The Last of the Mohicans is the best known of James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper was the first American novelist to achieve international popularity, and for an author writing in the early 19th Century was notably fait and complex in portraying American Indian characters, though sometimes slipping into noble savage tropes. Last of the Mohicans has been widely adapted onto screen, but Michael Mann’s 1992 offering is the most popular and enduring, thanks to its great cast, good music by Trevor Jones, and well-shot scenery.
The setting is the French and Indian War, which was a colonial theater of the global Seven Years War. The British and French fought each other with a mix of regular troops, militia, and Indian allies. Last of the Mohicans in particular focuses on events around the Siege of Fort William Henry. Colonel Edmund Monro put up a dogged defense against the Franco-Native force under General Louis-Joseph Montcalm. Reinforcements failed to arrive, so Munro surrendered under generous terms from Montcalm. However, the French’s Indian allies then set upon the disarmed soldiers and the civilians (women and children included), massacring them in one of the most controversial moments of the war.
