42 pages • 1 hour read
James Fenimore CooperThe Last of the Mohicans
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1826A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 15-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary
The group spends a few days in the besieged fort. “The scene was at once animated and still” (178), with flags waving and crowds of French on the beach of the lake near William Henry. Nevertheless, Bumppo is bothered because they are surrounded by enemies. Cora and Alice thank Bumppo and his friends for helping them arrive at the fort. Even Munro says that he has heard of the fame of “The Long Rifle.”
There is another fort in the Hudson area, Edward, and the besieged wonder if that fort will send reinforcements. Meanwhile, the French commander, the Marquis of Montcalm, has invited Munro for a discussion. Munro suggests sending Heyward instead. Heyward sees Magua in the French encampment. Montcalm assumes Heyward came to deliver a message of surrender and is taken aback when he discovers this is not the case. Before leaving, Heyward says their fort is strong, and they have reinforcements.
Chapter 16 Summary
Heyward returns to William Henry. Munro catches Heyward off guard by suggesting that he is interested in his daughter Cora; Heyward explains that he has affections for Alice. Munro explains that he had wanted to marry a woman named Alice long ago, but he was too poor at the time. Instead, he became a soldier and was sent to the West Indies. There, he became involved with a woman who became Cora’s mother. Munro later returned from the West Indies, having inherited the wealth of his wife, who died not long after Cora’s birth. He found the woman he loved long before, they married, and she became the mother of Alice. However, his second wife died just one year later.
Munro finally asks Heyward what happened at the meeting with Montcalm. He is upset that the French assumed the British would surrender. However, he agrees to meet with Montcalm himself, but he wants Heyward to accompany him in case the French are laying a trap. Heyward becomes uneasy when he sees some Native American warriors lurking around the edges of the meeting with Montcalm in the French encampment. Montcalm reads Munro a letter he intercepted, which states that a British general named Webb had betrayed Munro by refusing to send reinforcements. Based on this information, Munro surrenders to Montcalm.
Chapter 17 Summary
Soldiers, together with women and children, depart William Henry in a somber mood. Gamut sings songs to lift their spirits. Heyward asks Gamut to watch over Alice and Cora during their retreat to protect them. The French soldiers appear to act honorably as the British leave William Henry. However, the British are approached by 100 or more Native American warriors, including Magua. One of the warriors attempts to take a woman’s shawl, which was wrapped around her baby. Annoyed, the warrior takes the baby from the woman and kills it against a rock, and then kills the woman with a blow of his tomahawk to her head. Then more than 2,000 warriors savagely attack the fort’s departing occupants. Gamut plays music, which rallies the group, but it also draws Magua near. He kidnaps Alice, carrying her away. Cora comes along, refusing to leave her sister. Gamut follows on horseback.
Chapters 18-19 Summary
The narrator explains that this attack has come to be known as the Massacre of William Henry. According to the narrator, Montcalm is a failure as a man because he lacked moral courage and allowed the massacre to happen. In the aftermath of the massacre, Bumppo, Munro, and Heyward hide at the edge of the woods, distraught and looking for Alice and Cora. They find traces of the women, including a scrap of Cora’s clothes. They also find the distinctive track of Magua. In addition, the find the “tooting we’pon of the singer,” indicating that Gamut is also following the women (227). However, they find no signs of Alice.
Bumppo, Munro, and Heyward go back to William Henry to spend the night. Heyward watches the dark wilderness. Thinking he hears something suspicious, he suggests that the enemy hasn’t left yet and might be lurking around them. Uncas and Chingachgook listen. A shot is fired, and Uncas comes back to say it was a member of the Oneida tribe. The group smokes before going to sleep, and Heyward is able to see Chingachgook and Uncas acting on their father/son relationship. The group plans to leave quickly and leave no trace.
Chapters 20-21 Summary
Munro, Heyward, Bumppo, and the Mohicans travel wearing moccasins and then board a canoe so as to not leave a trace. Heyward openly wonders why they are being so careful, given that they have Colonel Munro with them; he is told that even the Colonel will not stop bullets. They follow the path that Montcalm took, not realizing that there are Native American warriors waiting to ambush them. Uncas catches sight of them as they paddle away. The warriors follow their group in another canoe, and shots are fired. They try to stay out of range, but an enemy canoe is closing in on them. Though shots are being fired, even one knocking Uncas’s paddle out of his hand, Heyward refuses to hide in the canoe bottom. Finally, they manage to escape, going ashore and heading into the woods.
In the woods Bumppo and his group find a trail and later a site where the French had stopped. They temporarily lose the trail, but then Uncas finds Gamut’s shoe prints and other prints that may belong to Munro’s daughters. Continuing, the group comes across a site of earthen dwellings that appears to be deserted. Thinking it may be an enemy camp, the group is cautious. They are confused when they see a man who is not part of a Huron tribe and is wearing the clothes of a white man. As Heyward watches, Hawkeye goes right up to the strange man and begins to talk to him as other members of the camp seem to dive into the water.
Chapter 22 Summary
Heyward feels that he is hallucinating, as he watches what had looked like an enemy camp turns out to be beavers and their dams, and the stranger turns out to be Gamut. Gamut explains that Cora was led to a neighboring tribal village, while Alice is being kept with the Huron women in their dwellings two miles away. Gamut is allowed to go freely between the dwellings.
Bumppo and his group develop a plan, suggesting Gamut goes back to let the women know they will be rescued. Gamut can then give them a signal to facilitate the escape. Heyward insists on accompanying Gamut. Chingachgook paints Heyward with makeup to look like a French medicine man.
Chapters 15-22 Analysis
As the setting of the novel shifts to the besieged Fort William Henry, the perspective of the characters likewise changes. Bumppo, who is at home in the wilderness and up to this point has been critical for guiding his group through the frontier, recedes somewhat to the background and feels trapped, with the narrator noting, “[t]he countenance of Hawkeye was haggard and careworn, and his air dejected” (179). The broader context of the French and Indian War comes into the foreground, and there are glimpses of the interactions between the British and French colonial powers. Most significantly, readers are given insight on the military interactions between the powers when Heyward (and later Colonel Munro) are sent to parlay with Montcalm, which eventually leads to the British surrender of the fort.
In the midst of these high-level interactions, the truth about Heyward’s affections for Alice emerge, alongside this personal history of Colonel Munro. In one sense, these personal insights can seem almost like asides, as they do not directly relate either the siege of the fort or to the transport of Bumppo’s group through the wilderness. Yet the confessions of Heyward and Munro also give depth to the diverse cultural context that is at the heart of The Last of the Mohicans and to the groundwork of the then-future United States. The Scottish Munro’s meandering story of love for a Black Caribbean islander, the birth of their daughter, and the subsequent arrival of Munro and Cora in New England seems not outlandish, but typical of the burgeoning American culture. By contrast, Heyward’s preference for the white Alice belies his allegiance to British colonial culture. Just a few short years after the French and Indian War, the conflict between the American and colonial powers would lead to the war for American independence.
From these moments of personal insight, the novel leaps to one of its most dramatic and horrifying scenes, when the departing British are viciously attacked—Cooper’s depiction of the historical Massacre at William Henry. The descriptions of the gentle forest murmuring at the start of Chapter 14 are like a calm before this storm, which amplifies the contrast between the scenes: “It was a scene of wildness and desolation,“ the narrator notes, and it also leads to the second time that Munro’s daughters are captured, with Gamut in tow (220). Yet the novel does not depict these moments as a simple defeat. Instead, the narrator steps in to describe Montcalm as a failure of a man for allowing the massacre to happen, a charge which also praises the honor of the British forces.
As Bumppo and the others track their kidnapped companions, there are scenes of high action, such as the dramatic canoe chase in which the group narrowly escapes a group of Huron warriors. Likewise, Heyward’s decision to disguise himself as a French medicine man in order to infiltrate the Huron camp provides an instance of drama as well as a narrative means for Alice and Cora to be freed. At the same time, these close encounters provide opportunities for the narrator and characters within the novel to discuss Native American culture and the relationships between colonials and Native Americans, with Bumppo noting he thinks that they will go to the same paradise as white men, and noting the “great tie of language” that unites the various tribes (240). He also explains that even if they speak almost the same language, they are culturally distinct.
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By James Fenimore Cooper
