James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) is best remembered for his five-novel series known as the Leatherstocking Tales, including his most famous book, The Last of the Mohicans. Interestingly, the books in the series were composed out of order, the first one written, The Pioneers, taking place next to last (1793) according to the dates of the stories. On a recent adventure cross-country skiing in upstate New York, I took along The Pioneers and was struck by the novel’s repeated warning about the environmental impact of the colonial founders of our nation.
The central character, Judge Marmaduke Temple, founds a town called Templeton, modeled on Cooperstown, which was founded by Cooper’s father. Though far from perfect, the Judge is generally wise in his leadership of the town, a caring elder shrewd in his estimation of his fellow citizens, and loving father. The owner of a sizable estate, Marmaduke is wary of the profligate ways in which people harvest the town’s natural resources:
It behooves the owner of woods so extensive as mine, to be cautious what example he sets his people, who are already felling the forests, as if no end could be found to their treasures, nor any limits to their extent. If we go on in this way, twenty years hence, we shall want fuel. (chapter 9)
The book was published in 1823, three decades after the events narrated. Still, at times it strikes a prophetic tone that rings true today as much or more than it may have in the early 19th century, long before environmentalism and climate change were regular front-page news.
A couple of later scenes depict the townsfolk engaged in wanton killing of animals. The first depicts a hunt of passenger pigeons, the species famous for being so numerous that they would blacken the skies for days, before they were driven to extinction by overhunting. Leather-stocking, nickname of Natty Bumppo, protagonist of the series, bemoans the settlers’ unthinking, destructive ways:
This comes of settling a country! Here have I known the pigeons to fly for forty long years, and, till you made your clearings, there was nobody to skear or to hurt them. I loved to see them come into the woods, for they were company to a body; hurting nothing; being, as it was, as harmless as a garter-snake. But now it gives me sore thoughts when I hear the frighty things whizzing through the air, for I know it’s only a motion to bring out all the brats in the village. (chapter 22)
Similarly, the following two chapters describe a massively wasteful fishing expedition, in which the local lake is essentially dredged by nets, harvesting far more fish than the town can eat before the fish rot. Leather-stocking reproves the Judge when he suggests taking some of the yield:
No, no, Judge, … I eat of no man’s wasty ways. I strike my spear into the eels, or the trout, when I crave the creaters, but I wouldn’t be helping to such a sinful kind of fishing, for the best rifle that was ever brought out from the old countries. … I call it sinful and wasty to catch more than can be eat. (chapter 24)
Bumppo is a white man who was raised in part by Native Americans. His closest friend is a Native named John Mohegan, whose original name is Chingachgook (Big Snake). Bumppo’s view of the relationship between human society and the American wilderness is aligned with the Natives amongst whom he has lived his whole life: nature is a source of sustenance provided one takes from it only what one needs to survive. The settlers’ unbridled greed throws out of whack the harmonious relationship that the Natives established with the land, threatening to destroy the animals they eat, the land they sow, the Natives they displace and kill, and ultimately the town that they establish.
For those of us used to thinking about US environmental awareness as starting with Thoreau at Walden Pond, leading through Muir at Yosemite, Leopold in central Wisconsin, and Carson on the Eastern seaboard, Cooper provides an unexpected and welcome forebear. Although his depiction of Natives is informed by Romantic notions that today may appear as unhealthy projections, his jaundiced view of European settlement, shaped to a degree by Native perspectives, and his clearsighted awareness of the devastation caused by the settlers’ treatment of their natural surroundings, appear remarkably prescient and contemporary, 200 years later.