The Prairie (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

by James Fenimore Cooper, Steven Frye (Introduction)

Overview

James Fenimore Coopers The Prairie is the last episode in the Leatherstocking Tales. Set on the Great Plains just after the Louisiana Purchase, the frontier novel recounts the story of the aging trapper Natty Bumppo. The novel involves a series of conflicts between white settlers and rivaling Native American tribes. It communicates the destruction of natural resources and the tragic eradication of native peoples resulting from Americas expansionist ideology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781411430624
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble
Publication date:	09/01/2009
Series:	Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	748,015
File size:	842 KB
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

James Cooper (he added the Fenimore when he was in his 30s) was born September 15, 1789, in Burlington, New Jersey, to William Cooper and Elizabeth Fenimore Cooper. In 1790 the family moved to the frontier country of upstate New York, where William established a village he called Cooperstown. Although cushioned by wealth and Williams status as landlord and judge, the Coopers found pioneering to be rugged, and only 7 of the 13 Cooper children survived their early years. All the hardship notwithstanding, according to family reports, the young James loved the wilderness. Years later, he wrote The Pioneers (1823) about Cooperstown in the 1790s, but many of his other books draw deeply on his childhood experiences of the frontier as well.

Cooper was sent to Yale in 1801 but he was expelled in 1805 for setting off an explosion in another students room. Afterward, as a midshipman in the fledgling U.S. Navy, he made Atlantic passages and served at an isolated post on Lake Ontario. Cooper resigned his commission in 1811 to marry Susan Augusta De Lancey, the daughter of a wealthy New York State family. During the next decade, however, a series of bad investments and legal entanglements reduced his inheritance to the verge of bankruptcy.

Cooper was already 30 years old when, on a dare from his wife, he became a writer. One evening he threw down, in disgust, a novel he was reading aloud to her, saying he could write a better book himself. Susan, who knew that he disliked writing even letters, expressed her doubts. To prove her wrong he wrote Precaution, which was published anonymously in 1820. Encouraged by favorable reviews, Cooper wrote other books in quick succession, and by the time The Last of the Mohicans, his sixth novel, was published in 1827, he was internationally famous as Americas first professionally successful novelist. Eventually he published 32 novels, as well as travel books and histories. Cooper invented the genre of nautical fiction, and in the figure of Nathaniel or "Natty" Bumppo (Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans) -- the central character in the five Leatherstocking Tales Cooper published between 1823 and 1841 -- he gave American fiction its first great hero.

Shortly after publishing The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper moved his family to Europe, but in 1833 he returned to America, moving back into his fathers restored Mansion House in Cooperstown. He died there on September 14, 1851.

Author biography courtesy of Barnes & Noble Books.

Date of Birth:

September 15, 1789

Date of Death:

September 14, 1851

Place of Birth:

Burlington, New Jersey

Place of Death:

Cooperstown, New York

Education:

Yale University (expelled in 1805)

Introduction

James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie is the last episode in the Leatherstocking Tales, the most enduring and influential series of American frontier novels. It portrays in old age the mythic Natty Bumppo (also called "Leatherstocking," "Hawkeye," "Deerslayer," "Pathfinder," and "the Trapper"). This character is the original for the most recognizably "American" literary type, appearing in various forms under different names in frontier romances and Western novels and films, adapted later in police dramas and modern epics. Always similar in essentials, he lives on the periphery of the nation, yet he represents its values-as the outsider, the Indian fighter, the explorer, the man of pristine virtue and endemic violence. He speaks to the best and the worst in American culture and the expansionist impulses that fueled its history. Throughout the Leatherstocking Tales and especially in The Prairie, Cooper adapts the genre of the historical romance created by Sir Walter Scott in the Waverly novels. But Cooper takes it through the Adirondacks of New York into the Great Plains, from the old world to the new, and in doing so becomes one of the first internationally renowned American authors. The Prairie concludes Natty's story, but it was only the third written in a series of five. Considering the complexities of the hero's character in old age, the novel reflects some of the intricacies and paradoxes implicit in Cooper's view of what later became known as Manifest Destiny.

The Prairie is one of Cooper's early novels, but the author began writing comparatively late, and the varied experiences of his childhood and youth both enriched and informed his work. He was born to William Cooper and Elizabeth Fenimore Cooper on September 15, 1789, in Burlington, New Jersey. "Fenimore" was added to his name later in 1826. He was one of thirteen children, only six surviving to adulthood. In 1790, William Cooper purchased a large tract of land in upstate New York, near Lake Otsego, where he founded a settlement called Cooperstown. He served in public life, notably as a Federalist judge, and his young son's life in the settlement provided him with much of the setting and background for the Leatherstocking Tales. James attended boarding school in Albany and later entered Yale College. He was enrolled there from 1803 to 1805 but was expelled for a violent prank. In 1806, his father used his influence to acquire a commission for him in the United States Navy, and he sailed on a number of voyages and served in a military capacity at an outpost on Lake Ontario. These experiences combined to provide material for his sea tales and frontier novels. In 1810, Cooper resigned his commission, having met Susan Augusta De Lancey, the wealthy daughter of a family from Westchester. They married in 1811.

Both husband and wife were raised in rather privileged circumstances, but after William Cooper's death in 1809, a series of practical setbacks found the couple struggling with legal and financial matters. James was eager to find a reliable source of income. In "Small Family Memories," written as an introduction to Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper, his wife Susan recounts an event that became an appealing and popular account of Cooper's genesis as a writer. The family had established a custom of reading in the evening, and regularly ordered the latest English novels from a New York bookseller. Apparently, Cooper was reading from a particular novel, which after a time he threw aside saying, "I could write you a better book than that myself!" All who witnessed this proclamation were amused since Cooper was disinclined even to write letters. But he set about the task, and the result was Precaution (1820), a novel of manners in the style of Jane Austen and Amelia Opie, suggesting also the influence of Sir Walter Scott, who would later provide the generic model for The Prairie, as well as the rest of the Leatherstocking Tales.

Both Precaution and his second novel The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821) were well received, and Cooper quickly emerged alongside Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant as one of the bright lights of a new American literary culture. The Spy represented Cooper's first foray into the historical romance, a genre epic in nature and scope, established by Sir Walter Scott. In 1823, The Pioneers (the first of the Leatherstocking Tales) was published, followed in short succession by The Pilot (1824), Lionel Lincoln (1825), The Last of the Mohicans (1826) (volume 2 of the Leatherstocking Tales), and The Prairie (1827) (volume 3). Cooper remained prolific in later life, writing both fiction and nonfiction, and completed the story of Natty Bumppo by returning to the character's earlier years in The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841). Cooper traveled widely (completing The Prairie in Paris). Spanning many genres, his works engaged contemporary political debates both national and international as well as questions of historiography, race, and religion. His later novels, specifically The Oak Openings (1848) and The Sea Lions (1849) strongly affirm his Christian faith, and though he remained firmly patriotic, these religious beliefs were interlaced with a strident critique of American materialism and the rising tide of industrial capitalism. These latter concerns found early expression in The Prairie.

It is a humorous and certainly unfortunate fact of American literary history that Cooper's reputation suffered somewhat in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In "A Fable for Critics" (1849), James Russell Lowell criticized Cooper's class consciousness and suggested that his gift for characterization (particularly with respect to women) was limited. More damaging to the reception of Cooper's work was Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" (1895). In this playful but scathing essay, Twain lampoons the lack of verisimilitude and the highly romanticized elements of plot that appear in The Deerslayer. However, it must be noted that Twain was also highly critical of Sir Walter Scott, and "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" is a cornerstone treatise of late nineteenth-century American Realism. Twain's purpose is to outline an aesthetic practice that privileges the vivid rendering of actuality and historical detail, a practice employed by various writers of his own era, including William Dean Howells and Henry James. The essay is as much a response to Romanticism in general as it is to Cooper specifically. In spite of this criticism, The Prairie remains a particular favorite among scholars, and along with many of his other works it continues to be popular and compelling, exerting over time a tremendous influence on the development of the American novel. The character typology articulated in the story and the concern with the sunset fading of the American frontier are central preoccupations of twentieth-century authors such as William Faulkner, Larry McMurtry, and Cormac McCarthy.

The Prairie is set in 1804 on the Great Plains west of the Mississippi River, just after the Louisiana Purchase. The novel recounts the story of the aging trapper Natty Bumppo, now alone and isolated, as he encounters an oddly mixed and incongruous caravan of migrants. The brutal Ishmael Bush, his wife Esther, and their numerous sons and daughters, as well as his brother-in-law Abiram White, lead the caravan. Also among them are Esther's niece, Ellen Wade, and a naturalist by the name of Dr. Obed Battius. Abiram White holds captive the young woman, Inez, who is the wife of Captain Middleton, a soldier in the United States Army. As the story opens, the caravan happens upon the trapper, and they soon encounter a band of hostile Sioux. The novel involves a series of revealing conflicts between the white settlers, Natty, the Sioux, and their rivals the Pawnee. Cooper carefully orchestrates a series of twists and surprises that illuminate the complexities of the characters, traits that transcend individual identities, reflecting broader historical and political concerns. Through these various players, The Prairie advances and complicates a number of important themes previously addressed in The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans: the destruction of natural resources and landscape, the tragic eradication of native peoples, and the troubling trajectory of American history and American expansionist ideology.

Ishmael Bush and his darker counterpart Abiram White, though nuanced and quite human in their motives and aspirations, rise to almost allegorical proportions, representing the white American impulse to settle and possess the riches of America's unspoiled lands. Ishmael manifests a physical strength rivaled only by his callous force of will, mirrored directly in his many sons. Their overtly materialist efforts function parallel to the ostensibly altruistic motives of the naturalist Dr. Battius, whose often comic pursuit of scientific knowledge involves yet another form of control and possession. These characters emerge as intricately textured figures of virtue and vice. They are strong and powerful, full of energy, ambition, and aspiration; but they are also motivated by greed, single-minded avarice, and a willingness to transcend accepted ethical boundaries. As with his white characters, Cooper's treatment of Native Americans in The Prairie is starkly ambiguous, though less so within a single character. The young Pawnee chief Hard-Heart takes on a heroic role in his defense of his people against the Sioux, who figure less sympathetically in their willingness to steal, capture, and torture their enemies. As the narrative evolves, the interrelationship of whites and natives takes on a startling intricacy, and the novel resists any attempt to establish a moral framework that functions neatly along racial and ethnic lines. This becomes evident in Natty Bumppo himself.

It is through the development of Natty's character in The Prairie that we begin to see tension and paradox in Cooper's perspective on American history and expansionism. Natty proceeds from youth to old age in the following story-sequence: The Deerslayer (1841), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840), The Pioneers (1823), and finally The Prairie (1827). Read in this order, it appears that Cooper becomes more skeptical of expansionist doctrine. In his youth, Natty takes on many of the characteristics and practices of Native Americans, but he remains committed to his "white gifts," and in a significant way he is the "pathfinder," the vanguard of settlement and progressivism. As he reaches old age in The Prairie, he remains the heroic defender of those in need (white and native) but he deliberately removes himself from the ever-encroaching tide of settlement and civilization, and he is openly critical of its darker implications. The fascinating irony, however, is that the novels were not written in story-sequence, and read carefully each reflects a tension in Cooper's viewpoint that perhaps lasted throughout his life. In The Prairie, we can begin to see an essential relationship between characterization and genre, and in this sense we can come to understand Cooper's value as a novelist. Natty is derived from a long line of archetypal mythic figures. His genealogy is ancient, proceeding from the classical epics of Homer and Virgil, into the medieval romances of the European continent and England, and of course into the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott. As with all of the characters who emerge from this epic tradition, he is larger than life, capable of marshal feats beyond the common man. In addition, he is representative, suggesting the virtues, values, motives, and aspirations of a culture and a people. However, The Prairie is the most deeply critical and ambiguous of the Leatherstocking Tales, particularly regarding the mythic status of the hero. As a distinctly American version of the epic tradition, The Prairie foregrounds Natty's role as outsider, rebel, and self-proclaimed isolato-reflecting the individualist impulses so endemic to American cultural perception. In The Prairie, Natty stands between and is in large part the victim of a set of conflicting historical forces. The tide of progress leaves him without a place. But he is by no means a figure of pure sympathy. His anti-social behavior and his impulse to violence are central traits of a vexing concept of heroism that remains dominant today.

Natty Bumppo is in large part an Adamic figure, the central human actor in a new garden, a manifestation of the possibility that informed the early nation's sense of itself. With vast sweeps of open land available for the taking, the nation might expand its power and influence and become the vanguard example of modern democracy and political hope. This was Manifest Destiny in its essence, the nineteenth-century version of an ideal that traced its origins to the Puritans, who under John Winthrop envisioned themselves as a chosen people with a special mission, as a "beacon on a hill" meant to exemplify the ideal society. Natty is the new Adam in an American Eden, a mythic figure exemplifying possibility and vision. In The Prairie, however, the garden is darkening, leaning toward corruption through the invasion and malevolent influence of a decadent civilization. Natty's age and increasing infirmity connote his inevitable lapse into a fallen world, and his obvious propensity to settle disputes with the gun and the knife, present in all of the Leatherstocking Tales, is added evidence of his inability to represent the pre-lapsarian Edenic model in its purest form. In all of this, Cooper achieves something singularly impressive in The Prairie, because in this novel Natty sustains his mythic stature while acquiring a roundness of character perhaps less fully present in the other Leatherstocking Tales. In his weakness, he retains his wit and ingenuity; in his age, he achieves a recognizable human sympathy, both for the people he encounters and for the natural world they occupy.

Cooper centers the novel's thematic tensions not only on character conflict and interaction, but on the relationship of people to the land. As a firm reactionary committed to the frontier and the manner of living it demands, Natty draws the reader's attention to the vastness, the sublimity, and the inexpressible beauty of a distinctly American landscape. It is a sublimity more compelling because it is fading from view, giving way under the pressure of the inexorable forces of progress and mercantile materialism. But in spite of these inevitabilities, the landscape transcends. The darkly comic character of Dr. Battius, representative of the "scientific" civilization, is finally crippled and dumbfounded by the reality of a nature that he can never fully categorize and understand. Natty Bumppo, Ishmael Bush, Abiram White, Hard-Heart, Captain Middleton, and Inez, appear to us as characters of varying levels of sympathy and concern. Our attention is drawn to them. But here we are invited to consider that Cooper begins each chapter with an epigram from Shakespeare, and this Shakespearean scope implies, in the words of Macbeth, that these people are only players, who "strut" and "fret" and in the end are "heard no more." Through them, Cooper invites us to stand in awe of the natural world, to treat it with humility and reverence, and to understand that the human drama for which it provides the stage ultimately fades into the profound incomprehensibility of the stage itself. Cooper later returns to the optative representations of the white hero in The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841). But The Prairie demonstrates the levels, tensions, and richness of Cooper's creative intellect, as he grapples with the irreconcilable complexities of civilization and the dark beauty and immutable reality of nature.