Part 32

One of the young men looked down to find a small boy pulling his sleeve. "What is it?" he asked.

"Captain Kent's been writing verses to her too," said James Cooper. "He read them to me in the garden."

"Ho--ho," came the laughing answer. "Good enough." He turned about. "Ladies and gentlemen, my friend Captain Kent is a poet. He has some verses in his pocket written to the adorable Mistress Betty. Shall we hear them?"

"Yes, yes," came a chorus of voices.

It was poor Kent's turn to blush. He looked very uncomfortable. Miss Cosgrove glanced at him with wide inquiring eyes. He had not expected to read his poetry in such a setting. He stepped forward, and seizing little James Cooper under the arms lifted him to a chair.

"Behold," he said, "I should be glad to read the verses, but this gentleman, Master Cooper, has told me they are poor, and he should know because he plans to be an author."

The Captain's diversion succeeded. The guests were looking at the boy.

"My son James an author!" exclaimed Mrs. Cooper. "It's the first I've heard of it!"

"I don't want to," said the boy, very uncomfortable now that he was the centre of notice. "I want to be a soldier."

"That's right," said his father, "and I hope you may be if ever the country needs you. Friends, I give you these United States!"

By the time that toast was drunk Captain Kent had drawn Miss Cosgrove into a little alcove under the stairs and James had stolen out of the great hall.

James Cooper was a very fortunate boy. His father's house stood in one of the loveliest reaches of country on the Atlantic coast. Cooperstown lay on the southeastern shore of Otsego Lake, where the Susquehanna rushes out through a fertile valley between high hills. Bays and points of woodland break the Lake's edge, and in the distance rise the clear blue slopes of mountains.

Otsego Hall was built about the time when the young republic was stretching out for space in which to grow. Mr. Cooper found this lovely lake, and built on the frontier. Beyond his home spread seemingly endless forests, filled with the wandering bands of the Indians of the Six Nations, and with all manner of wild animals. The Lake was the home of flocks of gulls, loons and wild duck, and more times than he could count young Cooper had seen a long file of Indian canoes steal swiftly across its upper bays. It was an ideal region for a boy of an adventurous turn of mind, fond of the outdoor world.

The heir of Otsego Hall was not such a boy of the wilderness as were Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln. He did not have to fight his way in the rough new world as they did. Mr. Cooper was well-to-do, and intended that his son should take a proper place in the young nation. There was little he could learn at the local academy, and so he was soon sent to school at Albany, where he lived in the home of an English clergyman who was fond of denouncing the war of the Revolution and the new country, and so made James Cooper more of an ardent patriot than ever.

When he was thirteen he was sent to Yale College, and felt himself almost a grown man. He had been better prepared than most of his classmates, and so decided he did not need to study to keep up with them. Instead of working he devoted all his time to sport, and to wandering through the beautiful country about New Haven. He was learning a great deal about outdoor life, and storing his mind with pictures, but at the same time was learning little of the Latin and Greek which his teachers thought vastly more important. He got into scrape after scrape with other boys of his way of thinking, and finally in his third year a midnight frolic led to his being dismissed. Mr. Cooper took his son's side and argued with the faculty, but the boy had to leave. His father looked about for some means of taming his son's wild habits and decided to send him to sea for a time.

Nothing could have pleased James better. He wanted to see the world, and he was fond of ships. He had no special ambition, but rather looked forward to serving in the navy. In the fall of 1806 he sailed from New York on the ship Sterling bound for England with a freight of flour. The voyage was a long and stormy one, and the boy, who was simply a sailor before the mast, got a good taste of life at sea. He enjoyed it thoroughly. When they reached England he went to London in his sailor's clothes, and knocked about that great city much like any other jack on shore. He made friends quickly, enjoyed any new adventure, and stored up a great stock of stories to take home.

The boy enjoyed his voyage before the mast so much that when he returned to New York he asked his father to get him a commission in the United States navy. Mr. Cooper was able to do this, and James was soon after sent as midshipman with a party of men to build a brig of sixteen guns on Lake Ontario. It took them a winter to build the ship, and during that time the party stayed at the tiny settlement of Oswego, a collection of some twenty houses. All around lay the unbroken forest stretching thirty or forty miles without a break. There was abundance of game, many Indians, and a splendid chance to live the frontier life that Cooper loved. He now knew the habits of the wild red men and whites, the lore of the woods, the perils and joys of the sea, and as he helped to build the gunboat he learned a thousand things that he was to turn to splendid uses later.

The boy had now grown to manhood, and yet no sign of his real work had appeared. He was not especially fond of books or history, his views of the charm of a soldier's life were much those he had spoken to Captain Kent at Otsego Hall. It seemed as though he were settled in the navy.

It is strange how chance determined the fate of young Cooper. About this time his grandmother asked him to take her name, and for a while he called himself Fenimore-Cooper. Then a little later he married, and his wife did not like the idea of his leaving her on long sea voyages. He seems to have been quite willing to give up the navy, and settle down at Otsego Hall as lord of the manor after his father's fashion. He liked the life of a country gentleman, and spent his time planting trees, draining swamps, planning lawns, and cultivating flowers and fruits. By the time he was thirty he had tried his hand at almost everything except writing.

It happened that as Cooper was one day reading aloud to his wife from an English novel he threw the book down, exclaiming, "Why, I believe I could write a better story myself!" His wife laughed, and asked him to prove it. He said he would, and thereupon sat down and began to lay out a plot. A few days later he was deep in work on the story, and he kept at it until he had finished a two-volume novel, which he called "Precaution."

His wife and friends liked it and urged him to publish it; so in November, 1820, appeared the first of that great series of native American stories which were to give the young nation a distinct place in English literature. Chance began them, but the first few books proved so successful that Cooper settled at once into the career of novelist.

The famous "Leather-Stocking Tales" followed, and the world made the acquaintance of the America of the Indian and the pioneer in "The Deerslayer," "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Pathfinder," "The Pioneers," and "The Prairie." Here he tells the romantic story of the conquest of the wilderness, and draws the portraits of the pioneer, the hunter, and the Indian. The same character, Harvey Birch, called Leather-Stocking, runs through them all, first as a youth in the novels that deal with the red men, with the great characters of Chingachcook and Uncas, then as a man in the dramas of the white men who blazed the trail westward through the forests, and settled the great prairies.

The story of Daniel Boone inspired him in these latter novels, and he tells of such scenes as the great prairie fire and the panther fight with the vividness of an eye-witness. "The Pioneers" is laid on the shores of Lake Ontario where he built the war-ship, and "The Deerslayer" about the little lake near Otsego Hall.

He wrote great tales of the sea also, in one of which, "The Pilot," he took as his hero John Paul Jones, tales founded on his own knowledge of a sailor's life won at first hand; but it was the Indian tales that brought him greatest fame. Whether the pictures of the men of the Six Nations be accurate or not they made direct appeal to the imagination of the world, and Indian character will always stand as Cooper drew it. Shakespeare and Scott have made English history for us, and Cooper has done the same thing for the history of the Indian.

Cooper said later that he might have chosen happier periods for his stories, more stirring events, and perhaps more beautiful scenes, but none which would have lain so close to his heart. He never forgot what had interested him so deeply in his boyhood, and when he wrote he went back to his boyhood memories. Little had he realized in those days how the words Captain Kent spoke in the garden would come true. He had drifted into writing before he realized what a great untrodden field lay before him.

The story of James Fenimore Cooper is an inspiration to every American. It is the history of a man who loved his country deeply, and who was as fine-spirited a gentleman as he was a great author.

VII

John Ericsson