old man? 4. For what did Inez mistake the fire? 5. What did Middleton propose to do? 6. What do you learn of his character? 7. What does Leatherstocking fear more than the fire? 8. What does he order his companion to do? 9. How does he rebuke Middleton? 10. How does Leatherstocking cheat the fire? 11. What is the story of Columbus and the egg? 12. What difference do you notice in the Leatherstocking of this and of the earlier selections? 13. Why do you suppose he has gone so far west? 14. What changes in the United States had he seen in his lifetime? youth to old age? 15. What traits had he shown from Topics for Oral and Written Composition. 1. The Character of Leather stocking. 2. Cooper's Indians. 3. Life on the Frontier. 4. The Rifle on the Frontier. 5. The French and Indian Wars. 6. The 8. Women's For Study with the Glossary: I. readiness of resources, precipitously, inopportunely, the priming of his piece, warily, expedients, projection, with conceit and intelligence, apprehension, consummate, Manitou (the Indian name for God), Moravians (missionaries of that religious sect), imminent jeopardy, to cock and poise his rifle, concussions. II. demeanor, reserved mien, acclivity, feasible, fain, Narragansetts (a breed of horses), housings, Ty (Ticonderoga), turbid, alluvium, mammoth, mastodon, pigeon-winging, fabricate, elucidate, humors, nether garment. III. comported, sinewy, King George's commission (i.e., as officer in the British army), stomach (pride, inclination), category, calash. IV. extremity, respiration, manifestations of anger, pampered, vestige, inanimate, her fancy conjured. V. Sioux (Soo), circumvented, equivocal, coruscations of the North, salamander, anan, fog (dry standing grass). JAMES FENIMORE COOPER The first American novels to find readers across the ocean were those of Cooper. When Cooper began to write, Sir Walter Scott had already written some of the Waverley novels and had charmed the world by those stories that 5 mingle love and adventure with past times and historical scenes and persons. Cooper also wrote historical romances, but he opened new realms of romantic adventure, not of past days but of the new world. He took his readers on ships and sailed the seas or he took them into the American 10 forests and showed the red men struggling in vain against the whites. His novels were translated into every European and into several Asiatic languages. Many a boy in Russia or Greece has had his interest in America first aroused as he followed the trail of Leatherstocking and Chingachgook. 15 Cooper's boyhood and youth gave him an excellent preparative for writing tales of sea and forest. He was born in 1789 at Burlington, New Jersey, and the family soon moved to Cooperstown, on the banks of Lake Otsego in central New York. This is the village described in The Pioneers, 20 which had just been built in the forest wilderness, and here his boyhood was spent. There were still living in the forest about the village old Indians and hunters, who, like Leatherstocking, felt that the advancing settlements were spoiling their game preserves. From these the boy had a 25 chance to hear many stories of the wars between red men and white and to learn much of the craft of trapper and scout. At the age of fourteen, Cooper entered Yale College, where he remained three years. Then for five years he served in the navy and gathered the knowledge which aided him in writing his stories of fight and chase on sea. 5 His first novel, Precaution, was written in 1820. It was a story of life in English society, a thing about which Cooper knew nothing. Nobody reads the book now. This story was followed in the next year by The Spy, a story of the Revolutionary War. Its subject, and the life with which he told the 10 story made it enormously successful. In 1823 came The Pioreers, the first of the Leatherstocking novels, and The Pilot, the first of the sea tales, with John Paul Jones as the hero. We have already made the acquaintance of the four other Leatherstocking stories, Last of the Mohicans (1826), The 15 Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and Deerslayer (1841). Among the best of his sea tales are The Two Admirals and Red Rover. Cooper lived abroad for a time and on his return to the United States became involved in political quarrels and other controversies. One of his writings that 20 involved him in a long and bitter quarrel was a History of the Navy of the United States. He had not given credit for the victory in Lake Erie to the men to whom some people thought it ought to be given; and, though he was right in his facts, he allowed himself to be drawn into another wrangle 25 over this matter. Altogether, he seems to have been more vigorous than peaceful. In addition to many other books, he wrote thirty-three novels before his death in 1851. Cooper is not a great creator of men and women, and his plots are often faulty in construction; but his genius is its best in incidents such as those set forth in our Selections. He does something more than to excite us with the stir of action and adventure; he makes us feel the beauty and 5 poetry of sea and forest. Life on the frontier in colonial days was full of action and it called forth fine virtues and ugly faults in both red men and whites. Both had many chances to be either cruel or generous, either treacherous or noble, and all had to be courageous in order to exist. Strife 10 between the Indians and whites no longer exists, and there is now no frontier in the United States between civilization and the wilderness. Cooper tells of a life that has gone, with its heroisms and its weaknesses. If his stories thrill boys in foreign lands with their adventures and excitement, they 15 should have an added interest for the American boy because they tell one of the most thrilling chapters in the story of his country. REVIEW QUESTIONS 3. What 4. What 1. What suggested the story of Longfellow's "Skeleton in Armor"? 2. Whom does Longfellow suppose the man to have been? difficulties did Columbus have on his first voyage westward? signs of land kept him in hope? 5. Tell some of the traits and customs of the Indians of Virginia. 6. Who was Philip of Pokanoket? What became of him? 7. In what actions have you seen Leatherstocking? 8. Which of these inventions is most interesting to you? 9. Which parts of these stories of Cooper seem most unreal? 10. What other books dealing with frontier life or with the Indians do you know? |