Indians and Dissembling Gentlemen in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers
It is well-documented that James Fenimore Cooper mined John Heckewelders History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations (1819) for information about the Lenape, Mahican, and Iroquois peoples that populate his Leatherstocking Tales. Scholarship tracing the Moravians influence on the novelist has consistently asserted both the reliability of Heckewelders Indians and Coopers faithfulness to those representations. Still beyond the ken of criticism, however, are matters that complicate Heckewelders claim that his unadorned picture of Indians is disinterested. With this in mind, I re-examine the literary relationship between Heckewelder and Cooper to interrogate in a new light the cultural politics of Coopers Indians.
I will argue a few points concerning Heckewelders writings that bear directly on Coopers Indians and cultural relations in The Pioneers (1823). Heckewelder was not always the man of probity that his reputation boasted, for his stature as a judicious, credible gentleman proceeded from his proficiency in dissembling in various capacities, as a patriot spy, ethnographer, and Indian advocate. So too did Cooper dissemble when he launched his literary career in perfect secrecy, hoping that anonymity would offset the risk of his literary venture to restore the family fortune. Moreover, his early fictions feature noble gentlemen who assume false identities to (re)fortify their gentle status and civic leadership. What is markedly different about Coopers production of gentlemen in his third book, The Pioneers, is a new strategy that deploys Heckewelderian Indians as agents in a gentlemans scheme of dissimulation. My explication of this strategy springs from the claim that the genuine Indians Cooper found in Heckewelders History are well-equipped for the novelists purposes because they are classed representations that naturalize the ascendancy and cultural authority of white gentlemen.
The balance of my paper will show that Heckewelders representations of Indians, his class bias, and the privilege of dissimulation he exclusively affords gentlemen are serviceable to Coopers production of an American natural aristocracy. Specifically, I posit that Indians are instrumental in Coopers manufacture of honorable gentlemen, whom he ultimately installs as legal and political authorities in a nation listing dangerously toward egalitarianism. Constructing a natural aristocrat in Pioneers hinges on a dissembling act that distinguishes an American-born gentleman of noble lineage (Edward Effingham) from his British predecessors and faux gentlemen. Cooper places the young man in Heckewelderian cross-cultural spaces, where his pose as a hybrid genteel savage initiates his appropriation of Chingachgooks natural virtues and provides for his re-emergence into American society as a distinguished gentleman. In Coopers cast of characters, only Effingham possesses the comprehensive knowledge of civilized and savage populations that allows him to salvage vestiges of the degenerated Indians nobility, a quality of the dying sagamore that the novel dignifies through his steadfast loyalty to the gentry. I further submit that Pioneerss simulation of upward mobility plays well into early nineteenth-century ideologies espousing meritocracy, though it does not efface the novels greater commitment to producing a static social order and reconfiguring the eminence of American gentlemen as a natural relation consonant with Federalist and Republican politics.