ABSTRACT
At the end of Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans, Chingachgook (Russell Means) laments to his white son Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) that AngloAmerican expansion into the North American backcountry will one day bring the frontier to an end, populating the western boundaries of the British American colonies with white settlers. He says that the sun has set on the “Red Man” and the frontier now belongs to Hawkeye and his lover Cora Munro (Madeleine Stowe), but frontier pioneers like them will vanish as well once colonial settlers move west. Earlier in the film we learned that Hawkeye lived most of his life on the frontier, reared by his Mohawk father Chingachgook, largely removed from Anglo-American colonial settlements and their social conventions, even forgoing his anglicized birth name, Nathaniel.1 Recognizing the tide of history, however, he decides to flee westward to Can-tuckee (that is, Kentucky territory) in order to remain free and independent of the social restrictions that he believes defines colonial life.2
