1840

THE PATHFINDER

OR, THE INLAND SEA

by James Fenimore Cooper

THE PATHFINDER OR, THE INLAND SEA -

-Here the heart

May give a useful lesson to the head,

And Learning wiser grow without his books.

-Cowper.

PREFACE -

THE PLAN of this tale suggested itself to the writer, many years since, though the details are altogether of recent invention. The idea of associating seamen and savages, in incidents that might be supposed characteristic of the Great Lakes, having been mentioned to a publisher, the latter obtained something like a pledge from the author to carry out the design, at some future day, which pledge is now tardily and imperfectly redeemed.

The reader may recognize an old friend, under new circumstances, in the principle character of this legend. If the exhibition made of this old acquaintance, in the novel circumstances in which he now appears, should be found not to lessen his favor with the public, it will be a source of extreme gratification to the writer, since he has an interest in the individual in question, that falls little short of reality. It is not an easy task, however, to reproduce the same character in four separate works, and to maintain the peculiarities that are indispensable to identity, without incurring a risk of fatiguing the reader with sameness, and the present experiment has been so long delayed, quite as much from doubts of its success, as from any other cause. In this, as in every other undertaking, it must be the "end" that will "crown the work."

The Indian character has so little variety, that it has been my object to avoid dwelling on it too much, on the present occasion. Its association with the sailor, too, it is feared, will be found to have more novelty than interest.

It may strike the novice as an anachronism, to place vessels on Ontario, in the middle of the eighteenth century, but, in this particular, facts will fully bear out all the licence of the fiction. Although the precise vessels mentioned in these pages may never have existed on that water, or anywhere else, others so nearly resembling them are known to have navigated that inland sea, even at a period much earlier than the one just mentioned, as to form a sufficient authority for their introduction into a work of fiction. It is a fact not generally remembered, however well known it may be, that there are isolated spots, along the line of the great lakes that date, as settlements, as far back, as many of the oldest American towns, and which were the seats of a species of civilization, long before the greater portion of even the original states was rescued from the wilderness.

Ontario, in our own times, has been the scene of important naval evolutions. Fleets have manoeuvred on those waters, which, half a century ago, were as near desert as waters well can be, and the day is not distant, when the whole of that vast range of lakes will become the seat of empire, and fraught with all the interests of human society. A passing glimpse, even though it be in a work of fiction, of what that vast region so lately was, may help to make up the sum of knowledge by which alone, a just appreciation can be formed of the wonderful means by which Providence is clearing the way for the advancement of civilization across the whole American continent. -

December, 1839.

PREFACE TO THE 1851 EDITION -

FOLLOWING the order of events, this book should be the third in the Series of the Leather-Stocking Tales. In the Deerslayer, Natty Bumppo, under the Sobriquet which forms the title of that work, is represented as a youth, just commencing his forest career as a warrior; having for several years been a hunter so celebrated, as already to have gained the honorable appellation he then bore. In the Last of the Mohicans he appears as Hawkeye, and is present at the death of young Uncas; while in this tale, he re-appears in the same war of '56, in company with his Mohican friend, still in the vigor of manhood, and young enough to feel that master passion to which all conditions of men, all tempers, and we might almost say all ages, submit, under circumstances that are incited to call it into existence.

The Pathfinder did not originally appear for several years after the publication of the Prairie, the work in which the leading character of both had closed his career by death. It was, perhaps, a too hazardous experiment to recall to life, in this manner, and after so long an interval, a character that was somewhat a favorite with the reading world, and which had been regularly consigned to his grave, like any living man. It is probably owing to this severe ordeal that the work, like its successor, the Deerslayer, has been so little noticed; scarce one in ten of those who know all about the three earliest books of the series having even a knowledge of the existence of the last at all. That this caprice in taste and favor is in no way dependent on merit, the writer feels certain; for, though the world will ever maintain that an author is always the worst judge of his own productions, one who has written much, and regards all his literary progeny with more or less of a paternal eye, must have a reasonably accurate knowledge of what he has been about the greater part of his life. Such a man may form too high an estimate of his relative merits, as relates to others; but it is not easy to see why he should fall into this error, more than another, as relates to himself. His general standard may be raised too high by means of self-love; but, unless he be disposed to maintain the equal perfection of what he has done, as probably no man was ever yet fool enough to do, he may very well have shrewed conjectures as to the comparative merits and defects of his own productions.