al, lived events in the colonial history of the United States. However, he also roots his narrative in his own imagined war. Cooper wants to emphasize the tensions between mankind and the land, between natives and colonists, and between nature and culture. He does this by using history as a frame and filling that frame with fictional events.
             Cooper's characters illustrate the various ways that national cultures interact. The chronology of the first two chapters foreshadows the eventual colonial domination over the Indian frontier. In Chapter I, friendly and hostile Indian tribes rule the terrain that so daunts the whites. In Chapter II, Gamut gives a sophisticated biblical performance, ignoring the Indians as he sings. Although Cooper gestures at the eventual dominance of the whites, he also makes the white Gamut a figure of fun. Gamut behaves prissily in the menacing forest and then puts the lives of his companions at risk. Even Gamut's biblical knowledge does not dignify him; he is identified as a New England religious psalmodist only because Magua, the Indian informant, is familiar with psalmody. Heyward, although less foolish than Gamut, also acquits himself badly. He has a greatly inflated sense of his own skill and wrongly determines that no danger exists after taking a cursory glance around the woods.
             Cooper's characters embody some of the broad stereotypes held during the colonization of America. Racial tensions underlie The Last of the Mohicans. At this point in the novel, Magua represents the nineteenth-century stock figure called the noble savage, an Indian for whom the white population feels both sympathy and horror. Whites may celebrate Magua for his willingness to help them, but they also fear his cultural differences and his familiarity with a terrain they find fearsome. Cora embodies the typical white reaction to Indians-terror and fascination. Cooper also suggests that Cora feels a sexual attractio...