James Fenimore Cooper | Page 2

his
permanent home. He accordingly began in 1796, and in 1799
completed, the erection of a mansion which bore the name of Otsego
Hall. It was then and remained for a long time afterward the largest
private residence in that portion of the State. When in 1834 it came into
the hands of the son, it still continued to be the principal dwelling in the
flourishing village that had grown up about it.
On his father's side Cooper was of Quaker descent. The original
emigrant ancestor had come over in 1679, and had made extensive
purchases of land in the province of New Jersey. In that colony or in
Pennsylvania his descendants for a long time remained. Cooper himself
was the first one, of the direct line certainly, that ever even revisited the
mother-country. These facts are of slight importance in themselves. In
the general disbelief, however, which fifty years ago prevailed in Great
Britain, that anything good could come out of (p. 003) this western
Nazareth. Cooper was immediately furnished with an English nativity
as soon as he had won reputation. The same process that gave to Irving
a birthplace in Devonshire, furnished one also to him in the Isle of Man.

When this fiction was exploded, the fact of emigration was pushed
merely a little further back. It was transferred to the father, who was
represented as having gone from Buckinghamshire to America. This
latter assertion is still to be found in authorities that are generally
trustworthy. But the original one served a useful purpose during its day.
This assumed birthplace in the Isle of Man enabled the English
journalists that were offended with Cooper's strictures upon their
country to speak of him, as at one time they often did, as an English
renegade.
His mother's maiden name was Elizabeth Fenimore, and the family to
which she belonged was of Swedish descent. Cooper himself was the
eleventh of twelve children. Most of his brothers and sisters died long
before him, five of them in infancy. His own name was at first simply
James Cooper, and in this way he wrote it until 1826. But in April of
that year the Legislature of New York passed an act changing the
family name to Fenimore-Cooper. This was done in accordance with
the wish of his grandmother, whose descendants in the direct male line
had died out. But he seldom employed the hyphen in writing, and
finally gave up the use of it altogether.
The early childhood of Cooper was mainly passed in the wilderness at
the very time when the first wave of civilization was beginning to break
against its hills. There was everything in what he saw and heard to
impress the mind of the growing boy. He was on the border, if (p. 004)
indeed he could not justly be said to be in the midst of mighty and
seemingly interminable woods which stretched for hundreds of miles to
the westward. Isolated clearings alone broke this vast expanse of
foliage, which, covering the valleys and clinging to the sides and
crowning the summits of the hills, seemed to rise and fall like the
waves of the sea. The settler's axe had as yet scarcely dispelled the
perpetual twilight of the primeval forest. The little lake lay enclosed in
a border of gigantic trees. Over its waters hung the interlacing branches
of mighty oaks and beeches and pines. Its surface was frequented by
flocks of wild, aquatic birds,--the duck, the gull, and the loon. In this
lofty valley among the hills were also to be found, then as now, in
fullest perfection, the clear atmosphere, the cloudless skies, and the

brilliant light of midsummer suns, that characterize everywhere the
American highlands. More even than the beauty and majesty of nature
that lay open to the sight was the mystery that constantly appealed to
the imagination in what might lie hidden in the depths of a wilderness
that swept far beyond glance of eye or reach of foot. This, indeed, may
have affected the feelings of only a few, but there were numerous
interests and anxieties which all had in common. The little village had
early gone through many of the trials which mark the history of most of
the settlements in regions to which few travelers found their way and
commerce seldom came. Remote from sources of supply, and difficult
of access, it had known the time when its population, scanty as it was,
suffered from the scarcity of food. Sullivan's successful expedition
against the Six Nations did not suffice to keep it from the alarm of
savage attack that never came. The immense forest shutting in the
hamlet on every side had (p. 005) terrors to some as real as were its
attractions to others. Its recesses were still the