In his imagination, James Fenimore Cooper cast back to a New World before the encroachment of settlers. His most enduring character is Leatherstocking, who goes by the name Deerslayer in The Deerslayer (and by other names in the other books), and carries in him what Cooper believed to be the best attributes of the Indian and white worlds. “Removed from nearly all the temptations of civilized life, placed in the best associations of that which is deemed savage, and favorably disposed by nature to improve such advantages,” Deerslayer was, in the author’s own words, a “seed scattered by the wayside” that had flourished.
Leatherstocking was the first backwoodsman in American fiction to consciously renounce civilization, and the first to bear witness to the inevitable settling of the once vast wilderness. He was the original rugged individualist in American literature, a man who had never read a book in his life but had amassed all he knew through experience. At a time when the young country was ripe for a literary hero of American proportions, James Fenimore Cooper supplied one.
In those early days of his writing, Cooper was convinced that American scenery had no rival. At his best, Cooper was said to “paint” scenery with his pen as well as others painted with a brush. The landscape that Cooper introduced in the early Leatherstocking novels was one of staggering natural beauty.
