The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Pathfinder, by James Fenimore Cooper

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Title: The Pathfinder
The Inland Sea

Author: James Fenimore Cooper

Posting Date: November 3, 2008 [EBook #1880]
Release Date: September, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PATHFINDER ***

Produced by Nigel Lacey

THE PATHFINDER

or, THE INLAND SEA

By James Fenimore Cooper

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 introduce 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 the
Ontario in the middle of the eighteenth century; but in this particular
facts will fully bear out all the license of the fiction. Although the
precise v