“Expanse”
Cooper demonstrates a propensity toward favoring a certain word when it comes to imagery related to bodies of water. It is a word reserved, in face, exclusively for descriptive passage of such topographical features:
“The expanse of the ocean is seldom seen by the novice with indifference”
“No sail whitened the surface, no whale or other fish gambolled on its bosom, no sign of use or service rewarded the longest and most minute gaze at its boundless expanse.”
“Sure enough, Cap, who had announced his approach by a couple of lusty hems, now made his appearance on the bastion, where, after nodding to his niece and her companion, he made a deliberate survey of the expanse of water before him.”
“Everything near appeared lovely and soothing, while the solemn grandeur of the silent forest and placid expanse of the lake lent a sublimity that other scenes might have wanted.”
The Virgin Forest
If water be expansive in the world of the Pathfinder, then the forests are virgin territory to be explored and made mature. The author engages another a favorite word to describe the woody wilderness in which the story takes place, but in this instance, it is not so preciously reserved. After all, young unmarried women play a significance role in the narrative:
Chapter 1:
“It is still the practice of the country to call these spots wind-rows. By letting in the light of heaven upon the dark and damp recesses of the wood, they form a sort of oases in the solemn obscurity of the virgin forests of America.”
Chapter 19:
“None of the islands were high, though all lay at a sufficient elevation above the water to render them perfectly healthy and secure. Each had more or less of wood; and the greater number at that distant day were clothed with the virgin forest.”
Mark Twain Takes Offense
Mark Twain famous took offense to some of the imagery portrayed in The Pathfinder. In fact, he went so far as to publicly call Cooper to account for the offenses of which the following really seems to have gotten Twain’s goat as almost nothing else:
"`Be all ready to clench it, boys!’ cried out Pathfinder, stepping into his friend's tracks the instant they were vacant. `Never mind a new nail; I can see that, though the paint is gone, and what I can see I can hit, at a hundred yards, though it were only a mosquito's eye. Be ready to clench!’ The rifle cracked, the bullet sped its way, and the head of the nail was buried in the wood, covered by the piece of flattened lead.”
Twain’s ultimate verdict on the literary quality of this particular bit of imagery from the novel is succinct but impossible to misinterpret: “Wasn't it remarkable! How could he see that little pellet fly through the air and enter that distant bullet-hole? Yet that is what he did; for nothing is impossible to a Cooper person.”
Aka The Pathfinder
The Leatherstocking Tales present almost the entire chronology of Natty Bumppo aka Hawkeye aka Leather-Stocking aka the Pathfinder aka the Deerslayer aka the trapper, among other aliases. Each new entry in the series obviously required the re-introduction of this main character, but the imagery associated with those re-introductions take on a more significant aspect since the stories are not themselves presented in chronological order. The old who is first introduced in The Pioneers is in this story a good three decades younger:
“The latter saw, as the stranger approached that she was about to be addressed by one of her own color, though his dress was so strange a mixture of the habits of the two races, that it required a near look to be certain of the fact. He was of middle age; but there was an open honesty, a total absence of guile, in his face, which otherwise would not have been thought handsome.”
