James Fenimore Cooper

to the characters of The Last of the Mohicans which had
been published only in February of that year. In 1828 Cass
again attacked Heckewelder and incidentally Cooper, say-
ing that "His Uncas and his Pawnee Hard-Heart, for they
are both of the same family, have no Hying prototype in
our forests." Cooper had made himself superficially vul-
nerable to this attack by mechanically repeating Uncas and
Magua in his Hard-Heart and Mahtoree of The Prairie
(1827) and making them Plains Indians, a group that the
great Indian agent knew. But this unimportant bit of lazi-
ness is not decisive of the true question: Who knew the
"real" Indian? the "ardent, benevolent missionary" of the
eighteenth century; or the nineteenth-century government
agent who dealt with them on the treaty-ground, poor and
almost naked, exchanging their ancestral lands for food,
brandy, firearms, trinkets? The opportunity for knowledge
did not necessarily lie with the man of affairs. "As just would
it be," Cooper somewhat cynically said in his 1850 preface,
"to draw conclusions of the general state of American society
from the scenes of the capital, as to suppose that the negotiat-
ing of one of these treaties is a fair picture of Indian life."