Of the "Leather Stocking Tales" I was able to read, only the first three could not get around the others, I decided years ago that Natty Bumppo was the first American super hero.... Something of a "Captain America" in buckskins.
Dan
*puts on literary critic hat*
Pretty close. As you may recall, the first book Cooper wrote was
The Pioneers, in which Natty Bumppo is a kind of personification of the wilderness and untrammeled freedom and acts as a foil to Judge Temple, who represents civilization and order. Cooper intended his readers to side with Judge Temple (who is endeavoring to preserve what remains of the wilderness from the depredations of the townsfolk), but made the mistake of making Bumppo a tragic figure instead of a contemptible one. Natty is a mildly comic figure, a cranky old coot who refuses to change with the times and is always going into long-winded reminiscences about the old days, but he is by far the most interesting character in the book, and readers apparently wanted more of him.
Cooper made Natty into the hero of the next four books, and in doing so made him into an exemplar of the best that human nature, uncorrupted by civilization, could achieve - kind of a "noble savage" type of figure. Cooper never intended him to be typical of frontiersmen in general, and in several books (particularly
The Prairie and
The Deerslayer) the other white frontiermen are not very nice people. To touch on the original subject of the post, Killdeer is something of a mirror for Hawkeye - it is supposed to be an exceptional rifle, extraordinarily long (Hawkeye is a tall, lanky man), plain on the outside but of exceptional workmanship, just as Natty is lacks all refinement but is of sterling character.# So, yeah, he is a superhero of sorts, but the character is a reflection of the philosophic idea that Cooper was playing with (and it changes a bit from book to book - Natty is a lot more saintly in the last two books than he is in LOTM).
The interesting things is that Hawkeye is the original version of that staple of Westerns - the "good badman" who does the hard dirty work of opening the frontier to settlement but is unable himself to adjust to the demands of civilization. John Wayne's character in
The Man who Shot Liberty Valence may superficially appear to be quite different from Cooper's Hawkeye, but at the core they are the same literary "type."
*takes off literary critic hat*
I hope that made some sense. Yeah, I am weird - I actually read all the books as a kid and liked them a lot.
#If someone wants to try and make a "killdeer" of their own, I would suggest putting aside the movie gun for a bit and looking at 1) how Cooper actually described the gun, with due allowance for some anachronisms and 2) what the gun role the gun plays in the books, before 3) running the literary model through the filter of what actually existed at the time. You might come up with something quite interesting.
