You have been asked to design an amusement park with a “frontier” theme.
Discussion 6
Write a 200-word response to the following discussion activity. Use specific references and direct quotes from our readings this week to illustrate and support your view/s.
You have been asked to design an amusement park with a “frontier” theme. While your goal is to make the park fun, engaging, and accessible to children and families, you are also concerned that your representation of the “frontier” be accurate. How will you interpret the idea of the frontier? What will you call your park? How will you portray the history of American expansion and westward migration? What activities and exhibits will you provide for visitors to the park? Attach a brief paragraph to your post in which you summarize how the frontier video (posted in the Week 6 Modules folder) and a critical study of Cooper’s romantic fictions have influenced the choices you decide upon for your park.
Frontier Video-
https://www.learner.org/series/american-passages-a-literary-survey/masculine-heroes/?jwsource=cl
Cooper’s romantic fictions
Reading the works of Fenimore Cooper was a rite of passage for young American boys until the middle of the twentieth century. In fact, his adventure tales featuring Hawkeye (Natty Bumppo, the old hunter in the excerpts we’re reading) did much to shape not only the popular conception of the eastern woods in the French and Indian War and the Revolution but also popular ideas of what Indians were like and how to tell a “Noble SavageLinks to an external site.” (mostly Delewares and Mohegans in Cooper’s tales) from the skulking, villainous Hurons. Although Cooper features prominent Native American characters and describes tribal customs in detail in his most famous novels, he was not personally familiar with Native American culture. In fact, even though many of his American readers took him to be an expert, Cooper’s knowledge of Indian culture came largely from books, legends, and stereotypes. Think about how the Indians are portrayed in the excerpt from The Last of the Mohicans and the way he creates two separate versions of Native American character, celebrating “noble savages” like Uncas and Chingachgook while portraying other Native Americans as ferocious, barbarous, and inhumane.
In The Pioneers Natty is an old man, a living relic of an older way of life; in The Last of the Mohicans, which is set almost a half century earlier, Natty is in his prime. Essentially, then, the series is elegiac: it celebrates a fading past of romantic exploits and unspoiled wilderness. Settings in works of fiction are often invented to symbolize or encapsulate the conflicts that will be developed in the story. How does Cooper describe the frontier community of Templeton in The Pioneers? How does the town function as a contact point between “civilization” and the wilderness? What kinds of hardships do the townspeople face? What is their vision of “progress”?
On the other hand, The Pioneers can be read as an early moment in American environmental literature. The flood of pigeons slaughtered with cannons and so thick that they blot out the sky, for example, are indeed the passenger pigeonsLinks to an external site. that were driven to extinction in the opening decades of the 20th century. In both excerpts from The Pioneers, Cooper describes the way “settlement” and “civilization” exploit and disrupt the natural abundance of the wilderness. While the Judge tends to view this process as “improvement,” Natty condemns it as destructive and wasteful. What is Cooper’s position on the environmental impact of European-American settlement? In what respects does he seem to side with the Judge’s position, and in what respects does he seem to side with Natty? How does The Pioneers raise environmental issues that still concern us today? How do contemporary debates about issues such as logging old-growth forests, salmon fishing, and drilling for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge grow out of some of the same controversies raised in The Pioneers?
Natty Bumppo has been described as the “first American hero” in U.S. national literature. What qualities make Natty heroic? How does he deal with the tensions between “wilderness” and “civilization” that structure life in and around Templeton? How does he deal with his existence on the border between Native American and Euro-American culture?
In her article “I Have Been, and Ever Shall Be, Your Friend’: Star Trek, The Deerslayer and the American Romance,” critic April Selley argues that the male-male bonding between Natty and his Native American sidekick Chingachgook laid the groundwork for later American heroes and their ethnic sidekicks (Journal of Popular Culture 20.1 [Summer 1986]: 89-104). These ethnic sidekicks, Selley argues, tend to be more effeminate, and thus enhance the masculinity of the European-American hero. Two famous examples of European-American heroes and ethnic sidekicks are the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and Captain Kirk and Spock. Do you agree with Selley’s reading of Cooper’s characters? Can you think of other examples that fit this model?
How do the selections from “Native Americans: Removal and Resistance” present a view of Native Americans different from Fenimore Cooper’s depiction of “noble savages”? With regard to Native Americans, many American 19th century authors like Cooper preferred to elegize over the Last Mohican or the vanished glories rather than engage with the indigenous peoples who were still very much on the scene.
https://www.learner.org/series/american-passages-a-literary-survey/masculine-heroes/?jwsource=cl
