Introduction
In The Pathfinder, James Fenimore Cooper tells a thrilling tale of naval adventure, rival love, and wilderness experience that captures the rough-and-tumble life on the shores of Lake Ontario during the French and Indian War. Cooper is the foremost author of historical romance in American literature, and The Pathfinder remains one of the finest examples of the genre. The fourth novel in the five-novel series that forms the world-famous Leatherstocking Tales, The Pathfinder revives Cooper's most enduring creation, that intrepid frontiersman Natty Bumppo. It is unnecessary to have read the other books in the series to enjoy this one. The Pathfinder stands alone as an example of Cooper's unique ability to depict how the combination of tenderness and violence brings order to the American frontier.
Though the Leatherstocking Tales earned Cooper an international literary reputation, he did not set out to be a novelist. Born September 15, 1789, in Burlington, New Jersey, and raised in Cooperstown, New York, the town his father founded, Cooper received an uneven education. He entered Yale College in 1803 but was dismissed for misconduct in 1805 and joined the U.S. Navy a few years later. In 1808 and 1809, he served aboard a vessel stationed on Lake Ontario at Oswego, New York. The experience acquainted him with the Great Lakes and schooled him in seamanship. He would put such knowledge to good use in The Pathfinder, which is set in the same locale. After resigning from the navy in 1813, Cooper established himself as a gentleman farmer on Long Island, but he lived a little too well and ran through a rather sizable family fortune before the start of the next decade. He began writing novels in the 1820s mainly as a financial expedient. A prolific author, Cooper wrote dozens of books in a number of different fields--fiction, history, politics, travel--over the next three decades. Nothing he wrote was as beloved as the Leatherstocking Tales, but a few of his other novels were highly regarded. The Pilot (1824), for example, revealed his capacity for writing tales of thrilling maritime adventure. Cooper maintained his prolific literary output until his death on September 14, 1851.
The Pioneers (1823) was Cooper's first novel to introduce Natty Bumppo, who would also become known by a number of other names--Hawk Eye, Leatherstocking, Longue Carabine, and Pathfinder. This character is Cooper's single most important contribution to American literature. The Last of the Mohicans (1826), the second book in the Leatherstocking Tales series, would become his best-loved and most widely known novel. In The Prairie (1827), set in 1805, Natty Bumppo is quite an old man, and the novel ends with his death. In the early 1830s, Cooper toyed with the idea of writing a novel set in the Great Lakes region, an area of North America destined to form the heart and soul of the continent during the ensuing decades. This setting would allow him to combine the mystery and danger of the American wilderness with maritime adventure. Richard Bentley, the English publisher who would later issue several of Herman Melville's works, liked Cooper's idea very much and encouraged him to pursue it. Usually committed to more projects than he had time to complete at any given moment, Cooper did not return to the idea until late in the decade. Completing The History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839), his most important historical work, Cooper was reminded of how exciting naval action on the Great Lakes could be. Initially, he had no intentions of resurrecting Natty Bumppo, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that his most beloved character was the best suited to carry his new novel.
In recent years the word "prequel" has entered the English language to denote a work that tells a story whose action occurs previous to the story it follows. The word may be new, but the idea is at least as old as the Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper set The Pathfinder: or, The Inland Sea (1840) during the French and Indian War when Natty Bumppo was in his early thirties. The special charm of this new story, in the words of the New-York Review, is its depiction of Cooper's renowned hero "in an entirely new light--Natty in love!" For the fifth and final novel in the series, The Deerslayer (1841), Cooper took the story of Leatherstocking even further back. Set in the 1740s, The Deerslayer depicts Natty Bumppo as a young man just beginning his wilderness initiation. After completing The Pathfinder, Cooper thought it was the best book in the Leatherstocking series, a belief he maintained even after completing The Deerslayer, which some have considered his masterpiece. Cooper disagreed. Two years after The Deerslayer appeared, he told Rufus Griswold that in some respects it was a better book than the previous one but concluded that as a whole The Pathfinder was superior.
As The Pathfinder begins, Mabel Dunham and her Uncle Charles Cap, a garrulous old sea dog, are being led through the wilderness of frontier New York by a duplicitous Tuscarora named Arrowhead and his endearing wife, Dew-of-June. These four soon encounter three others who have been sent from Fort Oswego to meet Mabel and her party: Pathfinder, his friend Chingachgook, and a brave young lakeman named Jasper Western. All get acquainted over the next several pages, and their conversation continues at some length.
With his obstinate insistence on the superiority of the ocean to Lake Ontario, Cap dominates the conversation. Some contemporary readers found the character a little overbearing. Reviewing The Pathfinder for the New-Yorker, Horace Greeley observed that Cap is "entirely overdrawn and a gross caricature." Similarly, The Spectator, a London literary weekly, noted that Cap's obstinate behavior stems from "sea prejudices operating upon a crabbed and carping nature." Not all contemporary readers felt this way. In a letter to the editor of Knickerbocker, Washington Irving called the character of Cap "a master-piece."
Though Cap's long-windedness does test the reader's patience, his speeches and the early conversations among the other principle characters serve an important purpose in the narrative. They contribute to the deliberately measured pace, and help lull readers into an almost hypnotic state of complacency so that when the first Mingo bullet strikes it disturbs the calm and initiates a long and thrilling sequence of close combat and daring athleticism. The pattern established in these early scenes recurs throughout the book. Dialogue and exposition combine to build the tension slowly, which Cooper breaks swiftly with bullets, knifes, and tomahawks. Cooper was a pioneer in the aesthetics of bloodshed: His lyrical depiction of violence is unexcelled in American literature.
Upon its publication, American readers greeted The Pathfinder with enthusiasm. They were thrilled that Cooper had returned to his beloved hero, especially since several of his recent books had antagonized American readers, in terms of both content and format. The New York Review began its notice of The Pathfinder as follows: "We hail the reappearance of Mr. Cooper in his old and true sphere, with deeper regret than ever that he should so long have been unfaithful to his proper vocation. We have read this work with an interest and a delight which we have no terms to express. It is a true work of genius." The reviewer for the Southern Literary Messenger, the foremost literary journal in the South, sounded a similar note as it congratulated Cooper "upon his return to his old ground of romance." This reviewer expressed much pleasure upon reading the further adventures of Cooper's most famous character: "Natty Bumppo is a character that can never grow stale. He is one of nature's philosophers. He has sat at her feet in her great cathedral of rocks and streams and mighty woods, and her teachings have gone down into his simple heart, and have made the toil-worn and rugged hunter eloquent and profound. There is a beautiful simplicity in his actions and a fountain of fresh, free thought in his words, that will always excite emotion and interest."
These remarks constitute one of the finest contemporary appreciations of Cooper's famous hero and help explain Natty Bumppo's enduring allure. Yet they do not completely explain why Leatherstocking continues to appeal to readers today. Both he and Chingachgook remain worthy of admiration because of their professionalism too. Such a term may seem anachronistic when applied to a fictional frontiersman from the early nineteenth century (when only law and medicine were considered professions), but there can be little doubt that in the face of danger, Natty Bumppo always behaves in a professional manner. He is a true expert at what he does. He can look over field and stream, read the terrain, and understand the dangers ahead. He knows precisely how to react to perilous situations in order to save those people who are relying on his protection.
Besides giving Natty Bumppo a memorable personality, Cooper also made him memorable by applying keen pictorial sensibilities to paint his picture. Cooper is known for his capacity for painting landscapes with words, but, like the contemporary painters belonging to the Hudson River School, he enhanced his landscapes by placing man in the foreground. Long after a reader finishes The Pathfinder or, for that matter, any of the other novels that form the Leatherstocking Tales, the image of Natty Bumppo sticks in the mind. There he is: Clad in a buckskin jacket and leaning on his long rifle, he stands at the edge of a rocky promontory facing west. A sea of trees spreads out before him, extending to the horizon, where the setting sun darts its rays back across the treetops. The gaze of Leatherstocking penetrates the continent: He sees all that America is and all that America could become.
The Pathfinder attracted numerous enthusiasts overseas, and this novel, along with the others in the series, helped to shape foreign perceptions of the United States. During the next decade and a half, The Pathfinder was translated into Danish, Dutch, French, and German. In France, Honoré de Balzac was one of Cooper's greatest admirers, and his review remains one of the fondest appreciations of The Pathfinder. Balzac observed that Cooper "owes the high place he holds in modern literature to two faculties: that of painting the sea and seamen; [and] that of idealizing the magnificent landscapes of America." The Pathfinder, Balzac explained, gave Cooper the opportunity to combine both faculties to tell a touching yet action-filled story. The book also found many appreciative readers in Russia. T. N. Granovskii, an influential historian and central figure in mid-nineteenth-century Russian intellectual life, read The Pathfinder in its French translation, Le Lac Ontario, and found it "really beautiful." Leo Tolstoy enjoyed The Pathfinder and referred to it in his novella "The Cossacks." Since its initial appearance in 1840, The Pathfinder has remained in print and continues to appear in more and more languages. From the late nineteenth century, it has been translated into Czech, Hebrew, Hungarian, Latvian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.
The importance of The Pathfinder extends beyond the bounds of literary history. After all, James Fenimore Cooper gave currency to the word "pathfinder." After the publication of his novel, the word began being widely used to refer to Western explorers adept at finding their way through the wilderness. John C. Fremont, for one, became known as the great pathfinder. With the start of the Scouting movement in the early twentieth century, both Boy Scouts and Girl Guides could earn Pathfinder Badges, emblems to show their proficiency at finding the right way. The word began to be applied figuratively to anyone who blazed a trail through any field of scholarly or creative endeavor. As William James observed, "Philosophers are after all like poets. They are path-finders." When the marketing people at Nissan Motor Company sought a name for its sturdy all-terrain vehicle in 1987, they decided to call it Pathfinder. And when the scientists at NASA sought a name for its Mars Explorer, they too called it Pathfinder. Since its initial publication, The Pathfinder has become more than just a literary classic, it has become part of the fabric of our culture.
Kevin J. Hayes, Professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma, is the author of An American Cycling Odyssey, 1887, Melville's Folk Roots, and Stephen Crane, among other books. He has received the Virginia Library History Award presented by the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Center for the Book.
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