SOURCE: “Fire-Water in the Frontier Romance: James Fenimore Cooper and ‘Indian Nature,’” in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 22, No. 2, Autumn, 1994, pp. 215-31.

In the following essay, Davis claims that one of Cooper's underlying themes is that alcohol addiction was the inevitable outcome of contact between Native Americans and Euro-Americans. This theme is partly developed in the author's numerous depictions of the “drunken Indian” stereotype.

There is something painful in the reflection that these people were once numerous, and that by our approach they have been reduced to a few. It is natural that we should feel averse to the admission that the true causes of their decline are to be found among us. Hence we have sought for the seat of the disease among them …¹

Indiana Senator John Tipton, defending before the Senate in 1838 an appropriations bill augmenting federal support for those Native Americans who had recently been...