How James Fenimore Cooper Redefined “Pioneer”

Pioneer. The word often evokes esteem and reverence here in America, and those bold enough to earn the honorific are vaulted to an almost holy, prophet-like status. We cheer technological pioneers like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates; extol political pioneers such as Jeannette Rankin and Barack Obama. Then there are the archetypal pioneers, the Daniel Boones and Kit Carsons: the frontier folk who transformed a rag-tag group of colonies into an international powerhouse, people who made “pioneer” a verb. But “pioneers,” frontier or otherwise, weren’t always lionized. “Pioneers” were originally disdained in America, and they wouldn’t be respected today if it weren’t for the author James Fenimore Cooper.

The people we today call “pioneers” were referred to as many things pre-Cooper—“back-settlers” or “foresters,” chiefly—but rarely “pioneers,” and when they described as such, the meaning was closer to the word’s French origins, , a circa 1520 military term for an army’s vanguard. They were the first wave of foot soldiers sent to absorb the conflict’s initial brunt. In other words, pioneers were poor schlubs sent on a kamikaze mission. These ill-fated men were respected for their sacrifice but were in no, a French-born naturalized citizen who wrote in his tome : “[Frontier pioneers] are a kind of forlorn hope, preceding by ten or twelve years the most respectable army of veterans which come after them…In all societies there are outcasts; this impure part serves as our precursors or pioneers…”