common.” Let us guess, then, that it was about sixteen feet wide. This
leviathan had been prowling down bends which were but a third as long as
itself, and scraping between banks where it had only two feet of space to
spare on each side. We cannot too much admire this miracle. A low-
roofed log dwelling occupies “two-thirds of the ark’s length”–a dwelling
ninety feet long and sixteen feet wide, let us say a kind of vestibule
train. The dwelling has two rooms–each forty-five feet long and sixteen
feet wide, let us guess. One of them is the bedroom of the Hutter girls,
Judith and Hetty; the other is the parlor in the daytime, at night it is
papa’s bedchamber. The ark is arriving at the stream’s exit now, whose
width has been reduced to less than twenty feet to accommodate the
Indians–say to eighteen. There is a foot to spare on each side of the
boat. Did the Indians notice that there was going to be a tight squeeze
there? Did they notice that they could make money by climbing down out
of that arched sapling and just stepping aboard when the ark scraped by?
No, other Indians would have noticed these things, but Cooper’s Indians
never notice anything. Cooper thinks they are marvelous creatures for
noticing, but he was almost always in error about his Indians. There was
seldom a sane one among them.
The ark is one hundred and forty feet long; the dwelling is ninety feet
long. The idea of the Indians is to drop softly and secretly from the
arched sapling to the dwelling as the ark creeps along under it at the
rate of a mile an hour, and butcher the family. It will take the ark a
minute and a half to pass under. It will take the ninety foot dwelling a
minute to pass under. Now, then, what did the six Indians do? It would
take you thirty years to guess, and even then you would have to give it
up, I believe. Therefore, I will tell you what the Indians did. Their
chief, a person of quite extraordinary intellect for a Cooper Indian,
warily watched the canal-boat as it squeezed along under him, and when he
had got his calculations fined down to exactly the right shade, as he
judged, he let go and dropped. And missed the house! That is actually
what he did. He missed the house, and landed in the stern of the scow.
It was not much of a fall, yet it knocked him silly. He lay there
unconscious. If the house had been ninety-seven feet long he would have
made the trip. The fault was Cooper’s, not his. The error lay in the
construction of the house. Cooper was no architect.
There still remained in the roost five Indians.
The boat has passed under and is now out of their reach. Let me explain
what the five did–you would not be able to reason it out for yourself.
No. 1 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water astern of it. Then No.
2 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water still farther astern of it.
Then No. 3 jumped for the boat, and fell a good way astern of it. Then
No, 4. jumped for the boat, and fell in the water away astern. Then
even No. 5 made a jump for the boat–for he was a Cooper Indian. In the
matter of intellect, the difference between a Cooper Indian and the
Indian that stands in front of the cigarshop is not spacious. The scow
episode is really a sublime burst of invention; but it does not thrill,
because the inaccuracy of the details throws a sort of air of
fictitiousness and general improbability over it. This comes of Cooper’s
inadequacy as an observer.
The reader will find some examples of Cooper’s high talent for inaccurate
observation in the account of the shooting-match in The Pathfinder.
“A common wrought nail was driven lightly into the target, its
head having been first touched with paint.”
The color of the paint is not stated–an important omission, but Cooper
deals freely in important omissions. No, after all, it was not an