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Updated: June 19, 2025
First among these great characters came Harvey Birch in 'The Spy', but Cooper's real triumph was Natty Bumppo, who appears in all five of the Leatherstocking Tales. This skilled trapper, faithful guide, brave fighter, and homely philosopher was "the first real American in fiction," an important contribution to the world's literature.
On his airy height of the "Cooper Memorial," gleaming white through the lakewood slope of Mt. Vision, wondrous Leatherstocking stands, a rare tribute to simple, uplifting goodness.
We might have told them that though the Leatherstocking Tales and Robinson Crusoe and Two Years Before the Mast and Ivanhoe were all well enough in their way, the trouble with them was that they mainly were so long-winded. It took so much time to get to where the first punch was, whereas Ned Buntline or Col.
William deserves special mention, not from any idiosyncrasy of the man, but because he was concerned soon after he joined us in the most disastrous of my adventures throughout the expedition. To look at, William Nelson might have sat for the portrait of Leatherstocking.
Library records of to-day show no waning of this early popularity of the "Leatherstocking Tales" and "Sea Stories" of Fenimore Cooper. In 1883 Victor Hugo told General Wilson that excepting the authors of France, "Cooper was the greatest novelist of the century."
But this explanation fails many times to fit the facts: for the great romantic characters, like Leatherstocking, Don Quixote, Monte Cristo, Claude Frollo, are just as vividly drawn as the great characters of realism; and the great events of realistic novels, like Rawdon Crawley's discovery of his wife with Lord Steyne, or Adam Bede's fight with Arthur Donnithorne, are just as thrilling as the resounding actions of romance.
Ravensnest, with no lack of scenic embellishments, introduces to us three of the author's happiest characters always excepting Leatherstocking and Long Tom namely, the two Littlepages, 'Captain Hugh' and his 'Uncle Ro, and Mistress Opportunity Newcome.
At the best such a frontier levy was composed of men of the type of Leatherstocking, Ishmael Bush, Tom Hutter, Harry March, Bill Kirby, and Aaron Thousandacres.
While feeding their cattle, settlers were shot from ambush by the lurking foe; and on March 11th, a family barricaded within a burning house, which they were defending with desperate courage, were rescued in the nick of time by the militia. No episode from Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales surpasses in melancholy interest Harry Hicks's heroic defense of his little fort on Bean Island Creek.
This romantic episode which gave Fenimore Cooper the theme for the most memorable scene in one of his Leatherstocking Tales had an even more romantic sequel in the subsequent marriage of the three pairs of lovers. Glad tidings arrived only a few days later when the Declaration of Independence, read aloud from the Virginia Gazette, was greeted with wild huzzas by the patriotic backwoodsmen.
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