Where Hawkeye Gets Old

The Pioneers by James Fenimore Cooper
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is not a book I would recommend for most people. But this is a book that serves a useful purpose, and it should still be read by some of us.

I hated the first half, tbh. Super boring with virtually no plot. Cooper allows his characters to just blather on about nothing for pages. They argue with each other over minor points and belabor everything that gets the slightest mention. Maybe he's establishing character; if so, they all sound like self-important drunks. (There are a couple actual drunks in the novel. The rest just argue like it.)

Even 2/3 of the way through, I was trying to decide if this was a 1-star or 2-star novel. (I liked Last of the Mohicans as well as Pathfinder. Even Deerslayer, a little. They're all a bit quaint and plodding, but they have some points of interest and a decent plot with sections that are genuinely fun. But this one--the first written, actually--is not nearly as reader-friendly.) However, it does pick up a lot in the last third, enough that I wish that he had written the whole novel over those events. It would have been a successful novel, to my mind. At least it improved it enough I can give it a barely-passing 3 stars.

Even the dreadfully dull parts at the beginning have some merit, though. Most of the value in this novel, IMO, is the way it traces the westward expansion of the late 1700s and early 1800s, from an almost contemporary perspective, with an evaluation of the effects on the land and people. (A lot of what Cooper writes is based on the life of his own father, who founded Cooperstown, New York, where young James Fenimore grew up.) And the most interesting part there, for me, was the description of the abuse and waste of everything on the frontier, even 230 years ago.

Judge Templeton (a stand-in for the author's father) opposes the waste he sees, and there are many examples. Far too many trees are being cut down. He objects especially to felling maples. Connected to that, he objects to the wasteful way the sap of the maples is harvested to make sugar, with much of it spilling away. Other characters push back, laughing at him, talking as if the huge wilderness will be there forever. They hunt pigeons, shooting them down in the hundreds and thousands, covering the ground with them, though they intend to make use of only a fraction. They use nets on Lake Otsego to gather far more fish all at one time than they intend to use. And in general, they overhunt everything, with a new law about a restricted deer-season just starting to be in effect.

The consequences of this overuse are seen most pathetically in the old hunter, Natty, who is the aged version of Hawkeye from Last of the Mohicans. He's 70 now, and the frontier has caught up to him, settlers becoming a nuisance to him, making it harder to survive. And his old friend Chingachgook, representing all of the tribes of the area that had died of disease and war by that point, is a shadow of his old self, hardly able to live in the new version of the land. They no longer fit on the frontier, and in the end old Hawkeye leaves to find the true wilderness once more, where the forests aren't hollowed out by clearings, hammers aren't pounding every day, and the game isn't all driven off.

It's so sad to see how voices were calling out these practices and injustices 200 years ago and yet have still gone mostly unheard. We're still doing the same things.

The author's relationship with race and ethnicity is a little more awkward. There are slaves present in the story, and Cooper shows an awareness of their shared humanity while still being pretty racist, and he openly admires a lot about Native culture while still being condescending and superior. I feel like he's ahead of the curve for 1830 (when he wrote it), but it still makes for awkward reading in the 2020s.

Taken as a whole, I feel like the book offers a useful glimpse into the lives of people at that time (1790s). Some things were more backward than I thought, like the existence of slaves so late in New York state, but other things seemed surprisingly modern, like the judicial system and existence of a conservation movement. The point is that my impression of those times is quite off, and I doubt a history book would supply as many insights as this flawed novel gave me.

Not highly recommended, but still valuable.

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