Introduction

Summary

The literature of frontier settlement is dominated not by the solitary woodsman in the tradition of Natty Bumppo but by the pioneer patriarch – the American Abraham – who leaves the society of his forefathers to establish his family in the wilderness. Like the famous isolatoes of our literature, the American Abraham strikes out for the West, but for him the migration is strategic rather than an essential part of his being. Whereas Natty feels a centrifugal pressure repeatedly impelling him to a distant orbit, the patriarch is driven by the centripetal impulse of his own will to seize authority at the center. While Natty and his successors live alone, in the open air, in a Concord cabin, in an iron cot in Yoknapatawpha County, the patriarch must group people around him and bind them to his vision in order to feel his destiny – at Templeton, at Rancho de los Muertos, at Sutpen's Hundred.

In general, James Fenimore Cooper's romances of frontier settlement pass over the earliest intrusions of white civilization into the wilderness, made by hunters and military men, to focus instead on the first communities, their growth, and their gradual reabsorption into the national or colonial culture from which the patriarch and his followers had originally ventured. In that “intermediate space,” Crèvecoeur had proposed, an observer “might contemplate the very beginning and outlines of human society, which can be traced nowhere now but in this part of the world” (12).