Near the centre of the State of New York lies an extensive district of country whose surface is a succession of hills and dales, or, to speak with greater deference to geographical definitions, of mountains and valleys…Only forty years have passed since this territory was a wilderness.
These are the first and last sentences of the paragraph which opens Chapter I. In between is a description of the civilizing impact that has created villages within the geographical. This seemingly overstated importance attached to information that will prove to be almost irrelevant to the storyline actually has great thematic significance. The novel is about the last stage of taming a wilderness into civilization based upon and governed by democratic precepts and ideals.
“I trouble no man; why can't the law leave me to myself? Go back—go back, and tell your Judge that he may keep his bounty; but I won't have his wasty ways brought into my hut.”
The dispute between the old ways of wilderness living and the necessity for laws within a civilization is made concrete through the dispute between the old pathfinder Bumppo and Judge Marmaduke Temple who is not just the magistrate of the town called Temple, but also its wealthiest citizen and chief landowner. Natty just wants to live the way he always lived before what he sees as arbitrary laws were passed solely to bring a sense of economic order to the town. The Judge, of course, has motivations on his side which are a bit more complicated.
“Neither were we so silly as to wish such a thing, could we convert these clearings and farms again into hunting grounds, as the Leather-Stocking would wish to see them.”
Ultimately, the changing of the guard between Natty’s old-style laws of nature required to survive in the harsh wilderness and the imposition of man-made laws to replace them boils down—as it often does—to simple land dispute. Well, perhaps not really simple, but one of diametrical opposition. Natty sees the “progress” of civilizing what that area near the heart of New York which had been total wilderness just forty years earlier as more than just the creation of laws. It is the wholesale transformation of the landscape. Laws are created to support economic necessities, not personal ones and the laws being passed will turn the hunting grounds that produce food for men like him into pastures to produce food to sell to others. It is a wholesale change of lifestyle which has him worked up, not just one seemingly law he violated which seems to be entirely lacking in rational logic for existing in the first place.
Perhaps there was something of deep feeling excited in the bosom of this inhabitant of the forest by the sound of a name that recalled the idea of his nation in ruins, for he seldom used it himself—never, indeed, excepting on the most solemn occasions; but the settlers had united, according to the Christian custom, his baptismal with his national name, and to them he was generally known as John Mohegan, or, more familiarly, as Indian John.
The novel explores another facet of civilization among the western world: the coincident arrival and progression of Christianity. Natty has become a victim of the economics of civilizing the wilderness. His old Mohican friend Chingachgook suffers an even worse fate: he has been converted to Christianity and dies struggling mightily to hold onto his once illustrious native pride and dignity under the exceptionally offensive name Indian John.
