Natty “Hawkeye” Bumppo

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Also known as “Hawkeye,” “Leatherstocking,” “The Pathfinder“, “Deerslayer” and “La Longue Carabine“
Created by James Fenimore Cooper
(1759-1851)

“I would dare to speak truth, Hurry, consarning you or any man that ever lived.”
— Natty reveals his code in The Deerslayer

Honorary private eyes throughout history for a thousand, Alex…

No, James Fenimore Cooper’s frontiersman NATHANIEL “NATTY” BUMPPO (aka “Hawkeye,” “Leatherstocking,” “The Pathfinder“, “Deerslayer” and “La Longue Carabine“) is not a private eye.

But the five novels that comprise Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales form a major link between the chivalric romance of the Arthurian legends and the myth of the American frontiersman/cowboy and the notion of the hard-boiled American private eye as some kind of knight (cf: Marlowe, Archer, Spenser, etc., etc., etc.), and as such he deserves at least a mention.

The novels, published out of order but read sequentially chronicle the adventures of Bumppo from 1740 to 1814, from his days as a frontiersman (and occasional scout for the British Army) in the Northeastern United States (and possibly parts of Ontario and Quebec), to the last novel, The Prairies (1827), which finds Bumppo (referred to only as “the old man” or “the trapper”) living out his final years somewhere out on the Midwestern plains, far from his home state of New York which has grown far too civilized.

Although born to white parents, young Nathaniel grew up among the Mohican tribe, learning their ways and becoming a skilled and virtually fearless hunter and tracker, possessing extroadinary physical prowess and skill with the long rifle, and astounding knowledge of the wilderness, which soon made him and his “faithful Indian companion” Chingachgook much sought after as a scout in the interminable violence of the American frontier. But Hawkeye is also a noble and wise figure, a rugged individualist driven by a rigid code of honour, and he walks an uneasy path between white and native, refusing to ally himself completely with either.

Throughout the series, Bumppo is the hard-boiled hero, stepping in to help (for pay, for duty, for honour). He works for a while as a scout for the British Army and as a guide, and is often drawn reluctantly into his adventures.

Oh, but what adventures they are, full of rip-snorting action, treacherous enemies, betrayals, stunning acts of courage and sacrifice, heroic deeds, burning passions and narrow escapes. To read the books is to subject yourself to what may seem like ponderously brain-clogging prose (Cooper’s prose has not aged well), but the actual stories still kick ass, particularly the most popular entry in the series, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), generally regarded as Cooper’s masterpiece.

In it, Bumppo and Chingachgook find themselves on a wandering daughter job of sorts, trying to track down the kidnapped daughters of a British colonel, as the French and Indian war rages around them. The story itself was inspired, perhaps, by real-life frontiersman Daniel Boone‘s pursuit and rescue of his daughter Jemima and two friends, also taken by hostile Natives. Indeed, many believe Cooper’s creation of Bumppo was inspired, at least in part, by Boone, as well as the lesser known frontiersman David Shipman, a well-known local character in the town where the author grew up.

But I digress….

Hawkeye–a “man without a cross”–is arguably the foundation upon which the American frontier hero (and thus the cowboy and later the hard-boiled American private eye) was built. Certainly, the similarites are there, and Bumppo does all sorts of P.I. things, like being an outsider working mostly alone in a corrupt and violent world, a rugged individualist lead by a rigid and personal code of honour, carrying a gun and doing what must be done. His disdain for “established society” is clear, and his formidable skill with “reading sign” was later echoed by many a detective, including Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle cited the Leatherstocking tales as a child favorite).

Cooper was also one of the first American writers to include African and African-American characters. In The Last of the Mohicans, Colonel Munro’s eldest daughter, the raven-haired Cora is the daughter of a West Indian mulatto woman, not the typical sentimental European heroine. Cooper certainly used stereotypical and often idealized characters in his portrayal of native peoples and African Americans, but he portrays many of them with positive human qualities.

The influence of Bumppo on detective fiction (and American literature, for that matter) is clear. Bumppo is the principled loner, the man who goes down those mean streets (or rivers or forests), neither tarnished nor afraid, and not himself mean. He is, above all, a man of honour, rising above the society he feels driven to protect. As Chandler wrote of his own version of the archetype, “He is the hero, he is everything.”

 So… replace Hawkeye’s wilderness with the new urban wilderness of the mean streets, and you’re almost home.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Fenimore Cooper was a rich man’s son who turned to writing. His  novels depicting colonial and Native characters from the 17th to the 19th centuries brought him fame and his own fortune. Just in time, too–the family fortune was collapsing as his writing career was just beginning to take off.

He was born September 15, 1789 in Burlington, New Jersey,  but lived much of his boyhood and his last fifteen years in Cooperstown, New York (also the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame), which was founded by his father (and later, Congressman) William Cooper on property he had purchased after the American Revolutionary War. He enrolled in Yale, but he was kicked out after three years for his involvement in several pranks (one of which involved the blowing up another student’s door, and another involving the locking a donkey in a classroom). Expelled without completing his degree, he obtained work in 1806 as a sailor and eventually joined the then relatively new United States Navy, eventually obtaining the rank of midshipman.

It was in the Navy that he learned the technology of managing sailing vessels, a clear inspiration much of his later fiction.  Indeed, his second novel, the one that launched his literary career,  The Spy (1821), was set set during the Revolution, and became the first novel written by an American to become a bestseller both at home and abroad, and established Cooper as the first significant American novelist. Cooper would go on to publish numerous social, political, and historical works of fiction and non-fiction, but his best-known works remain the five novels that comprise The Leatherstocking Tales. There have been countless adaptations of the books (particularly but not limited to The Last of the Mohicans) for the stage, film, radio, television, comics and even postage stamps, including five issued by (get this!) the USSR in 1989.

Not that everyone loved Cooper. Mark Twain took considerable pleasure in taking the piss out of Cooper’s reputation, in his 1895 essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences,”that draws on examples from The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder. Twain finds Cooper’s books “seriously flawed” and an example of “a literary delirium tremens,”and goes on (and on), listing their various faults. It’s satiric and snide and savage, and often quite funny. As Bob Toomey pointed out on Rara Avis years ago, “It’s hard to take Cooper seriously after reading Mark Twain’s (essay). In fact, a lot of more recent writers could benefit from Twain’s comments.” Which may be true, but perhaps Twain was no doubt also aware of his own reputation–he also found much to disparage in the writings of George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Those bums. 

UNDER OATH

  • “You have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”
    — D.H. Lawrence on Bumpo’s character in The Deerslayer in Studies in Classic American Literature.
  • “In one place in Deerslayer, and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.”
    — Mark Twain in “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences”

THE LEATHERSTOCKING TALES

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. The photo at the top is of Daniel Day-Lewis as “Hawkeye” in the 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans, directed by Michael Mann.

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