Mark Twain specifically singled out The Pathfinder for derision. Noted French novelist Balzac notably singled out The Pathfinder as an example of literature-as-painting, suggesting that within the words of Cooper can be found “the school that literary landscape-painters ought to study; all the secrets of the art are here.” Over such a stretch of potential does the pendulum of critical appreciation of this entry in the Leatherstocking Tales swing. Is it an affront to literature or an example of the realization of literature’s potential for greatness?
That is up to the individual to decide. What is more to the point is where it fits onto the Tales overall, why, how and for what purpose? Whether Cooper succeeded to the degree awarded him by Balzac or failed to the degree that Twain considers it an affront to literary decency is ultimately beside the point at hand which, fortunately, can be answered simply by looking at the title. The other Leatherstocking Tales plop the reader down among the Mohican effort to avoid genocide, the pioneers, the slayers of deer, and the great American prairie land stretching out like a promise before them all. What does this book promise? A path that is found and followed.
The central figure tying all these novels together is Natty Bumppo aka the deerslayer aka Hawkeye. Hereafter he will also be referred to as the Pathfinder. And what is a Pathfinder? Someone who blazes a path toward a destination, to be sure, but also one who in that decision to follow that path must leave behind what lies in the past. A Pathfinder can easily be translated into someone who finds their true calling and is so committed to following that calling that certain very important and significant aspect of life are sacrificed. They are sacrificed willingly, but not necessarily without regret.
Although rarely singled out by critics as the best written of the Tales or as the most exciting adventure story to be found within the Tales, it is not exactly an uncommon sentiment among critics that The Pathfinder is the central story that binds everything together. It is the glue holding the disconnected individuals stories or Hawkeye and Chingachgook together. It is, to use a metaphor from another time and another place, the straw the stirs the drink. Because its not-quite-exciting story that is told in not-quite-the-best-writing by its author becomes the Leatherstocking Tale that gives its hero his meaning. And since the hero of these novels can be appropriately termed a metaphor for the American ideal, that means it is the story that gives the country is meaning.
This is not the only story in which Hawkeye flirts with the possibility of romance. But it is the only one of the Tales in which the nearness of love for him offers the lure of temptation of not following his true path. By this point in the stories—chronologically speaking—it has become apparent that Hawkeye belongs to the wilderness. To take him from the wild, slap a suit on him, force him into the conventions of acceptable society ways and call him a townsperson already seem like something more suitable to the plot of a sitcom. (Like, for instance, when big farmer Jeff Pruitt comes into Mayberry quite literally picking up women on the streetcorner in search of a wife only to fall for Barney Fife’s girlfriend and ultimately be taught the lesson that his path belongs neither to becoming a townsperson nor to marrying a girl from town, but rather sticking with the big farmer’s daughter he’s been expected to marry all along.)
Like Jeff, Hawkeye does not belong to civilized society. Unlike Jeff, however, there is a sense that Hawkeye actually has fallen in love with Mabel Dunham. And, of course, this has to be so. For if she is merely some dalliance, his sacrifice carries no weight. It is only if the reader presses through the rest of the Tales into Hawkeye’s old age bachelorhood with the knowledge that he once loved deeply and chose to sacrifice that love to pursue his true path that the very existence of this book makes sense.
It is the story of America. Sacrifices that had to be made in order to pursue the path of building a country and then a nation and then a continent and then an empire. Hawkeye’s love for Mabel Dunham absolutely has to be true and deep just as The Pathfinder has to be written to tie everything together. Otherwise, what has Hawkeye sacrificed? Not wearing a suit? Not living in a house on the edge of town? Not buying his supplies at the local trading post? The Pathfinder absolutely must exist in order to show that America exists only because men (and women) sacrificed so much to pursue the various paths that have brought us all here to this very moment.
