Wyandotte, or, The Hutted Knoll. A Tale; Volume 1-2

Wyandotte, or, The Hutted Knoll is a novel by James Fenimore Cooper, first published in 1843. Cooper, who lived from 1789 to 1851, was the first major American novelist and the author of the Leatherstocking Tales including The Last of the Mohicans of 1826 and The Deerslayer of 1841. Wyandotte belongs to his later work, after the major Leatherstocking novels but during the period when he was still producing substantial fiction across various subjects and settings.

The novel is set in upstate New York during the American Revolution. The central setting is a remote frontier homestead called the Hutted Knoll, established by Captain Willoughby, a retired British officer, in the wilderness of the Otsego region in the years before the war. The novel follows the Willoughby family and the various other characters connected to the homestead through the disruptions that the Revolutionary War brings to their isolated community.

The Wyandotte of the title is an Indian character, a former chief who has been associated with the Willoughby family for years and whose loyalties become complicated as the war develops. Cooper used the Indian character to explore the various questions about Native American loyalties during the Revolutionary War, when different tribes and individuals made different decisions about whether to support the British, the Americans, or to maintain neutrality. The historical reality was substantially more complicated than the popular American narrative of the period generally acknowledged, and Cooper’s fiction at its best engaged with the actual complexity of the situation.

The novel belongs to Cooper’s substantial body of work on the American frontier experience. His Leatherstocking Tales had established the basic American frontier novel form, with the figure of Natty Bumppo as the white frontiersman whose loyalty to the wilderness world distinguished him from the encroaching settler civilisation. Wyandotte uses similar materials but builds the novel around a different family structure and a different historical moment, with the Revolutionary War setting giving the dramatic action a particular political and historical weight.

The book runs to about four hundred pages in the two volume edition. For readers of nineteenth century American frontier fiction, Cooper is essential. Wyandotte is not in the first rank of his major work, but it is among the better of his later novels.