THE IMMORTAL NATTY BUMPPO
In the opinion of Sainte-Beuve, Fenimore Cooper possessed the "creative
faculty which brings into the world new characters, and by virtue of
which Rabelais produced Panurge, Le Sage Gil-Blas, and Richardson
Pamela." Thackeray, praising the heroes of Scott's creation, expressed
an equal liking for Cooper's, adding that "perhaps Leather-Stocking is
better than any one in Scott's lot. La Longue Carabine is one of the
great prize-men of fiction. He ranks with your Uncle Toby, Sir Roger de
Coverley, Falstaff--heroic figures all, American or British; and the
artist has deserved well of his country who devised him." Thackeray
proved the sincerity of his admiration when he borrowed a hint from the
noble death-scene of Leather-Stocking in _The Prairie_, and adapted it
to describe the passing of Colonel Newcome.
Cooper's wide audience of general readers is here in agreement with
Sainte-Beuve the critic and Thackeray the novelist. Whatever else may be
said of Cooper's works it is certain that in the man Natty Bumppo, known
as "Leather-Stocking," "Pathfinder," "Deerslayer," and "La Longue
Carabine," Cooper created an immortal being. Among heroes of fiction
Leather-Stocking stands with the few that are as real to the imagination
as the personages of veritable history. Readers of Cooper recall
Leather-Stocking with genuine affection; others, without having read a
line of the _Leather-Stocking Tales_ have somehow formed an idea of his
person and character. Leather-Stocking is a rare hero in being noble
without being offensive. "Perhaps there is no better proof of Cooper's
genuine power," says Brander Matthews, "than that he can insist on
Leather-Stocking's goodness,--a dangerous gift for a novelist to bestow
on a man,--and that he can show us Leather-Stocking declining the
advances of a handsome woman,--a dangerous position for a novelist to
put a man in,--without any reader ever having felt inclined to think
Leather-Stocking a prig."
Leather-Stocking was first introduced to the public in _The Pioneers_,
the novel descriptive of early days in Cooperstown which Cooper
published in 1823. The character was not yet fully developed, but
Nathaniel Bumppo in outward appearance stood at once complete. "He was
tall, and so meagre as to make him seem above even the six feet that he
actually stood in his stockings. On his head, which was thinly covered
with lank, sandy hair, he wore a cap made of fox-skin. His face was
skinny, and thin almost to emaciation; but yet it bore no signs of
disease; on the contrary, it had every indication of the most robust and
enduring health. The cold and the exposure had, together, given it a
color of uniform red. His gray eyes were glancing under a pair of shaggy
brows, that overhung them in long hairs of gray mingled with their
natural hue; his scraggy neck was bare, and burnt to the same tint with
his face. A kind of coat, made of dressed deerskin, with the hair on,
was belted close to his lank body, by a girdle of colored worsted. On
his feet were deerskin moccasins, ornamented with porcupines' quills,
after the manner of the Indians, and his limbs were guarded with long
leggings of the same material as the moccasins, which, gartering over
the knees of his tarnished buckskin breeches, had obtained for him,
among the settlers, the nick-name of Leather-Stocking."
In this story the novelist had presented Leather-Stocking as a finished
portrait, with his long rifle, dog Hector, and all. Cooper had described
him as a man of seventy years, and intimated no purpose of carrying him
over into another volume. Natty Bumppo proved to be so popular, however,
that in 1826 Cooper made him an important figure in _The Last of the
Mohicans_, representing him in young manhood, at the age of thirty
years, and betrayed a more profound interest in the spirit of the
character which he had discovered. The success of this venture
encouraged the author, in the next year, to bring Leather-Stocking
forward, for what he intended to be the last time, in _The Prairie_. The
closing chapter of that story describes the death and burial of
Leather-Stocking.
But the public could not have enough of Natty Bumppo, and the result was
that, after leaving him in his grave, Cooper resurrected
Leather-Stocking as the hero of two more novels. In _The Pathfinder_,
published in 1840, he described Natty Bumppo at the age of forty years;
and _The Deerslayer_, the last published of the series, gave a youthful
picture of Leather-Stocking at the age of twenty. When the
_Leather-Stocking Tales_ were afterward published complete they of
course followed the logical order in the presentation of the hero's
life, without regard to the dates of original publication. The actual
order in which they were written, however, suggests an interesting
glimpse of Cooper's method of work in developing his most successful
character.
It is generally believed that an old hunter named Shipman, who lived in
Cooperstown during Fenimore Cooper's boyhood, suggested to the novelist
the picturesque character of Leather-Stocking. The persistence of this
tradition requires some explanation, for it is not strikingly confirmed
by what Cooper himself had to say of the matter. In the preface of the
_Leather-Stocking Tales_, written after the series was complete, he
said: "The author has often been asked if he had any original in his
mind for the character of Leather-Stocking. In a physical sense,
different individuals known to the writer in early life certainly
presented themselves as models, through his recollection; but in a moral
sense this man of the forest is purely a creation."
In the face of this, the most that can be said for the current
tradition is that Cooper's assertion does not exclude it from
consideration. What he lays stress upon is that the inner spirit of
Leather-Stocking was the novelist's creation. His statement is not
inconsistent with the possibility that he had the hunter Shipman chiefly
in mind as the prototype of Leather-Stocking, with some characteristics
added from other hunters, of whom there were many in the early days of
Cooperstown. The heat with which he denies having drawn upon the
character of his own sister in portraying the heroine of _The Pioneers_
seems to betray a feeling, which later writers have not often shared,
that an author cannot transfer real persons to the pages of fiction
without a violation of good taste. Here lies perhaps a partial
explanation of the fact that Cooper never acknowledged a living model
for any of his characters. Even Judge Temple in _The Pioneers_, who
occupies exactly the position of Judge Cooper in reference to the
village which he actually founded, Fenimore Cooper will not admit to be
drawn in the likeness of his father. He disposes of this supposition in
the introduction of _The Pioneers_ by observing that "the great
proprietor resident on his lands, and giving his name to his estates, is
common over the whole of New York." Yet in the same introduction he
confesses that "in commencing to describe scenes, and perhaps he may add
characters, that were so familiar to his own youth, there was a constant
temptation to delineate that which he had known, rather than that which
he might have imagined." How far he yielded to the temptation is a
question which, in making as if to reply, he deftly leaves unanswered,
and his unwillingness to satisfy curiosity on this point is the one
thing that a careful reading of his words makes clear. He is free to
admit in a general way that he drew upon life for material, but he will
not be pinned down as to any particular character; yet only in the one
instance--when his sister was named as the original of Elizabeth
Temple--did he flatly deny the identification of a real original with a
creature of his fiction. After all, even if Cooper had drawn many of his
characters from real life, there would have been so much modification
necessary to fit them into the action of a story as to warrant him in
the assertion "that there was no intention to describe with particular
accuracy any real character"; and if he did not wish to take the public
into his confidence regarding these intimate details of his work, he had
a perfect right to treat the matter as evasively as the truth would
permit.
One can see reasons for Cooper's unwillingness to inform the public that
his old neighbors in Cooperstown were to be recognized in his books.
There is the creative artist's reason, who does not wish to be regarded
as a mere photographer; there is the gentleman's sensitiveness to
certain rights of privacy not to be invaded by public print; there is
the experience of a writer who was often dismayed at the facility of his
pen in stirring neighborly animosities.
As to Leather-Stocking, this is to be said: that in Cooper's boyhood
there lived in Cooperstown a hunter named Shipman whom Cooper himself
in the _Chronicles of Cooperstown_, published in 1838, described as "the
Leather-Stocking of the region." Furthermore,--whether owing to any
private information from Fenimore Cooper cannot now be ascertained,--the
tradition from his time to the present day, in spite of the author's
vague disclaimer, persistently clings to Shipman as the original of
Leather-Stocking.
Strangely enough, the matter in dispute has not been the identity of
Shipman with Leather-Stocking, but the identity of Shipman himself. Who
was Shipman? This is the question that has stirred controversy; and two
ghosts have arisen from the past, each claiming to be the Shipman whom
Cooper idealized, re-christened, and made immortal.
Cooper gave to his hero the name of Nathaniel Bumppo. It has been
claimed that Cooper borrowed not only the character but the Christian
name of Nathaniel Shipman, a famous hunter and trapper, who came to
Otsego Lake at the time of the Revolutionary War, and made his home in a
cave on the border of the lake until about 1805.
According to the discoverers of this original of Leather-Stocking,
Nathaniel Shipman was a close friend of the Mohican Indians, and fought
with them against the French and the Canadian Indians. In the years
immediately preceding the American Revolution Shipman was a well known
settler of Hoosick, northeast of Albany and near the border of Vermont,
where he had built him a cabin on the banks of the Walloomsac. He was
well disposed toward the English, and one of his closest friends was an
officer in the British army. When the Revolutionary War began, while
Shipman's heart was with the movement for independence, his friendship
for the English was such that he determined to be strictly neutral,
helping neither one side nor the other. There is nothing to show that he
was not genuinely neutral. But his patriot neighbors were intolerant of
such neutrality. Anyone who was not for them was against them. Shipman
was put down as a Tory, and his neighbors treated him to a coat of tar
and feathers.
Soon after this event Nathaniel Shipman disappeared from Hoosick, and
not even his own family knew whither he had gone.
In process of time Shipman's daughter married a John Ryan of Hoosick.
Ryan served in the Legislature from 1803 to 1806, and at that time
became acquainted with Judge William Cooper, founder of Cooperstown, and
father of the novelist. In the course of their frequent meetings Judge
Cooper told Ryan of an interesting character whom he had seen in
Cooperstown, and described the picturesque appearance and quaint sayings
of the old hunter who lived on the border of Otsego Lake. At home Ryan
told the story to his wife, who soon became convinced that the old white
hunter whom Cooper had described was none other than her father, who had
been missing for twenty-six years.
Ryan went to Otsego Lake, and, having found the hunter, learned that he
was indeed Nathaniel Shipman who had disappeared from Hoosick at the
time of the Revolutionary War. Ryan persuaded the old man to return with
him, and brought him back to live in the home which then stood some two
miles east of Hoosick Falls. In spite of the devotion of his daughter,
however, the aged hunter never felt quite at home beneath her roof, or
among the former neighbors. His heart was in the wilds, and it is said
that he made frequent visits to the place where he had passed so many
years in unrestricted freedom, where there was none to question his
sincerity or to doubt his loyalty.
Nathaniel Shipman died at the Ryan home in 1809, and his grave is in the
old burying ground on Main Street in Hoosick Falls.
The local tradition in Cooperstown does not recognize Nathaniel Shipman
of Hoosick Falls. When a movement was made in 1915 to erect at Hoosick
Falls a monument to Nathaniel Shipman as the original of
Leather-Stocking, the proposition was made the subject of scornful
comment in Cooperstown, and Nathaniel Shipman of Hoosick was referred to
as "a spurious Natty Bumppo."
Cooperstown agrees that the original of Leather-Stocking was named
Shipman. But the name of the original hunter was not Nathaniel. He was
David Shipman. His grave is not far from Cooperstown, in the Adams
burying ground between the villages of Fly Creek and Toddsville, and at
the beginning of the twentieth century was marked with a tombstone by
Otsego chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. David
Shipman's descendants live in Cooperstown at the present time. When the
Hoosick Falls claim to Leather-Stocking was first published in 1915, it
was accompanied with the statement that the facts were known to the
people of Hoosick sixty years before. Notwithstanding this the claim was
contradicted in Cooperstown by the positive statement that "for over a
century David Shipman has held the undisputed honor of being the real
Leather-Stocking of Cooper's tales."
David Shipman served in the American army in the Revolutionary War, and
was a member of the Fourteenth Regiment of Albany county militia under
Col. John Knickerbocker and Lieut.-Col. John van Rensselaer. After the
Revolution he lived just over the hills west of Cooperstown in a log
cabin on the east bank of Oak's Creek, about equi-distant between
Toddsville and Fly Creek village. In 1878 Aden Adams of Cooperstown,
aged 81, stated that he well remembered David Shipman. As described by
Adams, he was tall and slim, dressed in tanned deerskin, wore moccasins
and long stockings of leather fastened at the knee, and carried a gun of
great length. He was one of the most famous hunters of the whole
country, and with his dogs roamed the forest in search of deer, bear,
and foxes. He supplied the Cooper family at Otsego Hall with deer and
bear meat, and also assisted Judge Cooper when he was surveying land
about Cooperstown in the early days of the settlement. Colonel
Cheney[91] says that after going west, David Shipman returned to his old
home in the Fly Creek valley, and lived there for several years. His
wife died, and was buried in the Adams cemetery. The ground was wet, and
water partially filled the grave. Elder Bostwick, a Baptist minister
from the town of Hartwick, officiated at the funeral, and upon remarking
to Shipman that it was a poor place to bury the dead, the old hunter
answered, "I know it, but if I live to die, I expect to be buried here
myself."[92]
Cooper's most famous hero, carved in marble, rifle in hand, and with the
dog Hector at his feet, stands at the top of the Leatherstocking
monument in Lakewood cemetery, on a rise of ground near the entrance,
overlooking Otsego Lake from the east side, about fifteen minutes walk
from the village of Cooperstown. That a monument commemorative of Cooper
and Leather-Stocking should stand in the public cemetery, in which
neither the author nor his supposed model is buried, is sometimes
puzzling to visitors. It is said, however, that the site was chosen with
reference to certain scenes in _The Pioneers_. The monument stands near
the spot upon which the novelist, for the purpose of his romance, placed
the hut of Natty Bumppo. It is not far below the road referred to in the
opening scene of the tale, where the travelers gained their first
glimpse of the village, and stands at the foot of the wooded slope upon
which, in the same story, Leather-Stocking shot the panther that was
about to spring upon Elizabeth Temple.
[Illustration: LEATHERSTOCKING MONUMENT]
The monument itself was the result of an unsuccessful effort which was
made shortly after Fenimore Cooper's death in 1851 to erect in his
memory a statue or monument in one of the public squares of New York
City. To this end, ten days after his death, a public meeting of
citizens of New York, at which Washington Irving presided, was held in
the City Hall; two weeks later the Historical Society of New York held a
meeting in commemoration of Cooper; and on February 24, 1852, there was
a great demonstration at Metropolitan Hall, with speeches by Daniel
Webster and George Bancroft, and a memorial discourse by William Cullen
Bryant. The raising of funds for a memorial, which these meetings set as
their object, was not commensurate with the expenditure of rhetoric. The
sum of $678 was contributed, chiefly at the meeting in Metropolitan
Hall, and the committee organized to solicit subscriptions did nothing
further.
Six years later Alfred Clarke and G. Pomeroy Keese of Cooperstown
undertook to raise by subscription a sufficient sum to erect a monument
in Cooper's memory in or near the village in which he lived, having in
view the transfer of whatever sum might be on deposit in New York toward
the proposed monument. They raised $2,500, to which Washington Irving,
acting for the defunct committee in New York, added the $678 already
contributed.
The monument, of white Italian marble, with the statuette of
Leather-Stocking at the top, was sculptured by Robert E. Launitz, and
erected in the spring of 1860. The small bronze casts of this statuette,
which one sees in some of the older homes in Cooperstown, belong to the
same period.
Another attempt to give artistic expression to pride in Natty Bumppo was
wrought in less permanent material. Upon the drop-curtain on the stage
of the Village Hall was painted the scene from _The Pioneers_ which
represents Leather-Stocking, Judge Temple, and Edwards grouped about a
deer that has been shot on the border of the lake. In producing this
scene the artist enlarged an illustration drawn by F. O. C. Darley for
an early edition of _The Pioneers_. The original scene described by
Cooper, and as depicted by Darley, was a wintry one, showing the lake
shore in a mantle of snow. This was thought to be a bit too chilly for a
playhouse, so the view as transferred to the curtain was brightened up
by the addition of green foliage; and deft touches of the scene
painter's brush, without altering the pose of any of the figures,
changed winter into glorious summer. Many a Cooperstown audience,
waiting for the performance to begin, has studied the scene which this
curtain displays, not without wonder that Leather-Stocking is in furs,
and that Judge Temple, in so radiant a summertime, has taken the
precaution to retain his earmuffs.
Natty Bumppo's Cave, a not very remarkable freak of nature which
Fenimore Cooper's pen has made one of the chief points of interest in
the region of Cooperstown, is about a mile from the village, high up on
the hill that rises from the eastern side of the lake. It offers a stiff
climb to the inexperienced, but not to others. It is not much of a
cave, being hardly more than a deep and curiously formed cleft between
the rocks. From the platform of rock over the cave a magnificent view
may be had of the lake and its more distant shores, with the hills
beyond.
[Illustration: _C. A. Schneider_
NATTY BUMPPO'S CAVE]
In _The Pioneers_ Cooper takes advantage of poetic license to enlarge
the cave for the purpose of his story, but the description is exact
enough to identify it with the present Natty Bumppo's cave. In the
summer of 1909 was discovered lower down the hillside another and larger
cave, the small entrance of which, in the woods beyond Kingfisher Tower,
at Point Judith, had long remained unobserved. Here the name of Natty
Bumppo came near being involved in another controversy, for some local
archeologists maintained that the newly discovered cave was the one
which Cooper meant to describe as Natty Bumppo's, being better adapted
to the requirements of the narrative than the one that tradition had
fixed upon.
Cooper might have provided a better cave for Natty Bumppo, but he did
not. On this point the testimony of his eldest daughter, Susan Fenimore
Cooper, is decisive. She was in many ways her father's confidant, and in
his later years closely associated with him in literary work. No other
person has written so intimately of him. In _Pages and Pictures_, which
Miss Cooper published in 1861, she gives a drawing of Natty Bumppo's
cave, and it is the one that has been associated with the tradition and
story of the village down to the present time. It is quite possible,
however, that the cave near Point Judith is the one referred to in the
tradition of Nathaniel Shipman of Hoosick Falls.
Natty Bumppo will live forever as a symbolic figure, representative of
certain indigenous qualities in American life. Lowell found in
Leather-Stocking "the protagonist of our New World epic, a figure as
poetic as that of Achilles, as ideally representative as that of Don
Quixote, as romantic in his relation to our homespun and plebeian myths
as Arthur in his to his mailed and plumed cycle of chivalry." Americans
themselves do not realize how widely, in other countries,
Leather-Stocking is still regarded as typical of certain qualities in
the American character. Among Americans who had half-forgotten their
Cooper, there was no little surprise at the exclamation of Gabriel
Hanotaux, member of the French Academy, distinguished author and
statesman of France, when, in the spring of 1917, on the entrance of the
United States into the war against Germany, he expressed his joy in a
message that was cabled round the world, "Old Leather-Stocking still
slumbers in the depth of the American soul!"
There is a point on Otsego Lake, opposite to Natty Bumppo's cave, from
which passing boatmen awaken the famous Echo of the Glimmerglass. For
more than half of the nineteenth century there lived in the village a
negro whose lungs were renowned for their power to call forth the
fullness of this strange echo. "Joe Tom," as he was named, was always
called upon, as the guide of lake excursions, to perform this peculiar
duty. Stationing his scow at the focal point, the negro would shout
across the water, "Natty Bumppo! Natty Bumppo!--Who's there?" And after
a moment the cry would be flung back, as by the spirit of
Leather-Stocking, from the heights of the steep woods and rocky faces of
the hill. On a still summer evening Joe Tom was sometimes able, by a
single shout, to call forth three distinct echoes, which were heard in
regular succession,--the first from the region of the cave, the second
from Mount Vision, and the third from Hannah's Hill on the opposite side
of the lake, until the margin of the Glimmerglass seemed to resound
with cries of "Natty Bumppo!--Natty Bumppo!" uttered by eerie voices.
The years pass, and no other name retains such magic power to wake the
sleeping echo of the Glimmerglass.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 91: _History of Otsego County_, 1878, p. 249.]
[Footnote 92: Calvin Graves, who came to Cooperstown in 1794, and lived
in the place for 84 years, is quoted as saying that he well knew
Shipman, the Leather-Stocking of Cooper's novels, and that Shipman was
never married. Graves said that he had often visited the old hunter's
cave in company with him. This testimony seems to point to the Hoosick
Shipman, who having deserted his family for twenty-six years, might
easily pass for a bachelor in Otsego, and who is said to have lived in a
cave, concerning which nothing is mentioned in the traditions of David
Shipman.]