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No, the honest fellow had not quite the grit of a 'Leatherstocking. Samson, armed with the hatchet, was chopping wood. I stayed to arrange the packs, and spread the blankets. Suddenly I heard a voice from the bottom of the ravine, crying out, 'Bring the guns for God's sake! Make haste!
Harrington, a still more celebrated hunter and pioneer, and who furnished a good idea of old Leatherstocking, and who was with Winchester at the battle of River Raisin, from which he escaped, and was one of Harrison's scouts, had been often at Basil Windsor's. Hunters often found shelter there. He was there both before and after the war; and he fully corroborated McConough.
The truth is, he has exaggerated both the virtues and the follies of sailors to an absurd degree; and his blue-jacketed heroes are no more to be accepted as a fair type of sailors, than are Fenimore Cooper's Chingachgook and Leatherstocking as types of the Red Men and trappers of North America.
Herein Leatherstocking makes his first appearance, and for all time, as Natty Bumppo, "with his silent footfall stepped from beneath the shadows of the old pines into the winter sunlight." An old hunter Shipman by name often came with his rifle and dogs during the early years of the new colony, to offer his game at William Cooper's door, and was a great attraction for the lads of Otsego Hall.
In Harvey Birch, the spy, he added to the world's gallery of fiction the first of his three great characters, the other two being, of course, Long Tom Coffin and Leatherstocking.
Our national vanity might be flattered by hearing that the phrase "L'oeil Américain" is used to describe an eye whose piercing vision is escaped by nothing, were we not told that it dates from the translation of Cooper's Leatherstocking tales into French, and has no reference, as "Natty Bumpo" would say, to "white gifts."
Indian canoes and flat-bottomed skiffs conveyed them to the eastern shore, where, at Two-Mile Point, a frightened fawn, startled from its forest home by the dogs of Shipman the hunter, who later outlined "Leatherstocking," darted from the leafy thicket and plunged into the lake. At once all were in motion to rescue the little creature now swimming for life.
Chairman, ladies and gentlemen," he began, when a roar interrupted him, so that he pretended to hastily remedy his error "I mean just gentlemen; I have the honor to report that your committee waited on the brothers of the Aldine troop, though unbeknown to their keenest scouts, and watched the entire operations at their called meeting this morning." "Good! Fine! Keep it up, Old Leatherstocking!"
The entire charge for the dinner for twelve persons and corn for as many animals was $3.... The colonel said he was the first settler in the valley of the Piedernales and for many miles around. In his colony were people of all trades. He told me his crop of corn this year would amount to 7000 bushels, for which he expected to realize $1.25 a bushel." Hamblin, "Leatherstocking of the Southwest"
We do not mean, of course, that Cooper's "Leatherstocking" is all this or anything like it, but that the character typified in him is ideally and potentially all this and more. But whatever was poetical in the lives of the early New-Englanders had something shy, if not sombre, about it. If their natures flowered, it was out of sight, like the fern.
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