Satanstoe

North America's colonial writers in English were notable in four literary genres: sermons, histories, Indian wars and Indian captivity tales. Fenimore Cooper's 1845 SATANSTOE has elements of all four. The tale is about New York colony in the early 18th century, mainly a few months in 1757-1758. Events take place just after the British defeat at Fort William Henry, the subject of Cooper's THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. ***

Sermons are a specialty of Reverend Mister Thomas Worden, a High Church Anglican priest born in England and deriving a decent inheritance from the Mother Country. Like almost all the striking characters of this novel, Dutch, English, mixed Dutch-English, Indian and French, Reverend Worden is a mixture of good and not so good. He is worldly, not very brave (he refuses to ride in a sleigh on the frozen Hudson river near Albany -- a hugely comic episode), a card player, a bit of a carouser. On the other hand his liturgies are punctiliously correct. He is willing to try to convert Indians off to the northeast of Albany. But he gives up when he decides that Christianity is too civilized for the savages at their then level of development. *** The only Indian captivity in SATANSTOE is oblique mention of the aftermath of the surrender of Fort William Henry. The French and Indian War passes from THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS to SATANSTOE with yet another English-French dustoff, this time at Fort Ticonderoga. *** Young heroes and heroines abound in this non-stop adventure tale. There is a caged lion, a terrifying breakup of the ice on the Hudson and subtle discussion of colonial New York property practices and law. The latter increasingly grow into the leit motifs of Cooper's two follow-on novels, THE CHAINBEARER and THE REDSKINS. With SATANSTOE these three novels make up Cooper's "anti-rent" novels or the Littlepage Trilogy. Young Cornelius Littlepage is the hero of SATANSTOE (name of his family's small West Chester Anglo-Dutch estate). The trilogy spans six generations of his family's efforts to create and keep a large wilderness estate in the face of growing popular American resentment of any vast private holdings. *** SATANSTOE is an important sketch of early American society, mores and economic preoccupations. -OOO-