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M I C H A E L D. B U T L E R University of Kansas Sons of Oliver Edwards; or, The Other American Hero Leatherstocking has traditionally been treated as the first fully developed American hero, the type prefiguring later anti-types like the mountain man, cowboy, gangster, soldier of fortune, expatriate writer, private eye. Literary and cultural historians who use Cooper’s creation as a starting point usually trace out a literature dominated by outsiders — by men and women who cannot exist within society: men and women whose innate or naturally evolved impulses, desires, values cannot be fit into the artificially shaped structures of civilization. Ours is, these critics conclude, a literature obsessed with figures in flight, with characters running from the distorting confines of town and tradition into the expansive freedom of wide open — outer or inner — space. The Westerner has a special place in this literary history, for sup­ posedly his situation most fundamentally and completely embodies the potentially tragic polarity of American life. Self-contained, melancholy, he lives on the edge poised between the wild and the civilized, between the savage and the spiritual, between brutality and uplift. Our con­ ventional images of him picture a man apart: a solitary figure riding across vast open space or standing on the closed-in streets of a falsefronted town. He is dwarfed by the wild but somehow fits into it; within the town his tranquil perpendicularity sets him apart from the chaos of sounds and shapes surrounding him. He is, we know, most committed to nature; nevertheless he is in spite of himself the agent of a society he cannot escape. Even as he runs before it, his retreat — like Bumppo’s — cuts the line of its advance. 54 Western American Literature For some delineators of the national character, this Western hero reflects an essentially American distrust of outside structures — of preestablished sets of rules, patterns of behavior, traditions, of cities, schools, even of history. In part that distrust rises from philosophical rejection of systems which force men and women, ideas, and things into preshaped and predetermining slots; in part, it seeps out of less positive adolescent fears of life’s complexity and of being an adult — whether among a society of individuals or a world community of civilized nations. The Westerner’s resonating appeal for us comes from his touching our deep-set fears and yearnings. He is our escape; he is our voice. His rejection of society is ours; his aggression against it the translation of our anxieties. His final retreat into the wild is our ultimate dream.1 Interestingly enough, this fairly standard description and interpreta­ tion of the Westerner is wholly untrue for a sizable number of popular heroes — perhaps for most of them. No matter how valid when applied to the American hero in general, the conclusions are based upon a develop­ ment or line of descent not shared by all cowboys. Popular Western fiction — a part of our literature most intimately involved with the wild and the natural — has often been the least subversively anti-social. Ironically, it generated and preserved a protagonist which counter­ balanced the outcasts of American writing. It created a family of heroes unrelated to Natty Bumppo and, in all generations, on much better terms with the civilized world. In the first of the Leatherstocking Tales, The Pioneers (1823), Cooper turned to popular literary types for his hero and helper. Oliver Edwards and Natty Bumppo are conventional characters of romantic fiction — American versions of an artistocratic hero and his faithful servant. Cooper used similar characters in two more novels in the series: The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Prairie (1827). In each, he matched the humble Bumppo with a younger and “nobler” man. 1Henry Nash Smith’s “The Sons of Leatherstocking” in Virgin Land is the standard study of the western hero’s development. Henry Bamford Parkes’s “Meta­ morphoses of Leatherstocking,” first published in Modern Writing No. 3 edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv (New York: Berkeley Pub. Co., 1956) and reprinted in Rahv’s Literature in America (Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1957), is probably the best known assertion of Bumppo’s...

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