ian policy (Mathes, et al., Reform; Mathes, "Ponca"; May and Mathes; Mathes, "Jackson"; Mathes, "Agent").
Although Cooper's is not the only narrative fiction voice of early-American history, after Irving he is the principal American novelist of the early decades of the republic. Schorer, et al., say that Cooper's youthful friendships with trappers and Indians around Cooperstown, New York, which was then at the edge of the frontier, were transformed into literary material: "In time, using those silent, resourceful hunters and Indians as models, Cooper was to fashion his mythical hero for the New World and the Old. Natty Bumppo--canny woodsman, matchless marksman, white brother to the noble red man--lives today, with minor changes, in the scores of rough noble heroes in movies" (Schorer, et al. 228). The philosophical roots of the romanticization of Indian life in the popular culture are in Rousseau's concept of the Noble Savage (Grenier 68). But as applied to the American Indian in 19th-century literature, that concept exists side by side with the stereoty
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