SOURCE: Johnson, Rochelle. “James Fenimore Cooper, Susan Fenimore Cooper, and the Work of History.” In James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art, Papers from the 1999 Cooper Seminar (no. 12), edited by Hugh C. MacDougall, pp. 41-5. Oneonta, N.Y.: The State University of New York College at Oneonta, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Johnson asserts that Susan Fenimore Cooper's writing reflects a desire to preserve the natural environment for its cultural and historical significance, while her father's works suggest an acquiescence to the necessary loss of landscape in the name of progress.

In the Introduction to her 1853 edition of John Leonard Knapp's Country Rambles, Susan Fenimore Cooper wrote, “We Americans … are still, in some sense, half aliens to the country … there is much ignorance among us regarding the creatures which held the land as their own long before our forefathers trod the soil, and many of which are still...