SOURCE: "'A Parental Affection': Law and Identity in Cooper's America," in "The Guardian of the Law": Authority and Identity in James Fenimore Cooper, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990, pp. 1-24.

In the following essay, Adams contends that Cooper was ambivalent toward the law in America because he "was impelled to believe—emotionally and intellectually—in the law's ability to achieve both social and individual integrity by the same set of historical and psychological conditions that encouraged him to reject the law as divisive. "

I

Early in The Prairie, deep in the long night that opens the novel, Natty Bumppo and Ishmael Bush have a conversation about one of Cooper's persistent concerns—property law. The squatter has just been robbed of his horses by the Tetons, so Natty's innocent observation that the Indians consider themselves owners of the plains, and thus entitled to all it holds, draws from Bush...