The Pioneers Read Free

family’s—the story of the descendants of the British Major Effingham, whose confiscated estate becomes Templeton in The Pioneers . They are stories of the disappointments of homecoming, disappointments Cooper himself experienced upon his return from Europe. He found home—Cooperstown in particular—to have changed into something recognizable only in its declension from its former state, which, for Cooper, was largely a state of mind: an expression of deep-rooted longings under the pressure of present anxieties.
    One thematic hallmark of The Pioneers is its obsession with change, with mutability. The seasonal transformations of the landscape, the more abrupt changes wrought by storm and fire, the bloom and decay of human life, the slapdash construction of a booming frontier town, the unceasing alterations to ways of living that new people, new laws, new tastes, and new threats required—Cooper describes all of this with wonderful detail and deep pathos. The opening scene of the novel, in which Judge Temple and his daughter Elizabeth, on Christmas Eve day, return home to Templeton through a world of white in a horse-drawn sleigh is a tour de force of American pastoralism. The fact that the very first character we encounter is neither Elizabeth nor her father, but rather their slave Agamemnon driving the sleigh, is no insignificant index of the violence that so often lies at the heart of such visions.
    â€”Max Cavitch

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
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    As this work professes, in its title page, to be a descriptive tale, they who will take the trouble to read it may be glad to know how much of its contents is literal fact and how much is intended to represent a general picture. The author is very sensible that had he confined himself to the latter, always the most effective as it is the most valuable, mode of conveying knowledge of this nature, he would have made a far better book. But in commencing to describe scenes, and perhaps he may add characters, that were so familiar to his own youth, there was a constant temptation to delineate that which he had known, rather than that which he might have imagined. This rigid adhesion to truth, an indispensable requisite in history and travels, destroys the charm of fiction; for all that is necessary to be conveyed to the mind by the latter had better be done by delineations of principles, and of characters in their classes, than by a too fastidious attention to originals.
    New York having but one county of Otsego, and the Susquehanna but one proper source, there can be no mistake as to the site of the tale. The history of this district of country, so far as it is connected with civilized men, is soon told.
    Otsego, in common with most of the interior of the province of New York, was included in the county of Albany, previously to the war of the separation. It then became, in a subsequent division of territory, a part of Montgomery; and, finally, having obtained a sufficient population of its own, it was set apart as a county by itself, shortly after the peace of 1783. It lies among those low spurs of the Alleghanies which cover the midland counties of New York; and it is a little east of a meridional line drawn through the center of the state. As the waters of New York either flow southerly into the Atlantic or northerly into Ontario, and its outlet, Otsego Lake, being the source of the Susquehanna, is, of necessity, among its highest lands. The face of the country, the climate as it was found by the whites, and the manners of the settlers are described with a minuteness for which the author has no other apology than the force of his own recollections.
    Otsego is said to be a word compounded of Ot, a place of meeting, and Sego, or Sago, the ordinary term of salutation used by the Indians of this region. There is a tradition which says that the neighboring tribes were accustomed to meet on the banks of the lake to make their treaties, and otherwise to