For many years it was a habit of critics to scoff at Cooper's Indian characters as romantic and idealized portraits of the red man. This judgment may have arisen during the period of Cooper's great unpopularity, when nothing was too unfair to please the American public; but, once said, it persisted and was quoted from decade to decade by people who cannot have read his books with any attention. It was insisted that the woodcraft with which Cooper endowed the Indians was beyond possibility, yet later naturalists have recorded time and again marvels quite as incredible as any in Cooper's pages. It was reiterated that their dignity, self-control, tribal loyalty, and reverence for age were overdrawn, yet many another authority has testified to the existence of these virtues. And, finally, it was charged that they were never such a heroic and superior people as Cooper made them, though study of his portraits will show that Cooper did not make them half as admirable as he is said to have done. Tamenund is simply a mouthpiece; Uncas and Chingachgook are the only living Indian characters whom he makes at all admirable, but he acknowledges the differences between their standards and the white man's in the murder and scalping of the French sentinel after he had been passed in safety: "'Twould have been a cruel and inhuman act for a white-skin; but 'tis the gift and natur' of an Indian, and I suppose it should not be denied." All the other Indians, beneath their formal ways in family, camp, and council, Cooper presents as treacherous and bloodthirsty at bottom, a savage people who show their real natures in the Massacre of Fort William Henry, the chief historical event in the book. On this ground he partly explains and partly justifies the conquest of the red men by the white. The other people of the story are types who appear in all Cooper's novels. Most important is the unschooled American: He has drawn you _one_ character, though, that is new, One wildflower he's plucked that is wet with the dew Of this fresh Western world.