 book has undergone the changes of Mahicanni, Mohicans,
and Mohegans; the latter being the word commonly used by the Whites. When it is
remembered that the Dutch (who first settled New York), the English, and the
French, all gave appellations to the tribes that dwelt within the country which
is the scene of this story, and that the Indians not only gave different names
to their enemies, but frequently to themselves, the cause of the confusion will
be understood.
    In these pages, Lenni-Lenape, Lenope, Delawares, Wapanachki, and Mohicans,
all mean the same people, or tribes of the same stock. The Mengwe, the Maquas,
the Mingoes, and the Iroquois, though not all strictly the same, are identified
frequently by the speakers, being politically confederated and opposed to those
just named. Mingo was a term of peculiar reproach, as were Mengwe and Maqua in a
less degree.
    The Mohicans were the possessors of the country first occupied by the
Europeans in this portion of the continent. They were, consequently, the first
dispossessed; and the seemingly inevitable fate of all these people, who
disappear before the advances, or it might be termed the inroads of
civilisation, as the verdure of their native forests falls before the nipping
frost, is represented as having already befallen them. There is sufficient
historical truth in the picture to justify the use that has been made of it.
    Before closing this introduction, it will not be improper to say a word of
an important character of this legend, who is also a conspicuous actor in two
other tales of the same writer. To portray an individual as a scout in the wars
in which England and France contended for the possession of the American
continent, a hunter in that season of activity which so immediately succeeded
the peace of 1783, and a lone trapper in the Prairies after the policy of the
republic threw open those interminable wastes to the enterprise of the half wild
beings who hang between society and the wilderness, is poetically to furnish a
witness to the truth of those wonderful alterations which distinguish the
progress of the American nation, to a degree that has been hitherto unknown, and
to which hundreds of living men might equally speak. In this particular the
fiction has no merit as an invention.
    Of the character in question, the writer has no more to say, than that he
represents a man of native goodness, removed from the temptations of civilised
life, though not entirely forgetful of its prejudices and lessons, exposed to
the customs of barbarity, and yet perhaps more improved than injured by the
association, and betraying the
