Twain, Cooper, and the Exploitation and Misrepresentation of Native American Culture by Stephen Pallas

In Mark Twain's essay, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," he takes aim at one of the literary canon--as the title suggests--in James Fenimore Cooper, with particular interest to two of his Natty Bumppo tales, The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder.  In the essay Twain reflects upon two distinct sets of folk from earlier on in the nineteenth century--Twain writing post-Civil War and Cooper writing before the bloodshed.  The two sets of folk, as I refer to them, and although there are perhaps more contained within the essay in smaller proportion, are of writers and Native Americans.  With respect to Becker's "Revealing Traditions: The Politics of Culture and Community in America, 1888-1988," she describes the "especially active interest in the culture of America's Indians in the late 19th century," the ground work of which was perhaps laid by Cooper's generation closer to the turn of the century (5).

Of Deerslayer, Twain writes, "[t]here are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction--some say twenty-two.  In 'Deerslayer,' [sic] Cooper violated eighteen of them."  Twain lists, in terse and pointedly comical language, the eighteen offenses Cooper makes against literary culture.  To cite one example, "the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the 'Deerslayer' tale."  Twain further languishes in the notion that Cooper has among the most unkeen eyes in all of literary history, and intersperses his disgust at these offenses with his inaccurate depictions of Native Americans, a group which, as I will describe later, Twain harbored some upfront hatred.

Other than these offenses, Twain extrapolates from reading Cooper that the latter misunderstood the relationship "Indians" maintained with Nature.  For example, argues Twain, "he was almost always in error about his Indians. There was seldom a sane one among them... In that matter of intellect, the difference between a Cooper Indian and the Indian that stands in front of the cigar-shop is not spacious," installing yet his own commentary on Native American culture in his contemporary society.  Twain himself utilizes Native Americans often, loosely employing the storytelling tactics used by Native American oral tradition of trickster tales in such stories as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; this subject can, however, be flushed further out in another discussion.  Most importantly, Twain argues that Cooper misses the boat as far as understanding the actual intellect of Native Americans.  But Twain himself refused to acknowledge Native Americans as anything more than a savage culture.  If the people of the nineteenth century were fascinated by Indians, then Mark Twain was certain among their chief dissenters.

In "Mark Twain's Response to Native Americans," Helen Harris argues in plain terms how Twain harbored a "literary insistence on the inferiority of the Indian and the nation's need to mythologize the extermination of the natives and seizure of their homelands as an admirable part of the 'pioneer struggle.'" (495).  And certainly Twain's most noteworthy and famous depiction of a Native American--in Injun Joe--is exemplary of this attitude toward them.  Twain and Cooper, and many other white writers of the nineteenth century, played a tremendous role in chronicling certain attitudes toward the Native American folk as the years rolled on into the twentieth century, and both emphasizing some strikingly negative stereotypes.