Is it a Western? Not in the sense that there are gun-toting cowboys and stagecoaches spilling bags and baggage in dusty landscapes filled with cactuses and towering red sandstone buttes. But we do have at least one grizzled frontiersman – Nathaniel ‘Natty’ Bumppo, AKA ‘Hawk-eye’ – who shoots with impressive accuracy at hostile Native Americans when the occasion arises. And it does, often.

What’s more, The Last of the Mohicans most certainly is a Western in the sense that the action takes place in the western reaches of what was then the Province of New York, beyond which lay Canada to the north and the vast expanse of the unexplored continent beyond.

So it is a Western, one of the first, and – which is more – 200 years after it was published in 1826, James Fenimore Cooper’s epic tale of survival, love and vengeance retains its ability to shock, move and mesmerise. Like the intensely fought ‘dreaded warfare of the wilderness’ that provides the setting – involving white settlers, European militaries and indigenous tribes loyal to France or Britain – so The Last of the Mohicans is soaked in blood and violence, and interracial complexity.

This is all anticipated in Cooper’s introduction to the book, where he alludes to the research for his tale and offers a potted partial history of the region. ‘The tribe that possessed the country which now composes the south-western parts of New England, and that portion of New York that lies east of the Hudson, and the country even much farther to the south, was a mighty people, called the “Mahicanni”, or, more commonly, the “Mohicans”,’ he wrote. ‘The few of them that now remain are chiefly scattered among other tribes, and retain no other memorials of their power and greatness than their melancholy recollections.’

With the tale of blood-letting and scalp-taking in mind, Cooper concluded his preface with what would now be regarded as a trigger warning, one directed towards ‘all young ladies, whose ideas are usually limited by the four walls of a comfortable drawing room; all single gentlemen, of certain age… and all clergyman’, whom he urges ‘to abandon the design’ of reading the book. The author ‘gives this advice to such young ladies, because, after they have read the book, they will surely pronounce it shocking; to the bachelors as it might disturb their sleep; and to the reverend clergy, because they might be better employed’.

The fact of the matter is, it surely is a grisly story, one with a high body-count. There’s a strong dose of survivalism in it, too, with moments reminiscent of The Revenant. In part, it’s a war story, given the backdrop of the French and Indian War in 1757 – the American leg of what is known elsewhere as the Seven Years War, which lasted from 1756 to 1763. This conflict pitted Britain against France and Spain, and referred to by Churchill as the ‘first world war’ because of its global reach.

This setting puts The Last of the Mohicans some considerable distance – both geographically and tonally – from the world of one of the authors of his day that we know Cooper admired, Jane Austen, on whose work his first novel, Precaution (1819), was modelled. By the time Cooper was sitting down to create The Last of the Mohicans in 1825, he was more consciously aping another great literary contemporary, one he also considered a rival: Sir Walter Scott, whose Waverley novels, including Ivanhoe (1819), were an undoubted inspiration to the generally Anglophile American.

By the time Mohicans landed, Cooper was 36 years of age and already had six books under his belt, including his first bestseller, The Spy (1821). Like Mohicans, this was a historical novel, this time set during the Revolutionary War, with a plot inspired by the exploits of a real spy, Enoch Crosby, who was acquainted with John Jay, a friend of the Cooper family and co-author of the Federalist Papers and the first chief justice of the United States.

Among these first books were two in what would become part of his five-strong series of ‘Leatherstocking tales’, with a narrative spanning 1740 to 1804, of which Mohicans would ultimately form the second part, chronologically. The uniting character of the series is the leatherstocking himself, Natty Bumppo, a man of European descent who is part-raised by Native Americans and in the prime of his life in 1757. When we meet him in chapter three of Mohicans he is described as having the frame of a man ‘who had known hardships and exertion from his earliest youth’ and is dressed in a green leather hunting shirt, ‘moccasins ornamented after the gay fashion of the natives’ and a pair of ‘buckskin leggings, laced at the sides’. Described as a scout, his weapon of choice is the rifle, after which he known as ‘La Longue Carabine’.

He is introduced with his friend and ‘brother’, Chingachgook, a lone Mohican chief, who appears in four of the five Leatherstocking Tales. ‘The expanded chest, full-formed limbs, and grave countenance of this warrior, would denote that he had reached the vigour of his days, though no symptoms of decay appeared to have yet weakened his manhood,’ wrote Cooper.

The novel itself begins with some sensational place-setting: ‘It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered, before the adverse hosts could meet. A wide, and apparently, an impervious boundary of forests, severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England.’ Adding that hardy colonists and Europeans spent months ‘struggling against the rapids of streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in martial conflict’, Cooper declares: ‘Emulating the patience and self-denial of the practised native warriors, they learned to overcome every difficulty; and it would seem, that in time, there was no recess of the woods so dark, nor any secret place so lovely, that it might claim exemption from the inroads of those who had pledged their blood to satiate their vengeance, or to uphold the cold and selfish policy of the distant monarchs of Europe.’

And so we begin. We are three years into a war that the British are losing by dint of ‘the imbecility of her military leaders abroad, and the fatal want of energy of her councils at home’, and the forces of the French general Montcalm are in ascendance, advancing from Canada into the province of New York. Jeopardy is everywhere – from the landscape, but also from its indigenous inhabitants who were so much better adapted to it, and ruthless, too. ‘The terrific character of their merciless enemies increased, immeasurably, the natural horrors of warfare,’ Cooper warned floridly.

We are with a young Englishman, Major Duncan Heyward, who is escorting two young women – half-sisters it will emerge – Cora and Alice Munro, to their father, Colonel Munro, who commands the nearby Fort William Henry. With them is an ungainly psalmodist or singing master, David Gamut. Their guide is a Native American named Magua, about whom Heyward soon develops a bad feeling. In pages that follow, Heyward will display nobility and courage, while Cora emerges as a powerful heroine in their own right.

But first the vulnerable party comes into contact with Natty Bumppo, who is with Chingachgook and his warrior-son, the Apollo-like Uncas. Pretty soon, Uncas and Cora hit it off – while we discover that Heyward has firm designs on Alice’s hand in marriage. Not before the villainy of Magua – a Huron Indian chief known by the French as ‘Le Renard Subtil’ or wily fox – is discovered and the first fight of the novel takes place against the Hurons on the rocks at Glens Falls on the Hudson. This was a setting that inspired the novel itself and which Cooper saw while touring the area in July 1824 with a distinguished English visitor, Edward Smith-Stanley, who would become 14th Earl of Derby and three-times prime minister in the 1850s and 1860s. After visiting the falls, Cooper told him, ‘I must place one of my old Indians here’ and later sent a bound edition of the book to him, telling his publisher, that they ‘had been together in the caverns at Glens Falls and it was there that I determined to write the book, promising him a copy’.

The book, like the tour, then moves ten miles north to Fort William Henry on the shores of Lake George, which we discover is being besieged and, worse still, on the brink of falling. Colonel Munro has little alternative but to surrender the fort to the much greater French forces and when the British-American force departs, it is massacred by Indians allied to the French, a story based on the actual events of August 1757, when several hundred troops, as well as women and children from the fort, were slaughtered and hundreds more taken captive.

Among those captives are Cora and Alice – by Magua, who, we discover, has a longstanding grudge against their father. Bumppo, together with Chingachgook and Uncas and with Heyward and Munro mount a rescue – one which takes them into the hostile territory of tribes loyal to French-held Canada.

It is a rich and exciting brew, one layered with exquisite and textured descriptions of the natural world – deep, never-ending forests teeming with life – and the majesty of the mountains and lakes. It is, of course, a landscape and recent past that Cooper was familiar with, even before his tour with the future occupant of Downing Street.

Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, the 11th of 12 children, into a large well-connected family of English and Quaker ancestry in 1789, two months and a day after the fall of the Bastille. The events of Mohicans unfold in what is now upstate New York, not far from where Cooper’s father, a wealthy merchant named William, acquired a vast, 10,000-plus acre holding on Lake Otsego in what would become Otsego County. Here, he founded a settlement in 1786 and named it after himself, Cooperstown. In 1791 he moved his family there, going on to build a substantial house (the manor house, later Otsego Hall), which would ultimately become James Fenimore Cooper’s summer home in the 1830s – one to which he added battlements and other adornments inspired by his lengthy stay in Europe.

William would become county judge and the district’s US congressman. James, meanwhile, would study at Yale before a prank had him expelled, whereupon he went to sea, crewing on a commercial vessel bound for England and then Spain before joining the US navy as a midshipman and serving in the Great Lakes. This provided material for his fourth Natty Bumppo novel, The Pathfinder or The Inland Sea, which was published in 1840.

More proximately, however, his two-year naval career spawned his fourth novel, The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (1824), which was set against the Revolutionary War and proved a hit, including with former navy colleagues. In later years, Cooper would write a history of the US navy and the biography of a seaman, Ned Myers, among a dozen or so works of non-fiction, on top of some 32 novels.

Despite this prodigious output, two centuries on, the only book people are still talking about is The Last of the Mohicans. And for good reason. Even though Cooper ‘was already acknowledged as preeminent in importance and popularity among American writers’ by the time it appeared, according to Richard Slotkin, the American cultural critic and academic, this is the book that defines him and – to an extent – America itself.

Helped no doubt by the many film adaptations – eight between 1911 and the most recent in 1992, which starred Daniel Day Lewis and is almost unrecognisable from the book – Mohicans survives also because of the strength of its characters, the presentation of the natural world and Native American culture, and the deliciousness of Magua and his villainy.

For Cooper biographer and literary scholar George Dekker, Cooper was aiming to create ‘a vast national prose epic – such as Scott’s novel of Scotland… or such as Shakespeare’s history plays’. However, since there was no ancient past to tap into he focused on the land, which united inhabitants past and present. ‘The wilderness, the frontier, the westward movement – these belonged to the nation as a whole in a way that even the battle of Bunker hill did not,’ notes Dekker.

While the characters express overtly racial and racist views by today’s standards – the ‘red man’, the ‘white man’, ‘pale face’ are commonplace – our prime protagonist, Bumppo, is simultaneously a sincere admirer of Native Americans and their society, and an advocate of racial purity of blood, of separation. If there is a contradiction here, it is one that goes to the heart of the book, and arguably of America itself.

What is certain is that the book’s narrative turns on several central relationships which are interracial, the most significant being the deep bond of friendship between Hawk-eye and Chingangook and the unspoken but heavily implied bond of romantic love between Uncas and Cora. There is also the close, avuncular relationship between Hawk-eye and Uncas, too. For Dekker, this helped make Cooper ‘the greatest advocate the American Indians’ because ‘for the first time in American literature the close friendship between men of different races becomes a matter of central importance’.

And yet, racial ambivalence abounds; while the Indians in the story are given a voice and their culture is documented and respectfully treated, they are at the same time repeatedly described as savages capable of appalling acts. At the same time, Cooper reserves a warmth for them. At the end of the book, Colonel Munro, in a few words of sombre dedication, invokes ‘the Being we all worship, under different names’, adding that ‘the time shall not be distant, when we may assemble around his throne, without distinction of sex, or rank, or colour!’. That the relationship between Cora – herself mixed race, of both Afro-Caribbean and European ancestry – and Uncas is never realised is the central, dramatic tragedy of the story. I don’t think Cooper willed it because he disapproved of a potential union: rather he used the potential of the union to sharpen the tragedy.

As for Bumppo, despite his close friendship with Chingachgook, he remains, as Richard Slotkin points out in his introduction to the Penguin Classic edition of the book, the ‘most absolute spokesman for racial and social conservatism’. This once again points to a distinct tension at the heart of the book – one highlighted by the elegiac title of the novel itself.

‘We may even say that Cooper never loves his Indians so much as when he is watching them disappear, and that for him as for General Sheridan – although with different emphasis – the only good Indians were dead’, declares Slotkin. ‘But it is part of the appeal of the romance to make us wish for something we know is impossible. Cooper would like to have had his dilemmas resolved both ways; the races both reconciled and kept separate, the wilderness both civilised and preserved in purity, the Indian forever vanishing yet never lost.’

Perhaps all Cooper was trying to do was to keep alive the memories and spirits of the generations immediately before his birth, whether it was the indigenous civilisation – and their tribes, beliefs and ceremonies – some of which he saw first-hand as a boy or in adulthood, or that of the European pioneers like Bumppo, perhaps modelled on the Otsego frontiersman David Shipman, whom Cooper knew and described in 1838 as ‘the Leather Stocking of the region’, one ‘dressed in tanned deerskin, and with dogs roamed the forest, hunting deer, bears and foxes’.

We also know that he read accounts such as David Humphrys’ Essay on the Life of the Honourable Major-General Israel Putnam (1788), which detailed the siege of Fort William Henry. It’s a narrative that Wayne Franklin, author of the definitive two-volume biography of Cooper, says ‘planted the seed that in time germinated in The last of the Mohicans’. For all that writers like Mark Twain have been critical of Cooper, Franklin is clear that the spiritual father of Huckleberry Finn is none other than Natty Bumppo. ‘Without Cooper, there would have been no Mark Twain’, declared Franklin, ‘as Mark Twain himself admitted by the savagery of his attacks.’

Two centuries on, The Last of the Mohicans remains a book that can be read and enjoyed, even if the sentences contain more syllables than modern readers are accustomed to. Moreover, it can still transport us to a distant time and even more distant frames of mind. Like all great works of literature it still inspires debate over what it was trying to say and why its author was saying it. As ever, the best way to decide is to read the book yourself.