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“Wasty Ways”: Stories of American Settlement

In his 1823 novel The Pioneers, or The Sources of the Susquehanna, James Fenimore Cooper recalls his childhood world: Otsego County in central New York during the 1790s, when settlers remade the local forest into farms. Cooper depicts the settlers as possessed by an irrational, emotional lust to decimate nature. Their slaughter of the wild plants and animals exceeds all considerations of economic need and interest. In two especially vivid scenes, the settlers of Templeton (the fictional version of the Otsego village of Cooperstown) festively muster to massacre a flock of passenger pigeons and a school of Otsego bass. At the pigeon hunt, "None pretended to collect the game, which lay scattered over the fields in such profusion, as to cover the very ground with the fluttering victims." Similarly, the settlers are "Inflamed beyond the bounds of discretion" at "the sight of the immense piles of fish, that were slowly rolling over on the gravelly beach." They leave most to die and rot, unwanted and unneeded. Otsego's dominant landlord, Judge Marmaduke Temple (modeled on the novelist's father, Judge William Cooper) sadly assures his daughter, "The poor are always prodigal, my child, where there is plenty, and seldom think of a provision against the morrow." He especially laments the rapid decline of the local fish: "like all the other treasures of the wilderness, they already begin to disappear, before the wasteful extravagance of man." Another character, the canny old hunter Natty Bumppo, shares this distress: "I call it sinful and wasty to catch more than can be eat."' Raised in wealth and comfort, Cooper offered an elitist explanation for settler profligacy with nature-abundance brought out the worst in the human nature of common folk. Incapable of restraint, the vulgar settlers despoiled nature as an unthinking sport. In contrast to explanations that emphasize the short-term rationality of profit maximization, Cooper insisted that the "profit" settlers sought was primarily psychic and emotional: the sheer thrill of killing and wasting. In the early American republic, where the unrestrained transformation of the wilderness was the essence of egalitarian opportunity, Cooper's argument was literally uncommon. But his distrust of the common man more often echoes in this century's