"Is a Nation to Be Sold like the Skin of a Beaver!": James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie and the Dilemma of Countersovereignty

Abstract

James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking series is often characterized as a literary staging ground, on which Cooper deploys, tests, and evaluates various political principles and representative figures. The Prairie, set on what Charles Adams refers to as the "blank slate" of the newly purchased Louisiana Territories, is exemplary of this sort of function, as demonstrated through the conflicting modes of proprietorship and legal authority represented by Ishmael Bush, Mahtoree, and Duncan Uncas Middleton. Yet while in most recent scholarship what is staged in the Leatherstocking novels is either an arrangement of competing political theories or the duality of settler identity formation, this essay argues that The Prairie engages a more foundational, and explicitly geopolitical, concern. The fundamental tension of the novel, between its historically deterministic opening and closing and its highly convoluted and contested middle, is suggestive of a powerful anxiety, exacerbated by the Louisiana Purchase, over the basis of American sovereignty as it takes shape in response to Indigenous forms of territoriality. Read this way, the depiction of conflicting modes of property law, framed by the novel's narrative tension, appear as symptoms of the dilemma of what Manu Karuka has termed countersovereignty, made apparent as the Bush family are forced to acknowledge that the "empty empire" of the Louisiana Territories is not so empty after all.