

                             James Fenimore Cooper

                               The Pathfinder or

                                 The Inland Sea

 - Here the heart
 May give a useful lesson to the head,
 And Learning wiser grow without his books.
                                                Cowper, The Task, VI, ll. 86-88.
 

                                    Preface

The plan of this tale suggested itself to the writer, many years since, though
the details are altogether of recent invention. The idea of associating seamen
and savages, in incidents that might be supposed characteristic of the Great
Lakes, having been mentioned to a publisher, the latter obtained something like
a pledge from the author to carry out the design, at some future day, which
pledge is now tardily and imperfectly redeemed.
    The reader may recognize an old friend, under new circumstances, in the
principal character of this legend. If the exhibition made of this old
acquaintance, in the novel circumstances in which he now appears, should be
found not to lessen his favor with the public, it will be a source of extreme
gratification to the writer, since he has an interest in the individual in
question, that falls little short of reality. It is not an easy task, however,
to reproduce the same character in four separate works, and to maintain the
peculiarities that are indispensable to identity, without incurring a risk of
fatiguing the reader with sameness, and the present experiment has been so long
delayed, quite as much from doubts of its success, as from any other cause. In
this, as in every other undertaking, it must be the end that will crown the
work.
    The Indian character has so little variety, that it has been my object to
avoid dwelling on it too much, on the present occasion. Its association with the
sailor, too, it is feared, will be found to have more novelty than interest.
    It may strike the novice as an anachronism, to place vessels on Ontario, in
the middle of the eighteenth century, but, in this particular, facts will fully
bear out all the licence of the fiction. Although the precise vessels mentioned
in these pages may never have existed on that water, or anywhere else, others so
nearly resembling them are known to have navigated that inland sea, even at a
period much earlier than the one just mentioned, as to form a sufficient
authority for their introduction into a work of fiction. It is a fact not
generally remembered, however well known it may be, that there are isolated
spots, along the line of the great lakes that date, as settlements, as far back,
as many of the oldest American towns, and which were the seats of a species of
civilization,
