence and Slotkin intuit the close relationship between the
Leatherstocking's mythological status as frontier hero and Cooper's narrative
reversal of the natural aging process. Slotkin suggests that as Cooper
became increasingly conscious of Leatherstocking's constitutive role in a
uniquely American mythos, he felt compelled to return his hero to an age of
youthful and manly vigor. And Lawrence demonstrates that Cooper's tales
reach beyond his specific historical context to resonate with something much
more deeply embedded in America's cultural unconscious.

No reader of Cooper today encounters the Leatherstocking Tales outside the

knowledge of their eminent status in the canon of American literature.
Cooper's set of five novels achieved the class of "great works of American
literature" through the consensus of the myth and symbol school of literary
criticism that emerged after World War II. As Donald Pease explains, "each of
the masterworks of the myth-symbol school…presuppose[s] a realm of pure
possibility where a whole self internalized the norms of American history in a
language and series of actions that corroborated American exceptionalism"
("New Perspectives" 24). For Pease, the masterworks of the myth-symbol
school produced metanarratives about American history in an effort to define
what was unique and original about American culture and society, but in the
process, they went beyond simply describing these narrative myths and
participated in shaping their trajectories.

R.W.B. Lewis's The American Adam provides a paradigmatic example of this

tendency as he traces a genealogy of the Adamic figure of American
innocence in order to draw a portrait of a uniquely American character out of
the body of nineteenth-century literature. For Lewis, the American Adam
represented "a radically new personality," "an individual standing alone, self-
reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid
of his own unique and inherent resources" (5). It is of little surprise that Lewis
positioned Cooper's Leatherstocking as the archetype of this figure:

Cultural and individual self-renewal was the aim of the day's most magnetic
metaphors…Cooper completed that motion a number of years before
either Walden or Leaves of Grass—the journey from Natty Bumppo's old age
and death in The Pioneers and The Prairie to his birth and golden youth
in The Deerslayer—and he completed it in terms of the character of his hero
and the experience which shaped it… (103)

Natty Bumppo becomes Lewis's ideal Adam in part because he exists outside
of time—he passes from old age into youth and is both renewed and
immortalized in Cooper's final Leatherstocking Tale, The Deerslayer. He
invites readers to follow the order of publication in reading Cooper's
Leatherstocking series, and participates in the production of, rather than
simply describing, a uniquely exceptionalist American mythos that gains its
affective force through the figure of the lone hero hacking out a life at the
boundaries of civilization.

Whatever Cooper's initial reasons for returning to the Leatherstocking mythos

after the death of Natty Bumppo in The Prairie, critical responses like those of
Lawrence and Lewis have not only recognized but celebrated the unusual
timeline that animates Natty Bumppo's passage from old age in The
Pioneers to death in The Prairie and finally rebirth in The Deerslayer. These
critical responses function to remove the figure of the Leatherstocking from
the specific texts he inhabits (we can recognize this through the fact that Natty
Bumppo is really only the central protagonist of The Deerslayer), presenting a
timeless hero (represented popularly by the image of the hero of The
Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans rather than The Pioneers or The
Prairie) capable of occupying the American cultural consciousness on his own
mythic terms.

My contention in this essay is that the myth of American youth that D.H.
Lawrence located in the Leatherstocking Tales carries its own reality effects
that are neither benign nor innocent. Cooper's imaginative reversal of the
natural aging process reflects a corporeal hierarchy that has been occluded
by the critics evaluating his work who have privileged the youth and manly
vigor of the young Leatherstocking over his more elderly depictions. In the
process of nominating the Leatherstocking Tales as a uniquely American
story, critics like Lawrence and Lewis have simultaneously suggested that the
mythos Cooper writes is actually contingent upon this reversal, that the mythic
body is necessarily an able body. Far from disturbing America's myth of
ability, the myth-symbol school of literary critics who established the American
canon participated in its ideology, presupposing a "utopian space of pure
possibility where a whole self internalized this epic myth in a language and a
series of actions that corroborated the encompassing state fantasy of
American exceptionalism" (Pease, "New" 163). The myth-symbol school and
the Frontier Adam they authorized participated in the articulation of America
as an exceptionalist nation of pure possibility, and imagined white, able-
bodied men as the agents of that possibility.

Conclusion

In contrasting Chingachgook's disabled body to Bumppo's able body, Cooper

marks disability as the exception that confirms able-bodiedness as the norm.
Positioning disability outside of America's conditions of belonging, Cooper
relies on the logic of disability to provide meaning to the category of race—
Chingachgook's physical degeneracy inscribes the racial degeneracy of his
people. But The Pioneers also foreshadows the temporal reversal of the
Leatherstocking series, where Natty Bumppo travels back in time from old age
to youth. The timeline of the Leatherstocking mythos rests on the inversion of
the simple biological fact that, if we live long enough, we will all come to
inhabit disabled bodies. Within Cooper's rendition, disability marks the point of
departure for the passage out of time and into myth, and in this way, the myth
of American ability relies on disability for both its enactment and its
intelligibility.

It is no accident that Natty Bumppo's sudden burst of physical strength at the

conclusion of The Pioneers is coupled with Chingachgook's physical wound
and resignation to death—like so many other binary systems of thought, able-
bodiedness rests on depictions of disability for its self-definition. But the telos
of Cooper's Leatherstocking series also suggests that able-bodiedness names
a temporal process, one that must invoke disability in order to discard it or
overcome it. While this process can be evidenced through the strange
inconsistencies that haunt Natty Bumppo's character throughout The
Pioneers, its ultimate effect is transposed onto Bumppo's relationship to
Chingachgook. Slotkin's larger study of the frontier myth in American culture
confirms Johnston and Lawson's theoretical framework by arguing that
Bumppo's mythic status relies on Chingachgook and the Native American
race as a first world of cultural authority. But this relationship is parasitic; the
first world of authority must be destroyed in order to be reconstituted in strictly
nationalist terms, all the while confirming the latent assumption that "the best
Indians are white men anyway" (Cheyfitz 126). This reading of the
Leatherstocking series would be far less troubling if we could simply bracket
these novels off historically and consider their relationship to the property laws
that existed at the time of their publication. But in helping to constitute a
national mythology, the Leatherstocking tales and the hero that unites them
aim to define the transhistorical character of the American nation. Even
though Chingachgook and Hetty are dead and buried, other characters, and
other people, will continue to be called to fill their roles and live their fates.

Works Cited

 Cheyfitz, Eric. "Savage Law: The Plot Against American Indians in

Johnson and Graham Lessee v. M'Intosh and The Pioneers." Cultures
of United States Imperialism. Ed. Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

 Cooper, James Fenimore. The Deerslayer. New York: Penguin, 1987. 

 —. The Pioneers. New York: New American Library, 1964.

 Davis, Lennard J. Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism,

and Other Difficult Positions. New York: New York University Press,
2002.

 —. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York:

Verso, 1995.

 Johnston, Anna and Alan Lawson. "Settler Colonies." A Companion to

Postcolonial Studies. Ed. Henry Schwartz and Sangeeta Ray. Malden:
Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 360-376.

 Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature (The Cambridge

Edition of the Works of D.H. Lawrence). Cambridge: The Cambridge
University Press, 2003.

 Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition

in the Nineteenth Century.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1955.
  McWilliams, Jr., John P. "Innocent Criminal or Criminal Innocence: The
Trial in American Fiction." Law and American Literature: A Collection of
Essays. Ed. Carl S. Smith, John P. McWilliams, Jr., and Maxwell
Bloomfield. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.

 Pease, Donald. "New Perspectives on U.S. Culture and

Imperialism." Cultures of United States Imperialism. Ed. Donald Pease
and Amy Kaplan. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. 22-40.

 —. The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2009.

 —. Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural

Context. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

 Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory.  Ann Arbor: The University of

Michigan Press, 2008.

 Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the

American Frontier, 1600-1860. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1973.

 Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1950.

Thomas Jordan is Instructor of English and Harpur Writing Associate at

Binghamton University. He recently defended his dissertation, The Empire of
Ability: American Exceptionalism and the Specter of Disability, and this essay
represents a piece of that larger project.

Endnotes

1. This phrase is repeated by Bumppo in reference to himself a number of

times throughout the second of Cooper's Leatherstocking series, The
Last of the Mohicans.
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2. From the outset, I want to make it clear that Cooper's representation of

Chingachgook does not extend to all of his later Native American
characters. For example, characters like Uncas in Last of the
Mohicans or Hard-Heart in The Prairie represent paragons of physical
ability. Still, Cooper's novels consistently seek to point out key
 differences between his white hero and his Native American
counterparts. If the discourse of primitivism that characterizes many of
his Native American characters were to be linked to mental disability, a
much larger case can be made for Cooper's use of disability to
distinguish between Natty Bumppo and his Native American friends and
enemies. While such an argument is beyond the scope of this article, I
do gesture in that direction through my later discussion of The
Deerslayer.
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3. It is worth noting that Chingachgook's injury is never elaborated upon in

the novel. It is mentioned only as an explanation for his decision to
forfeit his life.
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4. As a field, disability studies has called radically into question the right-
to-die legislation favored by most contemporary liberals and
progressives. As Lennard Davis explains, "To disability activists and
scholars, people like Jack Kevorkian are executioners in the service of
an ableist medical establishment" ("Bending" 43). In Enforcing
Normalcy, Davis has also shown how a whole history of eugenics
policies targeting disabled populations emerged out of the growth of
statistical analysis. While this movement reached its culmination in the
horrors of the Nazi final solution, the discourse of social Darwinism that
would lead to the implementation of specific eugenics policy measures
circulated widely in nineteenth century Europe and America. In light of
this history, Chingachgook's suicide at the conclusion of The
Pioneers offers an early predecessor to later forms of scientific racism
that rested on physical hierarchies for their explanatory power.
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5. Bumppo and Chingachgook violate Judge Temple's law when they hunt
deer out of season.
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