Where Hawkeye Finally Rests

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

I pretty much hated most of the book. But it finally got better at the end. (Probably more of a 2 star read. 1.5 even. But I'm sentimental.)

I had decided I would read all of the Leatherstocking Tales, and I found a little to enjoy in all of them, though I grew less and less interested as I worked through the series. They all have the same flaws--IMO--but they generally have a decent story to tell. The story is buried beneath a lot of nonsense, but there it is.

The main problem is JFC's horrible prose. When he's at his best, it's wordy. When he's at his worst, which is about 90% of the time, he's absurdly wordy beyond all reason, but also off-topic, rambling, and sermonizing, and it's especially his dialogue that offends. It is constantly so far removed from any human communication that it's more annoying and frustrating than reading should ever be. He has a naturalist in this story who is so absent-minded and argumentative, with such overblown language, that his dialogue went beyond humor to farce. (I won't quote any of his ridiculous professor-sounding speeches filled with Latin, but they are so bad and go on so long...) A bee-hunter is a character here, and he's an okay addition, but he constantly makes speeches with bee-inspired metaphors. Almost every speech has a bee in it somewhere. (Reminded me of the worst of Dickens.) And there are many others like this. Hawkeye--just called the Trapper in this novel--is the same here as everywhere, answering every question with a long soliloquy on the ways of the world and the gifts of the white man or red man and the natural ways of women or wild creatures or whatever. He gives two paragraph answers to yes/no questions, all without answering the question. And sometimes the narrator calls him prolix, as if we were meant to believe it's Hawkeye's problem and not the author's.

When he gets around to it, Cooper can tell a decent adventure story. That's why I kept reading; I convinced myself I'd learn to appreciate his books. That has only been true to a small degree. This time, he waits until about halfway through the book to start in on the actual plot. It's about then we discover a woman has been abducted and is hidden in a wagon headed across the prairie, all of this occurring in the days before settlers lived there. A family of outlaw rednecks are the villains in this part of the novel; later it's the Sioux. But even when we have Hawkeye in the story, helping the various white travelers, translating with the natives, he seldom does much of interest. He's more Jean Luc Picard here than James Kirk. He uses diplomacy to save his lives and others when they're captured various times, and it's okay, but not very adventurous. He's still pretty robust for a hero now in his 80s, but his part of the story mostly focuses on old-timer wisdom. The only real action he's responsible for is when the natives have trapped them with a wildfire, and he fights back with a fire of his own.

The very end leads us first to his goodbyes with all the settlers heading back to the settlements, followed by a last visit from one of those friends (months later, but only a page later in the book) where Nathaniel Bumppo/Pathfinder/Deerslayer/Hawkeye/Le Longue Carabine/Trapper finally dies. That part is actually very affecting, with language a little less overwritten, filled with a deep sense of melancholy. Those five pages are very good. It almost makes it worth reading the rest.

I'm glad I read these. I'm glad I'm done. You might like them, but they're a lot of work.

I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze, but you're welcome to check.

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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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Where We Get a Glimpse of a Different America

The Pathfinder by James Fenimore Cooper
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my favorite so far of the Leatherstocking Tales. A good plot, a good set of characters, a fun setting, a couple foul villains--it works well.

James Fenimore Cooper is not, in my opinion, an easy read. He has some tics that will annoy, and he belabors some dull scenes while rushing through the great ones, and I know that not too many of my friends would like this book. But he does some fun things that make it worthwhile for some readers.

Although the book is full of action--fighting down a river, chased by the enemy; sailing through a storm on Lake Ontario; facing overwhelming numbers from inside a fort hidden on a small island--one of the best scenes is just a shooting contest on a peaceful day at Fort Oswego. It's great fun seeing Hawkeye/Pathfinder outshooting everyone, just as you know he should, without breaking a sweat, but there's more to it. On one hand, we see the wives of the officers being bitchy to the humble, pretty daughter of a nobody sergeant. On the other, we find an annoying and cocky gentleman getting beaten by his inferiors. Just that is fun, but it's the juxtaposition of those events which supplies a nice critique of society at that time, the continued stratification of society that makes so little sense out in the forest. Of course, it's always fun to see Pathfinder be awesome. What's the point of his being the best shot on the frontier if we don't see him shoot?

The author puts less philosophy in Pathfinder's mouth in this book, and the novel's better for it. (He doesn't resist completely, however, and those are my least favorite passages.) Still, he has a lot more action in this novel than in others (IMO) and it makes a less laborious and more entertaining read. And, as always, knowing the whole of a classic novel has its own rewards, and I think for some readers that's reason enough.

So I liked it. Others may not. Recommended for a pretty narrow group of readers, I fear. :)

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