The Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics) - James Fenimore Cooper [310]
2 (p. 15) while Deerslayer was several years his junior: Deerslayer is usually considered to be between twenty and twenty-two at this time, which makes him about thirty-seven in The Last of the Mohicans, which takes place in 1757. The ages of the characters and the chronologies of the Leatherstocking Tales, however, do not always quite square. The action in the last section of chapter XXXII of The Deerslayer (pp. 520-522), when Natty, Chingachgook, and Uncas revisit Lake Glimmerglass, would have to occur early in 1757, because Uncas is still alive. He is killed in Mohicans, which takes place in 1757. In Mohicans Uncas is pictured as a mature warrior, not a boy Even if the action of The Deerslayer takes place as early as 1742, Uncas could be at most fifteen when he appears in the final scene at Lake Glimmerglass with his father and Deerslayer. Cooper did not always match up his characters’ ages in the different tales, but Natty more or less ages properly. It is about right for Natty Bumppo to be a “septuagenarian” in The Pioneers; if the novel takes place in 1793, then Natty would be seventy-three, provided he is thirty-seven in Mohicans. It might require a slight stretch for him to be still alive as an octogenarian in The Prairie; if we date his death as 1806, he would have been eighty-six at the time.
3 (p. 16) “I have now lived ten years with the Delawares”: Presumably, Natty grew up with his foster parents, the Moravian missionaries, until he was about twelve or fourteen and then went to live fulltime with the Delawares, where he acquired his linguistic skills. Natty did know his mother because Hetty reminds him of his mother, so we might guess that his parents died when he was three or four. Why didn’t the missionaries teach him to read and write? Maybe he would have felt more connected to society if he had mastered these gentlemanly white-man’s skills.
4 (p. 22) “we must be our own judges and executioners”: This exchange clearly contrasts Harry’s purely instrumental morality, which is based on power, with Natty’s “higher law” conceptions. Harry, a hulking brute of a man, personifies the notion that the stronger rule by might. Deerslayer does not accept this idea and believes in a universal morality, but has some difficulty, as we shall see, in reconciling his universalism with his idea of “gifts,” in which elements of moral relativity are embodied.
Chapter II
1 (p. 32) “in one affray with the redskins he lost his only son”: This history that Cooper gives us may help to explain Hutter’s willingness later to attack Indian women and children.
2 (p. 36) He bethought him of his mother ... with a saddened mien: This is one of the rare passages in which Natty thinks back on his childhood. He has suffered a terrible loss. We do not get a similar tender recollection of his foster parents, the Moravian missionaries, but we know that Natty meets Chingachgook when both are very young, and the two are like brothers.
Chapter III
1 (p. 42) “A white man’s gifts are Christianized, while a redskin’s are more for the wilderness”: Natty argues initially that there is a moral distinction between whites and Indians by virtue of the whites being Christianized. However, in his subsequent reply to Harry in this scene (several paragraphs down), he seems to make a more finely grained distinction by pointing out that, within the categories of whites and redmen, he does “not deny that there are tribes among the Indians that are nat‘rally pervarse and wicked, as there are nations among the whites.