The frontier in Cooper’s The Pioneers is not the alien, foreboding prison that Mary Rowlandson experienced, but is rather an attractive, captivating opportunity for a diverse collection of self-made American characters.  The frontier invites and offers potential to those willing to embrace its possibilities, including organizers and planners like Judge Marmaduke Temple.  That is not to suggest that there are not dangers; travel can be difficult; fires, Indians, panthers, and other natural obstacles demand care, but they do not prohibit co-existence between man and nature.

Modern (19^th century) man, however, brings dangers of his/her own – perhaps especially in the concept of progress. Nature has a pattern and plan structured by the ordinary demands of the environment; man-made institutions, arrangements, hierarchy, and laws are an intrusion which upset the balance.  They create a chaos as destructive as any found beyond the frontier’s border.

Cooper’s novel presents an imagined (mythical?) vision of a young United States.  Struggling to survive, embracing diversity and progress without fully appreciating its implications, searching for balance between individual and community rights, and probing for the meaning of tradition in a quickly changing world.  It also introduces an extraordinary cast of characters – none more “American” that Natty Bumppo.  He departs Templeton at the end of the story as “the foremost in that band of Pioneers who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent”(462).  But I am left wondering: Who are the pioneers of the title?  Natty and his elk? Chingachgook and other Indians? Judge Temple and the people of Templeton? Perhaps, in the final analysis, The Pioneers is the answer to Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur’s famous question from 1781, “What is An American?”  It is who we had become at the turn of the 19^th century, and it is the frontier which defines who we will be.

Denis Brennan