The Last of the Mohicans Summary: Cooper's 1826 Frontier Novel Explained
What it is about
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is a historical romance published by James Fenimore Cooper in 1826. It is the second book of the five Leatherstocking Tales and by far the best known to modern readers. Cooper came back to the sequence later: The Pathfinder followed fourteen years afterwards in 1840, and the prequel, The Deerslayer, arrived a year after that.
The setting is the French and Indian War, the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War, with France and Great Britain fighting for control of the continent. Both sides used Native American allies. The French relied on them especially heavily, since in the north-eastern frontier they were outnumbered by the British. Cooper places his story immediately before, during and after the Siege of Fort William Henry, in the country around Lake George in New York.
The plot engine is simple. Colonel Munro commands Fort William Henry. His two daughters, Cora and Alice, must be brought to him safely through contested forest. The party escorting them includes Major Duncan Heyward, a singing teacher named David Gamut, the frontier scout Natty Bumppo (called Hawk-eye) and the two Mohicans of the title, Chingachgook and his son Uncas. Critics have often read this mixed group as a small model of the society America was becoming, particularly in its racial make-up.
The story
This section describes the plot in detail, though not the final pages.
Cora and Alice set out from Fort Edward with Heyward, picking up Gamut along the way. Their guide is Magua, a native who takes them off the main route and away from the New York militia. Heyward grows uneasy. The party, effectively lost, falls in with Hawk-eye, Chingachgook and Uncas, who share Heyward's suspicion that Magua is a Huron scout working for the French. Exposed, Magua escapes.
Expecting him to return with reinforcements, the scouts hide the group in a cave on a river island. The Hurons attack, Gamut is wounded, the ammunition runs out. Hawk-eye and the Mohicans slip away, knowing they would be killed on sight while the British party is worth taking alive. They promise to return.
Magua explains his grudge during the captivity. Munro gave him whiskey, made him a drunkard, saw him cast out of his tribe, then had him whipped at a post for his drunkenness. He offers to spare the prisoners if Cora will marry him. She refuses twice, and he condemns them all to death. The rescue comes in time, and the party shelters in a ruined building from an older battle, which the Hurons will not approach because their dead are buried there.
They reach Fort William Henry through the French siege lines. Hawk-eye is sent for reinforcements and captured. The French general, Montcalm, shows Munro the letter in which General Webb refuses to send help. Munro accepts terms: the garrison, with its women and children, may leave if they withdraw from the war for eighteen months. Outside the fort, the column is ambushed by two thousand Huron warriors. In the massacre, Magua takes Cora and Alice.
The pursuit that follows runs through a canoe chase on the lake, a disguise plot in the Huron village (Heyward as a French medicine man, Hawk-eye inside a bear skin), the torture and rescue of Uncas, and finally a council at the Delaware village where Uncas is revealed to be a Mohican, kin to the once-dominant tribe the Delawares remember. The sage Tamenund sides with him. Magua is there, demanding his prisoners back.
The main characters
Hawk-eye is Natty Bumppo, the white frontiersman scouting for the British, competent in the woods in a way the soldiers are not. Chingachgook and Uncas are the Mohicans of the title, father and son, the last of their line. Magua is the Huron whose personal injury at Munro's hands drives much of the violence. Cora and Alice Munro are the sisters being escorted, Cora the one who refuses Magua. Duncan Heyward is the young British officer who declares his love for Alice and receives Munro's blessing. David Gamut, the singing teacher, is spared by the Hurons as a harmless madman and turns out to be useful.
The themes
Survival is the surface subject, but the book keeps returning to what it costs to belong somewhere. Identity is worked out through disguise, through adoption, through tribal allegiance and bloodline. Nature is both a sanctuary and a threat, and the forest knowledge of Hawk-eye and the Mohicans is set against the formal European war of forts, parleys and signed terms. War here is not a clean contest. The massacre outside Fort William Henry happens after an honourable surrender, and the novel's violence is often personal rather than strategic.
Why it still matters
The book has been one of the most popular English-language novels since it appeared, and it remains standard reading on American literature courses. It has been adapted repeatedly for stage, film and animation, and in many languages. Part of the reason is that Cooper built the frontier adventure template that so much later fiction and cinema works from. The other part is the title itself, which states the ending as a fact of history before the story begins.
