The Last of the Mohicans

Summary

The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is set in the wilderness of northern New York during the French and Indian War. Colonel Munro, the Scottish commander of Fort William Henry on Lake George, which the scout calls the Horican, is threatened by the French general Montcalm and his Native allies. His daughters, dark-haired, grave Cora and fair, timid Alice, set out from Fort Edward to join him, escorted by Major Duncan Heyward and accompanied by David Gamut, a gentle, gangling singing-master. Their guide, the Huron runner Magua, called Le Renard Subtil, leads them astray. They are rescued by the white scout Hawkeye, known to the French as La Longue Carabine, and his friends, the Mohican chief Chingachgook and his son Uncas, the last of their line. Magua escapes. The party hides in a cave on an island at Glenn's Falls on the Hudson, where Hurons attack; when their powder runs out, Cora persuades Hawkeye and the Mohicans to swim away for help. The others are captured, and Magua reveals his grievance: Munro once had him flogged for drunkenness, and he offers to spare the party if Cora becomes his wife. She refuses, and Hawkeye and the Mohicans rescue the captives. After a night march they reach the besieged fort through the fog. Munro reveals to Heyward that Cora's mother was a West Indian woman descended in part from slaves, and gives him leave to court Alice. When General Webb sends no relief, Munro surrenders with the honours of war, but as the garrison and its families march out, Montcalm's Native allies fall on them in a massacre, and Magua carries off the two sisters, with David following. Hawkeye, the Mohicans, Heyward and Munro track them north. Heyward enters a Huron village disguised as a French juggler-physician, Hawkeye joins him disguised in a bearskin as a conjurer, and they free Alice; Uncas, captured and condemned, escapes in the bearskin while David takes his place. At the Delaware village the aged sage Tamenund at first judges for Magua, until Uncas is revealed by the tortoise tattooed on his breast as heir of the ancient Lenape chiefs. Bound by Delaware law, Tamenund lets Magua leave with Cora, and Uncas warns him that pursuit will begin once the sun clears the trees. In the battle that follows the Delawares rout the Hurons; on a mountain ledge a Huron stabs Cora, Magua kills Uncas, and Hawkeye shoots Magua as he tries to leap a chasm. The novel ends with the funerals of Cora and Uncas, Chingachgook's lament, and Tamenund's farewell to the last warrior of the Mohicans. Cooper published the novel in Philadelphia in 1826, the second of his Leatherstocking Tales.

Top Lessons

• Friendship across peoples

  Hawkeye and Chingachgook have hunted and fought together for years. At Uncas's grave in Chapter XXXIII Hawkeye tells the grieving chief that he is not alone, and the two men bow their heads together over the grave. Cooper places the deepest loyalty in the book in a friendship between men of different peoples.

• The roots of revenge

  Magua's hatred begins with drink and a flogging at Munro's order. In Chapter XI he asks whether it is justice to make evil and then punish it, and Cora answers that her father did justice. Cooper lets Magua argue his case forcefully while showing where vengeance leads: to the deaths of Cora, Uncas and Magua himself.

• Courage of different kinds

  Cora's courage is calm and selfless: at Glenn's Falls she sends her rescuers away to save themselves, and on the mountain she kneels and gives herself to God. Alice is fragile, Heyward gallant, David gently stubborn in his psalms. Cooper shows that courage can take quiet forms as well as the scout's skill with a rifle.

• Elegy for a vanishing people

  Chingachgook's lament in Chapter III and Tamenund's farewell in Chapter XXXIII frame the book as a lament for a people whose line ends with Uncas. Cooper honors the dignity of the Mohicans and Delawares and the grief of their passing from the land.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine is marginal, but several threads interest a historian of psychiatry. Alcohol drives the plot: Magua traces his ruin to the fire-water brought by Europeans, and his flogging for drunkenness in Munro's camp is the source of his revenge. David Gamut moves safely among the Hurons because they take his oddity for a mind touched by the Great Spirit, the custom Hawkeye sums up by saying they never harm a non-composser; this reflects a widespread report, in Cooper's sources, of Native reverence for the mentally afflicted. In Chapters XXIV-XXV Heyward poses as a French healer called to drive an evil spirit out of a Huron woman who lies in a kind of paralysis, unconscious of her surroundings; Cooper describes the Native belief in possession and the pretended physician's discomfort at deceiving the sick. Munro's grief after Cora's death, Tamenund's extreme age, and the wounds of the fighting complete the picture. Any modern diagnosis of the sick woman or of David would be speculation.

• Chapter XI

  Magua tells Cora how fire-water led him into Munro's camp and to a public flogging.

• Chapter XXII

  David explains that he passes freely among the Hurons, and Hawkeye attributes it to their sparing of those touched in mind.

• Chapters XXIV-XXV

  Heyward, disguised as a French healer, is led to a sick Huron woman lying paralysed in a cave, where David sings to her and Hawkeye appears as a bear-conjurer.

• Chapter XXXIII

  Munro sinks into melancholy at Cora's funeral, and Tamenund, worn by great age, laments having lived too long.