WYANDOTTE

WYANDOTTE may well be the easiest of Fenimore Cooper's 32 novels for a 21st Century American to relate to and enjoy without extensive notes and commentaries. ***

Published 43 years before Stevenson's STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE, Cooper's WYANDOTTE, among many other things, probes the two personalities of a rogue, alcohol-prone Tuscarora Indian Chief. In his noble moments the Indian is Wyandotte, a perceptive, brilliant, compassionate man. When brooding, however, over the wrongs done to him by retired British Army Captain Hugh Willoughby, the savage is, because Willoughby sees him this way, simply an inferior, a semi-civiized, English-speaking Indian called Saucy Nick or Old Nick. ***

Most of the novel's action takes place in central New York in the pivotal spring, summer and autumn of 1776. In and around Boston have occurred or are occurring the battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill. Among the family and friends of retired Captain Willoughby and the Hutted Knoll colony he had formed ten years earlier -- with Old Nick's then indpispensable help -- political loyalty rapidly becomes the paramount issue. Shall we maintain our traditional loyalty to the British Crown or don the tempting new loyalty to the Continental Congress? In 1776 Captain Willoughby's son is a major in the British army. Willoughby's son-in-law is a Continental Colonel. The Captain himself is suddenly by inheritance made an English baronet, Sir Hugh. To whom shall the family, its black slaves, old retainers and manorial dependents be loyal? ***

As Wyandotte, the Tuscarora Indian unselfishly risks his life to save from scalping Willoughby's wife and two daughters (one by blood, one by adoption). And he also, for love of the Captain's adopted daugher Maud, Wyandotte rescues Robert, the adoptive brother whom Maud loves, the only son of Captain Willoughby. Young Bob is a captive among a marauding band of Mohawks and renegade whites disguised as Indians. They are besieging allegedly Royalist Willoughby's colony, "the Hutted Knoll," with an eye to confiscating it for themselves as patriotic Americans.***

But hours earlier, in his split personality as Nick, the Indian had stabbed to the heart the husband and father of the three women whom as Wyandotte he loved. This Nick did to avenge old beatings given him when on service with the captain's regiment of the British army. In a moment of unguarded arrogance, Willoughby had just made the mistake of threatening to beat the Tuscarora Chief once again if he withheld information about Willoughby's captive son, Bob. Wyandotte/Nick, a Jekyll/Hyde before Robert Louis Stevenson's creation, is summed up in a remark made 19 years later during a visit back to his old New York home by the murdered Captain's rescued son, now a British Lieutenant General: "He never forgot a favor, or forgave an injury." This is the novel's concluding sentence. ***

This is a grand tale, hard to put down once you pick it up. -OOO-