How does The Last of the Mohicans portray the loss of wilderness and Native peoples?

In The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper portrays the loss of the wilderness and Native peoples through a lens of romanticized sorrow and 19th-century American ideology.12

The novel captures the beauty of the unspoiled American landscape while simultaneously lamenting its inevitable disappearance. This sense of loss is deeply intertwined with the fate of the Mohican tribe, represented by the characters Chingachgook and his son, Uncas. As the last of their people, they serve as symbols of a vanishing way of life.1

While Cooper expresses regret over the destruction of both the natural environment and the Indigenous populations, the narrative ultimately frames these losses as an unavoidable consequence of "progress." This perspective reflects the prevailing attitudes of the era, which viewed the displacement of Native peoples and the transformation of the frontier as an inevitable historical trajectory.1