ABSTRACT
Leslie Fiedler says James Fenimore Cooper made his ‘Indians talk like mythic Celts out of Ossian’, and contemporary critics were only slightly less severe. General Lewis Cass's opinion of Cooper comes from his doubts about the thought and behaviour of the Indians themselves. Cass’s view of the Indian languages is not wholly inconsistent with Cooper’s, since the corollary of his opinion that they have little abstract vocabulary and that their words are mainly monosyllables denoting material objects to hand, is that they might well use figures drawn from everyday things to express ideas beyond the immediate scene. Though he was certainly aware of European precedents, he had an equally good eye for native literary growths. The Leather-Stocking Tales exploited the popular cult of Daniel Boone, the explorer and scout, agent for the Transylvania Company and local official in many border communities, who kept ‘lighting out’ for settlements ever more remote from civilization.
