Wyandotte

“One of the misfortunes of a nation, is to hear little besides its own praises,” wrote James Fenimore Cooper in his Preface to Wyandotté in 1843. The novel arrived at a time when a patriotic mythology about the American Revolution was developing, and Cooper’s somber tale of the sufferings of an isolated family in upstate New York during the Revolution was not congruent with the celebratory stories then being told. One reviewer indeed objected to Cooper’s “cynicism which hunts after cracks and crevices and unshapely stones in the altar of our political devotion.”