Natty as Frontiersman

In writing The Pioneers, Cooper both addresses and establishes the emerging American identity, still undefined in its infancy. While witnessing the definition of the new American man evolve and solidify, Cooper attempts to guide his development. As a torchbearer of American history, Cooper saw the frontiersman as a dying breed; men caught between two worlds without a home.

Cooper's construction of Natty Bumppo reflects the author's appreciation of the frontiersmen and his lament of their passing. Natty Bumppo is the literary bridge between the "old world" and the dawning of American possibility. Literary critique James Wallace notes that "Natty always appears form and returns to the forest which surrounds Templeton; he is a socially marginal character in a literal as well as a moral sense" (143). Natty's interactions both in the woods and in civilization make him a vestige of the natural man that Cooper so admires, trapped in the evolving world that Cooper bemoans.

| Fenimore's Natty Bumppo | Table of Contents |