In spite of these unities, however, critics' attitudes toward Cooper's plot have varied. An anonymous review in the London Magazine (May 1826) said this: "The story is a tissue of common-place Indian adventures, abounding with hair-breadth escapes and surprisals." Almost exactly a hundred years later, Lucy Lockwood Hazard, in The Frontier in American Literature (1927), felt that "Cooper deserves less credit for his plots than for any other part of his romances." On the other hand, a champion of Cooper like Thomas R. Lounsbury, in James Fenimore Cooper (1882), while admitting certain improbability of action and insufficiency of motive in the story, averred that "the interest not only never halts, but never sinks." The complexities that we have already noted indicate that Cooper does deserve some credit for his plot. Probability, though, is an aspect that may warrant further exploration.
Readers generally will concede an author an improbability which gets a story going, provided that the resultant effect is compatible with and does not exceed the potentials of the initial causative situation or action. Cooper assumes this allowance when he lets Cora and Alice Munro insist upon visiting their father at Fort William Henry even though it is the worst possible time for a visit or a trip through the forests. He further presumes when he lets the small party strike out on its own through Indian-infested territory rather than accompany the army. This is unreasonable action on the part of the characters, and Cooper fails to give them sufficient motives for it, but it does get the story going in a suspenseful way that leads directly into the plot structure. In other words, it works if the reader will allow the initial improbability. In essence, all the resultant major events follow logically from this beginning.
Yet, some of the details of later events bear questioning. The hair-breadth escapes and last-minute rescues often seem fortuitous. But anything can happen in war; the unusual often becomes the usual. Furthermore, at various stages in our development we have appreciated such happenings in thousands of western and war movies because we tacitly accepted them as romance rather than realism. We might try doing the same for Cooper since he was deliberately writing romance.
