Cooper can encompass this situation convincingly because it is history extending into his own lifetime: during the 1820s and 1830s, the United States policy of Removal was steadily shifting the Indians to areas west of the Mississippi River. But he can convince us also because of a natural paradox in himself. As a son of eighteenth-century rationalism (especially Scottish), he believed that everything had its "place," a belief that stratified society and even government. It was this conviction that led him through his spokesman Hawkeye to insist upon the rightness of Indian "gifts" and white "gifts" and upon the impropriety even after death of a union between Uncas and Cora. At the same time, Cooper was heir to the idea of progress which in America became a "manifest destiny" to press civilization all the way to the Pacific Ocean. When the force of progress confronted the condition of "place," the latter too often gave at its foundations, and the result was tragic turmoil that simply used and sometimes obliterated the tribes of "savage" Indians, that foreordained the fatality of love crossing the racial line, that called for the expendability of a Natty Bumppo who could be what he could only be, a frontiersman, as long as the frontier was stationary and consistent unto itself. It is this tragic meeting of differences comprising the idea of the frontier that gives power to Cooper's novel, even as he attempts to entertain his nineteenth-century reader with the elements of improvised adventure and of current sentimental love novels.
In the middle of these differing forces is Hawkeye, the first great fictional embodiment of the American myth. Based on real-life prototypes but with only a vague resemblance to Daniel Boone, Hawkeye is the frontiersman par excellence and the literary forefather of every fictional cowboy and his sort who since then has climbed from or onto his horse, prepared to defend the good with his deadly, unerring bullets and the strength of his endurance. Compared with him, the finest Indians like the last two Mohicans are a close second best, while a white like Major Heyward, though top-rate within the discipline of his own civilized milieu, is third-rate in coping with the uncertainties of frontier existence. The reason is that, while none of these were strictly born of the frontier, Hawkeye was. In growing up and living there, he has retained the morals of his civilized inheritance and acquired only the virtues and woodsmanship of the Indians. Thus he is not a full member of either side in the conflict. Instead, he is a quiet, unassuming, even background figure of the highest ideals who serves as mediator and who is made believably human because of minor frailties like his boasting pride in marksmanship. Although his is a life-long brotherly attachment to Chingachgook, he is essentially and sadly (but rightly if he is to remain true to his nature) alone, monolithic and ideally enduring at the same time that he must ultimately vanish with the geographical frontier.
