Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire, and New Historicism

ULTURAL historians have identified James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans as one of approximately forty novels published in the U. S. between I824 and I834 that together suggest the existence of a virtual "cult of the Vanishing American" in the antebellum period. Requisite to membership in this cult was a belief that the rapid decrease in the native population noted by many Jacksonian-era observers was both spontaneous and ineluctable.1 Cooper would seem to betray his indoctrination in the cult of the vanishing American when he states in the introduction to the I83I edition of his novel that it was "the seemingly inevitable fate of all [native tribes]" to "disappear before the advances . . . of civilisation [just] as the verdure of their native forests falls before the nipping frost."2 The elegiac mode here performs the historical sleight-of-hand crucial to the topos of the doomed aboriginal: it represents the disappearance of the native as not just natural but as having already happened.3