James Fenimore Cooper ou la frontière mélancolique
| ,Allochronic Views of Native Americans; or, Vanished Vanishing Indians in The Last of the Mohicans
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1James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans; A Narrative of 1757, first published in 1826, offers an archetypal example, perhaps the archetypal example, of a literary expression of the trope of the Vanishing Indian. This theme is present in many works of nineteenth-century American literature that include Native Americans as their subjects, but Cooper’s romance, whose very title evokes the disappearance of an entire tribe, takes the sad fate of North America’s indigenous peoples as one of its central concerns and offers one of the earliest extended and enduring examples of this genre. Indeed, The Last of the Mohicans helped make the Vanishing Indian a hallmark of American literature in a way that probably no other work has done.
2The trope of the Vanishing Indian (or Vanishing American, as it is sometimes referred to in recognition of the fact that the Indians were, of course, the first Americans) became a staple of American literature as well as American political discourse, for that matter, from the last decades of the eighteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century, and it was common, as well, in the visual arts, though its appearance in that domain tended to begin a bit later. Put simply, the trope consists in portraying Native Americans as members of a dying race, disappearing from their ancestral lands in the face of advancing white civilization. The tone is generally regretful, often nostalgic, and suggests that such a loss is sad and lamentable, but, alas, inevitable. The theme clearly meshed well with growing Romantic sensibilities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which valued images such as those of the noble savage or pristine nature and favored evocations of an exotic, decaying and irretrievable past. But it is clear that such a rhetorical stance could also serve to downplay, if not totally deny, the responsibility of whites in bringing about the very destruction of the Indians that the trope professes to mourn. Even worse, expressions of the theme of the Vanishing Indian sometimes suggest that that Native Americans were themselves to blame for their own demise, due, in part, to their inability or unwillingness to adapt to spreading civilization. As Roy Harvey Pearce writes,
3The romanticizing of Native Americans, which was implicit in the trope of the Vanishing Indian, however, was only really possible once the immediate threat of violent conflict had been eliminated, at least, in the early years of the existence of the United States, from the eastern regions of the country. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. points out that
- 2 R. F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Pr (...)
Death through disease and warfare decimated the aboriginal population in the face of White advance and gave rise by the time of the American Revolution to the idea of the vanishing race. If Whites regarded the Indian as a threat to life and morals when alive, they regarded him with nostalgia upon his demise—or when that threat was safely past2.
4Indeed, nostalgia, by definition, requires that its object be already of the past (though it can, of course, be evoked in cases of geographical, rather than temporal, distance, as well).
- 3 B. W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy, p. xi.
- 4 Ibid., p. xi.
- 5 Ibid., p. xii.
- 6 Ibid., p. xii.
- 7 The very fact that there are still many Indians living in the United States today makes it clear th (...)
5In any case, the trope of the Vanishing Indian is a tradition, as Brian W. Dippie puts it, “rich in pathos and older than the Republic.”3 It holds, as he states, that the Indians “are a vanishing race,” that “they have been wasting away since the day the white man arrived, diminishing in vitality and numbers until, in some not too distant future, no red men will be left on the fact of the earth.”4 For Dippie, the trope became a powerful image in the American mind. “Based on what was thought to be irrefutable evidence,” he states, “it became self-perpetuating. It was prophecy, self-fulfilling prophecy, and its underlying assumptions were truisms requiring no justification apart from periodic reiteration.”5 Indeed, the image of the Vanishing Indian became so strong in America that Dippie characterizes it as a “cultural myth,”6 which, if untrue in many ways, remained stubbornly fixed in the national consciousness.7
6One problem with the trope of the Vanishing Indian, as already noted, is that it can serve, among other things, to cover up the responsibility of the white population. This all too convenient stance is referred to by anthropologist Renato Rosaldo as “imperialist nostalgia.” As he explains,
- 8 R. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston, Beacon Press, 1993, p. 69-7 (...)
Imperialist nostalgia revolves around a paradox: A person kills somebody, and then mourns the victim. In more attenuated form, someone deliberately alters a form of life, and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to the intervention. At one more remove, people destroy their environment, and then they worship nature. In any of its versions, imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people’s imagination and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination8.
- 9 P. Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930, p. 1.
- 10 Ibid., p. 1.
7For Patrick Brantlinger, the trope of the Vanishing Indian can be classed as “extinction discourse,” which he describes as “a specific branch of the dual ideologies of imperialism and racism.”9 It is found, he notes, “wherever and whenever Europeans and white Americans encountered indigenous peoples.”10
8One of the specificities of the trope of the Vanishing Indian—which tends to create a sort of trap for those who employ it as well as for those who are exposed to it as readers or listeners or viewers—is that it frequently operates under some of the same false assumptions that have, according to Johannes Fabian, plagued anthropology for much of its existence. This trap is linked to the use of time as a distancing device between white and indigenous cultures. As Fabian explains, anthropology
- 11 J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York, Columbia University Pre (...)
promoted a scheme in terms of which not only past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of Time—some upstream, others downstream. Civilization, evolution, development, acculturation, modernization (and their cousins, industrialization, urbanization) are all terms whose conceptual content derives, in ways that can be specified, from evolutionary Time. They all have an epistemological dimension apart from whatever ethical, or unethical, intentions they may express. A discourse employing terms such as primitive, savage (but also tribal, traditional, Third World, or whatever euphemism is current) does not think, or observe, or critically study, the “primitive”; it thinks, observes, studies in terms of the primitive. Primitive being essentially a temporal concept, is a category, not an object, of Western thought11.
- 12 Ibid., p. 31 (emphasis in the original).
- 13 Ibid., p. 31 (emphasis in the original).
- 14 Ibid., p. 32 (emphasis in the original).
- 15 Ibid., p. 80.
- 16 Ibid., p. 81.
9The heart of the problem, Fabian asserts, is the “denial of coevalness.”12 By that, he explains, he means “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent (s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.”13 And it is the denial of coevalness that leads to what Fabian refers to as “the allochronism of anthropology.”14 For Fabian, the use of the ethnographic present, or “the practice of giving accounts of other cultures and societies in the present tense,” for example, is a clear symptom of the problem.15 “At the very least,” he notes, giving voice to critics of the use of this style, “the present tense ‘freezes’ a society at the time of observation; at worst, it contains assumptions about the repetitiveness, predictability, and conservatism of primitives.”16 He concludes,
- 17 Ibid., p. 143.
Anthropology emerged and established itself as an allochronic discourse; it is a science of other men in another Time. It is a discourse whose referent has been removed from the present of the speaking/writing subject. This ‘petrified relation’ is a scandal17.
- 18 R. F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian, p. 28.
10Now neither Cooper nor most of the many other writers, statesmen and artists who made use of the trope of the Vanishing Indian were, of course, anthropologists in anything but a very loose sense of the term. They very often did, however, adopt a similar allochronic view of their subject in their elaboration of that trope. To put it simply, “real” Indians, seen this way, were not just disappearing, they had already disappeared. And any remaining Indians were, by the same token, not fully “real.” Indeed, as Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. points out, up until relatively recently (and, one could argue, to a certain extent up to the present day), there was “a curious timelessness in defining the Indian proper.”18 As he further notes,
- 19 I think that this slight qualification of Berkhofer’s statement would be a bit more appropriate in (...)
- 20 Ibid., p. 28-29.
In spite of centuries of contact and the changed conditions of Native American lives, Whites [have tended to19] picture the ‘real’Indian as the one before contact or during the early period of that contact. That Whites of earlier centuries should see the Indian as without history makes sense given their lack of knowledge about the past of Native American peoples and the shortness of their encounter. That later Whites should harbor the same assumption seems surprising given the discoveries of archeology and the changed condition of the tribes as the result of White contact and policy20.
11Indeed, for many Americans of the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century, and even later, the vanishing “real” Indians had already vanished into the past because they were seen as “belonging,” in fact, to an earlier time.
- 21 P. Freneau, The American Museum, or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, & c., novembe (...)
12It should also be noted in the context of this study that the very nature of literary works, which by definition create a defamiliarization of their subject in one way or another, can be seen as strengthening the allochronic dimension of the trope of the Vanishing Indian in a way different from—yet at the same time akin to—the distancing effect of allochronic discourse in anthropological studies as described by Fabian. And it should be further pointed out that the phenomenon of seeing and describing Indians in this way predates Cooper’s use of the trope of the Vanishing Indian in The Last of the Mohicans; it was, in fact, already a well-established theme in writings prior to 1826. Philip Freneau, for example, published a poem (later entitled “The Indian Burial Ground”) making use of the trope in the November 1787 issue of The American Museum. The piece, according to a headnote, was “occasioned by a visit to an old Indian burying ground,”21 and an elegiac tone pervades its lines. Indians are but a ghostly presence in the poem, the last two stanzas, for example, declaring,
- 22 Ibid., p. 516.
By midnight moons, o’er moist’ning dews,
In vestments for the chace array’d
The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter, and the deer—a shade.
And long shall tim’rous fancy see
The painted chief, and pointed spear,
And reason’s self shall bow the knee
To shadows and delusions here22.
- 23 J. Ruppert, “Indians in Anglo-American Literature, 1492 to 1990,” Handbook of Native American Liter (...)
13 In the next to last stanza, the Indian hunter, as well as his prey, both long departed, are frozen in an eternal present, just as the ethnographic present, as Fabian points out, freezes its subject. Their only “real” ’ existence being in death, the Indians in Freneau’s poem have already faded. They exist only in “fancy,” as the last stanza states, and they are now mere “shadows,” or, even further removed from reality, “delusions.” Indians, it is suggested, are part of another age. Indeed, as James Ruppert states, in literary works of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Indian “was more an artifact of the past than a contributor to the present.”23
- 24 Pocahontas was born circa 1595 and died in England in 1617.
- 25 The two writings were later incorporated into The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, in 1820.
14In the early years of the nineteenth century, the subject of Indians of a bygone era became steadily more common. In 1808, for example, the first performance of James Nelson Barker’s play The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage was held in Philadelphia. The “Operatic Melo Drame,” as it was styled, with music by John Bray, celebrates the life of Pocahontas, who, by that time, had been safely dead for almost two centuries,24 providing another example of seeing an Indian as worthy of celebration only once part of the distant past. Just a few years later, in 1814, Washington Irving published two sketches in The Analectic Magazine: “Traits of Indian Character” and “Philip of Pokanoket.”25 These works both include classic literary expressions of the trope of the Vanishing Indian. In “Traits of Indian Character,” which will be sufficient as an example in this study, Irving declares,
- 26 W. Irving, History, Tales and Sketches, p. 1004.
How different was their state while yet the undisputed lords of the soil. Their wants were few, and the means of gratification within their reach. They saw every one round them sharing the same lot, enduring the same hardships, feeding on the same aliments, arrayed in the same rude garments. No roof rose, but was open to the homeless stranger; no smoke curled among the trees, but he was welcome to sit down by its fire and join the hunter in his repast. […] + Such were the Indians whilst in the pride and energy of their primitive natures; they resemble those wild plants which thrive best in the shades of the forest, but shrink from the hand of cultivation, and perish beneath the influence of the sun26.
15Here, a simple, yet noble and egalitarian, golden age is seen as part of the past. The image of Indians withering away like delicate plants offers a classic example of the frequent suggestion of the seemingly inevitable and natural aspect of a disappearance for which no one, apparently, is to blame. And the last paragraph of the sketch provides an extended expression of the lamentable fading away of the Indians. Irving regretfully reflects,
- 27 Ibid., p. 1011.
But I forbear to dwell upon these gloomy pictures. The eastern tribes have long since disappeared; the forests that sheltered them have been laid low, and scarce any traces remain of them in the thickly settled states of New England, excepting here and there the Indian name of a village or a stream. And such must sooner or later be the fate of those other tribes which skirt the frontiers, and have occasionally been inveigled from their forests to mingle in the wars of white men. In a little while, and they will go the way that their brethren have gone before27.
- 28 Ibid., p. 1011.
16The eastern Indians, once again, have simply “disappeared,” leaving behind only place names. The reference to “fate” in relation to the more western tribes also includes a strong suggestion of the inevitability of the Indians’ vanishing. It is noteworthy that Irving at least hints in this passage at the implication of whites, in whose wars, he states, Native Americans “have occasionally been inveigled from their forests to mingle.” These tribes, Irving continues, employing further images suggestive of the supposed passive, inevitable and natural characteristics of the disappearance of the Indians, “will vanish like a vapour from the face of the earth; their very history will be lost in forgetfulness; and ‘the places that now know them will know them no more for ever. ’”28 The sketch ends with these plaintive words:
- 29 Ibid., p. 1012.
“We are driven back,” said an old warrior, “until we can retreat no further—our hatchets are broken, our bows are snapped, our fires are nearly extinguished—a little longer and the white man will cease to persecute us—for we shall cease to exist! ”29
17There is, it appears, no hope, in part since the Indians themselves seem to have already accepted their demise.
- 30 Cooper gives a slightly different title, “An Indian at the Burial-Place of His Fathers,” which was (...)
18A last example, William Cullen Bryant’s “An Indian at the Burying-Place of His Fathers,” first published in 1824, can provide a natural transition to The Last of the Mohicans since Cooper uses an excerpt from that poem as the epigraph to Chapter III of the romance.30 Once again, the theme of death is highlighted, here, as in Freneau’s poem, by the setting in a burial place, and various strategies within the piece work to push time into the past, employing, again, an allochronic discourse that creates a temporal chasm between the subject and the reader. This aspect is clear in the very first stanza:
- 31 W. Cullen Bryant, “An Indian at the Burying-Place of His Fathers,” American Poetry: The Nineteenth (...)
It is the spot I came to seek, —
My fathers’ ancient burial-place,
Ere from these vales, ashamed and weak,
Withdrew our wasted race.
It is the spot, —I know it well—
Of which our old traditions tell31.
- 32 Ibid., p. 149; and J. F. Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, p. 34.
19The burial place belongs to the speaker’s fathers, and it is “ancient.” The archaic “Ere” also highlights the passage of time since the “real” Indians flourished, and the adjectives “ashamed and weak” suggest that a certain failing on the Indians’ part somehow led to this vanishing, that they were in one way or another responsible for their own disappearing or natural withering away. That the Indians simply “withdrew” makes it seem that no outside force is to blame, and the phrase “wasted race” offers another image of apparently natural decay. Cooper chooses the next to last stanza for his epigraph. That section of the poem focuses on the golden age of the tribe, before the arrival of white civilization. But that happy period, “Before these fields were shorn and tilled,”32 lies far in the distant past.
20As already mentioned, the very title The Last of the Mohicans makes it clear that the Vanishing Indian will be one of one of Cooper’s main themes. An allochronic view of Indians is thus already suggested, at least, before the reader even gets past the title page. And the work’s subtitle, A Narrative of 1757, serves to pull the story further into the past by highlighting the fact that the action is set almost exactly seventy years—or threescore years and ten, the biblical estimate of a lifetime—before the date of the book’s publication. The 1826 Preface and the 1831 Introduction to The Last of the Mohicans as well as the 1850 Preface to the Leatherstocking Tales also underscore, in various ways, the theme of the Vanishing Indian, adopting allochronic views of Native Americans, once again, before the reader even reaches the first line of the first chapter. The golden age of the Mohicans (or Delawares or Lenape) is already gone, Cooper, asserts in the 1826 Preface. He explains that
- 33 J. F. Cooper, op. cit., p. 4.
The tribe that possessed the country which now composes the south-western parts of New-England, and that portion of New York that lies east of the Hudson, and the country even much further to the south, was a mighty people, called the “Mahicanni,” or, more commonly, the “Mohicans.” […] The few of them that now remain, are chiefly scattered among other tribes, and retain no other memorials of their power and greatness than their melancholy recollections33.
21And Cooper depicts the time of the Mohicans’ flourishing as about as far in the past as possible—at least from the point of view of a European conception of North American history—dating their decline back to the earliest period of colonization, when the Dutch and various northern tribes, according to his account, worked in concert against the Mohicans:
- 34 Ibid., p. 6.
From that moment may be dated the downfall of the greatest and most civilized of the Indian nations, that existed within the limits of the present United States. Robbed by the whites and murdered and oppressed by the savages, they lingered for a time around their council-fire, but finally broke off in bands, and sought refuge in the western wilds. Like the lustre of the dying lamp, their glory shone the brightest as they were about to become extinct34.
22The “savages” in this passage are the tribes that, corrupted by the Dutch, have oppressed the Mohicans, and these “savages” are not noble. Furthermore, the 1826 Preface underscores the fact that even the reduced remnants of the noble Mohicans have, by and large, already vanished.
23Cooper’s 1831 Introduction highlights the same theme. Here, however, the author’s comments actually touch directly not only on the trope of the Vanishing Indian, but on the allochronic discourse that pervades the romance. As Cooper states,
- 35 Ibid., p. 9.
The Mohicans were the possessors of the country first occupied by the Europeans in this portion of the continent. They were, consequently, the first dispossessed; and the seemingly inevitable fate of all these people, who disappear before the advances, or it might be termed the inroads of civilization, as the verdure of their native forests falls before the nipping frosts, is represented as having already befallen them35.
24Not only does Cooper make reference to the tribe’s “inevitable fate” and use the verb “disappear” as well as an image typical of the trope of the Vanishing Indian, a forest falling before “the nipping frosts,” but he calls attention to the fact that, having occurred so far in the past, the downfall of the Delawares, in The Last of the Mohicans, “is represented as having already befallen them.” This vanishing people, he emphasizes, has already vanished. The introduction ends with an image of emptiness:
- 36 Ibid., p. 10.
The whole of that wilderness, in which the latter incidents of the legend occurred is nearly a wilderness still, though the red man has entirely deserted this part of the state. Of all the tribes named in these pages, there exist only a few half-civilized beings of the Oneidas, on the reservations of their people in New York. The rest have disappeared, either from the regions in which their fathers dwelt, or altogether from the earth36.
25The “real” Indians are already gone, and the identity, as Indians, of those remaining is denied. The Oneidas, for example, have been corrupted by contact with whites. Their “half-civilized” state, for Cooper, means that they are no longer “real” Indians.
26As already suggested, the very nature of The Last of Mohicans as a literary work can be seen as adding to the creation of a distancing from the work’s Indian subjects and thus reinforcing the effect of allochronic discourse in the text. This aspect, however, is somewhat slippery in Cooper’s work since he apparently evolved in his own view of just what the exact genre of The Last of Mohicans actually is. What seems to have occurred is that as “real” time advanced, creating a greater gap between the mid-eighteenth century setting of the story and the present of each new group of the work’s readers, Cooper saw his creation more and more as a romantic invention. At the beginning of the original 1826 Preface, in fact, he insists on the work’s subtitle, A Narrative of 1757, and warns his audience thus:
- 37 Ibid., p. 3.
The reader, who takes up these volumes, in expectation of finding an imaginary and romantic picture of things which never had an existence, will probably lay them aside, disappointed. The work is exactly what it professes to be in its title-page—a narrative37.
27But by the time Cooper wrote the 1850 Preface to the Leatherstocking Tales he had clearly changed his view of just what The Last of the Mohicans and the other works in the five-book series were exactly. At that point, he apparently no longer saw The Last of the Mohicans as a more or less realistic “narrative.” The 1850 Preface, in fact, ends with a paragraph offering a series of terms and assertions that all can be seen as emphasizing the distance between Indians as they “really” exist (or existed) and Cooper’s portrayal of them:
- 38 Ibid., p. 398 (emphasis in the original).
It is the privilege of all writers of fiction, more particularly when their works aspire to the elevation of romances, to present the beau-idéal of their characters to the reader. This it is which constitutes poetry, and to suppose that the red man is to be represented only in the squalid misery or the degraded moral state that certainly more or less belongs to his condition, is, we apprehend, taking a very narrow view of an author’s privileges. Such criticism would have deprived the world of even Homer38.
- 39 One might also suggest that Cooper had grown in confidence and felt more comfortable with, if not p (...)
28The Leatherstocking Tales, Coopers asserts, are works of “fiction” that aspire to be “romances.” They present a “beau-idéal” of their subject and can be classified as “poetry.” And Cooper not only asserts his “author’s privileges,” by which he clearly means the freedom to romanticize, but makes an implicit comparison between himself and Homer. Thus, as the advance of “real” time did its part to create an intensification of the allochronic view of Cooper’s portrayal of the Indians, his own sense of just what he had written also suggests a growing distance between his real life subjects and their portrayal in his works.39 Furthermore, the Indians that Cooper seems to see around him in the present are described as anything but noble. The Indian as he actually is, according to the author, exists “in the squalid misery or the degraded moral state that certainly more or less belongs to his condition.” Noble Indians, “real” Indians, for Cooper, exist in the past.
29Within the text of The Last of the Mohicans proper, Cooper’s direct evocations of the Vanishing Indian tend to be concentrated near the beginning and near the end of the romance. The first clear allusion to the theme, as already mentioned, appears in Cooper’s use of an excerpt from Bryant’s “An Indian at the Burying-Place of His Fathers” as the epigraph to Chapter III. The use is appropriate since it is in that chapter that perhaps the work’s most famous expression of the trope of the Vanishing Indian appears, in part because it is the only occurrence of the book’s title within the body of the romance. The passage appears near the end of Chingachgook’s recounting of the history of the Mohicans to Hawk-eye. Once again a simple and blissful golden age is seen as existing only in the distant past, before the arrival of the Europeans: “then, Hawk-eye,” Chingachgook states,
- 40 J. F. Cooper, op. cit., p. 39.
we were one people, and we were happy. The salt lake gave us its fish, the wood its deer, and the air its birds. We took wives who bore us children; we worshipped the Great Spirit; and we kept the Maquas beyond the sound of our songs of triumph40!
30But the present, according to the sagamore, offers a different picture:
- 41 Ibid., p. 40.
Where are the blossoms of those summers! —fallen, one by one so all of my family departed, each in his turn, to the land of spirits. I am on the hill-top, and must go down into the valley; and when Uncas follows in my footsteps, there will no longer be any of the blood of the Sagamores, for my boy is the last of the Mohicans41.
- 42 Agnès Derail-Imbert points out that in parallel to the vanishing of the Indian, there is a vanishin (...)
31Chingachgook offers no hope that Uncas will be able to continue the family or tribal line, despite the fact that his son is still a young man. But this makes sense, at least in his mind, because, as Chingachgook states, his family is already departed—the Mohicans, thus, for all intents and purposes, are already vanished.42
- 43 J. F. Cooper, op. cit., p. 144.
32There are other evocations of the trope of the Vanishing Indian here and there, later in the text, such as when Hawk-eye recalls a battle that took place in his youth, and declares, “The brothers and family of the Mohican [Chingachgook] formed our war party, and you see before you, all that are now left of his race.”43 But when the trope comes again to the fore in a direct and extended manner, it is near the end of the work, primarily through the words of Tamenund, the aged Delaware chief, and Uncas. For Tamenund, too, the golden age of the Mohicans (or Delawares or Lenape), seems to be in the past:
- 44 Ibid., p. 344.
“It was but yesterday,” rejoined the aged man, with touching pathos, “that the children of the Lenape were masters of the world! The fishes of the salt-lake, the birds, the beasts, and the Mengwe of the woods, owned them for Sagamores”44.
33The allochronic vision of a tribe whose only “real” existence is in the past thus appears to be confirmed, all the more so since “yesterday,” for the aged Tamenund, is quite a long time before.
- 45 Ibid., p. 348.
- 46 Ibid., p. 349.
- 47 Ibid., p. 349.
34However, when Uncas’s tortoise tattoo—indicative of his high position within the tribe—is revealed,45 time seems to alter; and Tamenund begins to see things differently. Recognizing Uncas as the one, he declares, “here to fill my place at the council-fire,”46 the old chief begins to believe that the glory of the Delawares is not necessarily confined to the past. But his perception of time becomes a bit clouded here, as the aged leader momentarily seems to confuse Uncas with an earlier Delaware chief of the same name and believes that he has somehow been transported back to the seventeenth century: “‘Is Tamenund a boy! ’ at length the bewildered prophet exclaimed. […] ‘Tell me, ye Delawares, has Tamenund been a sleeper for a hundred winters?’”47
35The revelation of Uncas’s tattoo and Tamenund’s brief delusion that he is reliving his youth lead to another monologue, this one by Uncas, which also evokes the Vanishing Indian. Here, the trope begins once again with an image of the “real” Delawares as existing only in the past, as having already vanished:
- 48 Ibid., p. 350.
Once we slept where we could hear the salt lake speak in its anger. Then we were rulers and Sagamores over the land. But when a pale-face was seen on every brook, we followed the deer back to the river of our nation. The Delawares were gone !48
36Uncas is referring here to the earlier home of his people, and his reflections then turn to the prophecies of his fathers, which suggest the possibility of a triumphant return to the Delawares’ original tribal lands on the eastern coast. He asserts, beginning with the words of his “fathers,”
- 49 Ibid., p. 350.
‘When the Manitto is ready, and shall say, “come,” we will follow the river to the sea, and take our own again. ’ Such, Delawares, is the belief of the children of the Turtle! Our eyes are on the rising, and not towards the setting sun! We know when he comes, but we know not whither he goes. It is enough49.
37Finally, the very last words of the romance are given to Tamenund, and, here, too, a vison of the tribe as having its glory in the past is followed by another view of a (perhaps) hopeful future:
- 50 In its first appearance, earlier in the romance, Cooper footnotes this term as meaning “Turtle.” Se (...)
- 51 J. F. Cooper, op. cit., p. 394.
“It is enough!” he [Tamenund] said. “Go, children of the Lenape; the anger of the Manitto is not done. Why should Tamenund stay? The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red-man has not yet come again. My day has been too long. In the morning I saw the sons of Unâmis50 happy and strong; and yet, before the night has come, have lived to see the last warrior of the wise race of the Mohicans! ”51
38Both of these monologues seem to reverse the trope of the Vanishing Indian that they begin with. They each, in fact, start with an evocation of a seemingly lost time of past glory and then shift to a projection towards a possible recovery of grandeur sometime in the future. Clearly, the dichotomy creates a tension in both speeches and suggests, perhaps, that the tribe may not be doomed to exist only in the past (of the two monologues, Tamenund’s, it should be noted, is the more ambiguous, and its meaning is less than clear). However, the renewed golden age is not for the present; it is projected, in both cases, into an undetermined point in the future. And thus, while the vision appears hopeful, it can be seen as yet another allochronic vision of the Indian since it conceives of “real” Indians as existing fully and proudly, once again, only in a time different and distinct from the present time of the story.
- 52 Ibid., p. 40.
- 53 Ibid., p. 349.
- 54 Ibid., p. 382.
39And hope for the future is undercut rather sharply, to say the least, by the death of Uncas in Chapter 32. If Uncas is, as Chingachgook states, “the last of the Mohicans”52 or, as Tamenund declares, the one “here to fill my place at the council-fire,”53 then the tribe’s fate seems to be sealed. In fact, as the father takes the place of his son as “the last of the Mohicans,” the pastness of the Mohicans’ world is highlighted even more strongly, as it is by the elegiac tone of last chapter, which begins with the somber note that “The sun found the Lenape, on the succeeding day, a nation of mourners,”54 and focuses on the funerals of Uncas and Cora. Tamenund’s and Uncas’s dreams of renewed glory in another time seem to be just that, dreams.
***
40 The Last of the Mohicans, was by no means the last example of the use of the trope of the Vanishing Indian, which incorporated allochronic views of Native Americans. In fact, the book’s success helped insure the continuation and great popularity of the trope, which it also helped, to a large extent, to define. Indeed, interest in the Vanishing Indian remained strong and would continue throughout the rest of the century and on into the following century in literature, political discourse and the visual arts. A short list of a few of the many examples of expressions of this theme that followed the publication of The Last of Mohicans can serve as a sort of coda to this study. It could include Thomas Cole’s painting Landscape with Figures: A Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” (1826), one of the artist’s several works inspired by Cooper’s romance; John Augustus Stone’s play Metamora, or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829), in which Edwin Forrest, for decades, played the title role of a defiant, but vanquished, King Philip; President Andrew Jackson’s second annual message to Congress (1830), in which he incorporates imagery of the Vanishing Indian in his justification of the Indian Removal policy; George Catlin’s many portraits of Native Americans of the 1830s, notably Wi-jún-jon Going to and Returning from Washington (1832), a work in which before and after portraits highlight the destruction of the “real” Indian through exposure to white ways; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), in which the title character accepts his displacement by white civilization; John Mix Stanley’s painting The Last of Their Race (1857), whose figures have apparently been driven to the very edge of the continent; Thomas Crawford’s sculpture The Dying Chief Contemplating the Progress of Civilization (1875- 1874), whose title provides an unambiguous gloss on the work’s theme of a vanishing way of life; Hiram Powers’s sculpture The Last of the Tribes (or The Last of Her Tribe) (1876-1877), which offers a similar portrayal of the trope; Edward S. Curtis’s photographs from the turn of the century, which were conceived, in part, as a last chance to preserve an image of “real” Indians, notably in The Vanishing Race –Navaho (1904); Frederic Remington’s painting Sunset on the Plains (1905-1906), which offers a similar view using a different medium; James Earle Fraser’s sculpture End of the Trail (1915), which proved an immensely popular expression of the theme of the Vanishing Indian in the figure of a warrior on horseback, who seems beaten and ready to give up the ghost; and Zane Grey’s novel, The Vanishing American as well as the film of the same name based on it (both 1925), which suggest that the Indian would not vanish without, at least, a protest. But despite the multitude of examples, The Last of the Mohicans, as already suggested, is probably the archetypal expression in American literature—and perhaps in American culture more generally—of an allochronic view of Native Americans used in the elaboration of the trope of the (vanished) Vanishing Indian.
Notes
1 R. Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind, p. 53. Pearce’s formulation, referring to “the price Americans would have to pay,” is a bit dated, to say the least, but his point that Americans tended to both pity and censure the Indians that they were destroying remains valid.
2 R. F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present, p. 29.
3 B. W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy, p. xi.
4 Ibid., p. xi.
5 Ibid., p. xii.
6 Ibid., p. xii.
7 The very fact that there are still many Indians living in the United States today makes it clear that the myth of the Vanishing Indian was, indeed, a myth, or, at the very least, a serious distortion of the reality of the situation.
8 R. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston, Beacon Press, 1993, p. 69-70.
9 P. Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930, p. 1.
10 Ibid., p. 1.
11 J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York, Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 17-18.
12 Ibid., p. 31 (emphasis in the original).
13 Ibid., p. 31 (emphasis in the original).
14 Ibid., p. 32 (emphasis in the original).
15 Ibid., p. 80.
16 Ibid., p. 81.
17 Ibid., p. 143.
18 R. F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian, p. 28.
19 I think that this slight qualification of Berkhofer’s statement would be a bit more appropriate in the context of the early twenty-first century.
20 Ibid., p. 28-29.
21 P. Freneau, The American Museum, or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, & c., november 1787, (515-516), p. 515.
22 Ibid., p. 516.
23 J. Ruppert, “Indians in Anglo-American Literature, 1492 to 1990,” Handbook of Native American Literature, Andrew Wiget (ed.), New York, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996, p. 386.
24 Pocahontas was born circa 1595 and died in England in 1617.
25 The two writings were later incorporated into The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, in 1820.
26 W. Irving, History, Tales and Sketches, p. 1004.
27 Ibid., p. 1011.
28 Ibid., p. 1011.
29 Ibid., p. 1012.
30 Cooper gives a slightly different title, “An Indian at the Burial-Place of His Fathers,” which was used in later collected editions of Bryant’s poems.
31 W. Cullen Bryant, “An Indian at the Burying-Place of His Fathers,” American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, John Hollander (ed.), New York, Library of America, 1993, p. 147-149.
32 Ibid., p. 149; and J. F. Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, p. 34.
33 J. F. Cooper, op. cit., p. 4.
34 Ibid., p. 6.
35 Ibid., p. 9.
36 Ibid., p. 10.
37 Ibid., p. 3.
38 Ibid., p. 398 (emphasis in the original).
39 One might also suggest that Cooper had grown in confidence and felt more comfortable with, if not prouder of, seeing himself as a literary artist in 1850 than he had in 1826. Indeed, the implicit comparison he makes between himself and Homer seems to betray a certain vanity, if not intellectual arrogance. That said, it does, in fact, seems more appropriate to classify The Last of the Mohicans as a romance, for example, than as a realistic “narrative.”
40 J. F. Cooper, op. cit., p. 39.
41 Ibid., p. 40.
42 Agnès Derail-Imbert points out that in parallel to the vanishing of the Indian, there is a vanishing of the color red in Cooper’s romance; and both disappearances, she perceptively notes, are portrayed as having already happened: “la représentation postule que l’Indien et, du même coup, la couleur ont toujours déjà disparu.” See Agnès Derail-Imbert, “The Last of the Mohicans ou l’incarnat de la nation,” p. 35.
43 J. F. Cooper, op. cit., p. 144.
44 Ibid., p. 344.
45 Ibid., p. 348.
46 Ibid., p. 349.
47 Ibid., p. 349.
48 Ibid., p. 350.
49 Ibid., p. 350.
50 In its first appearance, earlier in the romance, Cooper footnotes this term as meaning “Turtle.” See J. F. Cooper, op. cit., p. 349.
51 J. F. Cooper, op. cit., p. 394.
52 Ibid., p. 40.
53 Ibid., p. 349.
54 Ibid., p. 382.
Table des illustrations
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Titre | Wi-jún-jon Going to and Returning from Washington (1832), George Catlin (1796-1872), Smithsonian American Art Museum. |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/7805/img-1.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 66k |
© Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2016