William Cooper’s Town by Alan Taylor, recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History, is that rarest of things: readable social history. Whether guided by academic theorizing about “narrative,” or (more likely) his own good instincts, Mr. Taylor realized that the voting records, tax rolls, Masonic lodge membership lists, and farm produce statistics that are the stuff of Ph.D. theses lie dead on the page unless they are attached to interesting lives. Call it the great-enough man theory of history. In laying out the history of Cooperstown, New York, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mr. Taylor has two unusually interesting men to work with—William Cooper, land speculator and congressman, and James Fenimore Cooper, his youngest son, and America’s first successful novelist. William Cooper’s Town illuminates an era, as well as The Leatherstocking Tales, the cycle of novels that, for all their creakiness, can still inspire Hollywood movies and serious thought.

William Cooper was born in 1754 to poor Quaker farmers on the outskirts of Philadelphia, and became a wheelwright. But he was ambitious, marrying a rich farmer’s daughter, and checking books out of the library for edification and self-improvement (he borrowed one volume of the London Magazine five times). By the mid-1780s, he had become a successful storeowner and real estate developer in New Jersey.

But he was drawn to the frontier, which then lay in western New York. The Iroquois Indians had picked the wrong side in the Revolutionary War, and vast tracts west of the Hudson river were open for settlement. Cooper found a partner to help with the cash, and a New York lawyer, Alexander Hamilton, to sort out the vague prewar claims, and in 1786, became the co-owner of forty thousand acres, centered on picturesque Otsego Lake.

Cooper benefited from an influx of farmers from crowded New England. He made them an attractive offer: he sold lots, instead of leasing them; he required no money down; and he built amenities (what we would nowadays call infrastructure). “He who comes to better his condition,” Cooper later explained, “… will look for some religious institution, some school for his children. There must be mechanics to build houses, and erect mills.” Finally, Cooper himself moved to Cooperstown to make sure that everything worked.

By living on site, he sought to gratify other ambitions besides moneymaking. He wanted to be the American equivalent of an English country gentleman; his house, named the Manor House, was in the center of town. The residents of Cooperstown reciprocated by calling him the Father of his County, and by sending him to Congress, as a Federalist, for two terms in the 1790s. Cooper never learned to spell, and he never backed out of a fist-fight. But he had made it: he dined with President Washington; the exiled Talleyrand wrote a poem to his daughter Hannah.

The fall was as quick as the ascent. The first debacle was political. In 1799, Cooper, who also served as a judge, prosecuted Jedidiah Peck, a prominent local Republican, under the Sedition Act. Peck’s tribulations turned western New York, formerly a Federalist bastion, into a hotbed of Republicanism. This, and Aaron Burr’s machinations in New York City, tipped the state, and the presidency, to Thomas Jefferson in 1800. In the annals of electoral maladresse, Cooper belongs with Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President.

Financial ruin followed. Cooper tried other development schemes, in less promising places, which all failed. Falling agricultural prices cut into his profits, and old claims, which Hamilton had not entirely cleared up, involved him in lawsuits. Meanwhile, unpaid debts swelled alarmingly. Cooper raised his sons to be gentlemen, though all they learned was laziness and bad behavior. William, Jr., the third son, was expelled from Princeton for setting fire to Nassau Hall, and James, the fifth son, was expelled from Yale for blowing the knob off another student’s door with gunpowder. When they weren’t raising hell, they weren’t tending to business. Creditors snapped up all the family holdings by 1834.

William Cooper didn’t live to see it. He had died in 1809, from a blow to the head in a political argument, according to a family tradition preserved by a great-grandson, and repeated in books ever since. One of Taylor’s cleverest feats is proving, as surely as inferences can prove anything, that the tradition is wrong. The Father of his County died of natural causes.

The finale to this frontier Buddenbrooks was James’s decision, after serving two years in the Navy and making a good marriage, to write novels. Alan Taylor offers to explain The Pioneers, James Fenimore Cooper’s third novel, in which he recreated his father and the Cooperstown of the early 1790s as Judge Marmaduke Temple and Templeton.

Explanations of Cooper are not in heavy demand these days. His is one of the great sunken reputations of literature, lying on the seabed of oblivion alongside Sir Walter Scott’s. Mark Twain’s wicked little essay, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” discourages salvagers. When The Last of the Mohicans was playing in movie theaters a few years ago, every reviewer seemed to have read Twain, but none had read Cooper.

And indeed he committed many offenses. His prose, with a few exceptions, is one long bumble. His humorous minor characters are as funny as a visit to the dentist. Then there are the frequent absurdities of plot and incident which Twain mocked (though the man who contrived the ending of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn might have been more charitable).

But there are good reasons to read him nevertheless. The first is the character of Natty Bumppo, who binds The Leatherstocking Tales together. The series consists of The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841). Natty Bumppo’s adventures, written out of sequence, span sixty years, from the French and Indian Wars to the Louisiana Purchase, and he became a template for American icons. With some debt to the figure of Daniel Boone, Bumppo is the literary father of legions of gunslingers, Indian fighters, and private eyes, lonely men of action and honor. He is a garrulous figure, given to moralizing, but when he acts, he does not waste a motion.  

It was now, when the body of his enemy was most collected together, that the agitated weapon of the scout was drawn to his shoulder. The surrounding rocks, themselves, were not steadier than the piece became when it poured out its contents.

When he must refrain from acting, he does so with equal steadiness. Two companions of his level their rifles and pull the triggers:

The effort was answered by the mere snapping of the locks.

“Enough,” said [Natty], rising with dignity. “I have cast away the priming, for certain death would have followed your rashness. Now, let us meet our fates like men.”

He knows when to hold his fire, and when he fires, he never misses.

But there is another, surprising side to Cooper, and that is social realism. The Pioneers is as detailed as William Cooper’s Town, and more vivid. We see conniving lawyers, quarreling religious denominations, and bullying officeholders. We see a hunt of passenger pigeons, and are given Judge Temple’s melancholy thoughts on the likely result of such slaughters. We see Brom Freeborn, a free black man, playing the fool in order to get along with his neighbors. We see aspirations for higher things and the frustrations they often encounter. Judge Temple’s house has a portico, supported by four wooden columns, resting on a stone platform.

The ascent to the platform was by five or six stone steps, somewhat hastily laid together, and which the frost had already begun to move. But the evils of a cold climate, and a superficial construction did not end there. As the steps lowered, the platform necessarily fell also … leaving an open space of about a foot between the base of the pillars and the stones.

But all this is told in a tone which, while unsparing, is never bitter. It has, as Taylor says, a “dreamlike intensity.” Cooper told one publisher that he had written The Pioneers so rapidly that he had not “been even able to read it.”

Taylor shows how the novelist both corrected and recovered aspects of his father’s world. Cooper smoothed out Cooperstown’s politics and the judge’s combativeness. But he also acknowledged that Otsego Lake had not been virgin territory when William Cooper bought it, as the judge sometimes liked to claim, but that it had been occupied by colonial landowners, Indians, and squatters. All these appear in The Pioneers as supporting characters—Oliver Effingham, a mysterious young Englishman; Old John, a drunken Indian basket-weaver; and Natty Bumppo—who, in this, his first appearance, is in his early seventies.

Cooper resolved the first of these conflicts by marrying Effingham, the rightful titleholder, to Elizabeth Temple, the judge’s daughter. No lawsuits, no bankruptcy; Mr. and Mrs. Effingham can become the Father and Mother of their County in the second generation. Appropriately enough, this violation of reality gives rise to the most labored plot twist that Cooper ever concocted—far more ridiculous than the Indian hijinks Twain laughed at. When the realist strayed furthest from the conflicts of Cooperstown, he produced the only blemish on his book.

What falls beyond the purview of Taylor’s book is Cooper’s turn away from realism after The Pioneers. When he focused on Natty Bumppo and turned a supporting character into a myth, he left society behind. So, to all serious intents and purposes, did American letters. All the labors of Henry James and Mrs. Wharton hardly sufficed to bring society back.

Yet The Leatherstocking Tales, paradoxically, are not just an escape into the wish fulfillment of wilderness action, but a closer look at the darkness of life and the human heart. All the novels are marked by violence, populated by sinners red and white, and haunted by loss. The Last of the Mohicans ends with the death of a noble Indian; The Prairie ends with the death of Natty Bumppo. In The Pathfinder, Natty falls in love—in vain; marriage and family are not for him. The Deerslayer, which has an even more abortive love interest, ends with this stern thought:

We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true, though, happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned are to be seen, relieving its deformities and mitigating if not excusing its crimes.

William Cooper’s Town shows us where James Fenimore Cooper began, but to figure out why he fled to the wilderness, and what he found there, we must do him the courtesy of reading him.

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