The Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics) - James Fenimore Cooper [309]
Preface to The Leatherstocking Tales [1850]
1 (p. 5) Tales [1850]: Cooper wrote this preface for the Putnam’s Author’s Revised Edition of 1850 of the five Leatherstocking Tales. The Deerslayer was the first volume to appear in this new edition of the tales, but the preface was intended to be a general one for all of the tales. The Deerslayer was first published in Philadelphia on August 2 7 , 1841, by Lea and Blanchard. Richard Bentley brought out the British edition in London on September 7, 1841. Cooper usually published first in Britain to protect his British copyright, but in this instance Bentley appears to have had no problem in maintaining the British copyright. The corrected holograph manuscript for The Deerslayer, from which the first American edition was set, is now in the Pier-pont Morgan Library.
2 (p. 6) original in his mind for the character of Leatherstocking: The leading candidates that readers speculated on were Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, with perhaps a dash of Robin Hood from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) .
3 (p. 8) “Indians of the school of Heckewelder”: The reference is to John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary and sympathetic observer of the American Indian tribes, on whom Cooper relied for his knowledge of Indian customs, mores, and history. Heckewelder was a kind of early anthropologist who greatly admired the Indian people he wrote about so knowledgeably. See John Heckewelder, An Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States, Philadelphia, Abraham Small, 1819; reprinted as Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. 12, Philadelphia: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1876; and reprinted most recently in New York by Arno Press and the New York Times in 1971.
The unnamed critic from whom Cooper draws the quotation was probably Lewis Cass, governor of the Michigan Territory (1813-1831), who in 1828 said that Cooper “consulted the book of Mr. Heckewelder, instead of the book of nature.” Or it may have been Robert Montgomery Bird. Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837), a bestseller, was written to contest Cooper’s “poetical illusions” and “beautiful unrealities” by describing, as he says in his preface, “real Indians” who are in fact “ignorant, violent, debased, brutal.”
Preface to The Deerslayer [1850]
1 (p. 9) The Deerslayer [1850]: Cooper’s original 1841 preface to The Deerslayer is quite different in tone from the 1850 preface. Cooper states in the 1841 preface that “this book has not been written, without many misgivings, as to its probable reception.” The author hopes that if readers consider “this particular act not the best of the series,” they “will also come to the conclusion that it is not absolutely the worst.” The preface, which has an oddly defensive tone, even contains a reference to the temptation Cooper had “more than once to burn his manuscript, and to turn to some other subject.”
This depression or sense of foreboding was not justified. The novel was well received, though it was not as successful as some of his earlier works. This may have been due in part to the fact that it was not as widely reviewed as the other works. The Whig press, having been forced to compensate Cooper for their earlier libels, now decided to ignore him. (See the Introduction.)
Chapter I
1 (p. 12) The incidents of this tale occurred between the years 1740 and 1745: This places the action around the time of, or a few years prior to, the start