James Fenimore Cooper (1789‐1851) established an American literary prototype with his novel The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826), second of his five‐volume frontier series. While the book’s hero was raised by Delaware Indians, and his best friends were his Mohican foster‐brother Chingachgook and his son Uncas, none of the characters nor the setting was in New England. Cooper meant his book title as literary symbolism, not veracity. Chingachgook was based on a real Delaware man, Uncas on a real Mohegan.

Paul Block in a 1995 pastiche, Song of the Mohicans: A Sequel to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, acknowledges in a foreword notes that the Mohicans were never extinct, but rather lived in Massachusetts and in Madison County, N.Y., at the time of the adventure. C.L. Bush wrote a short Kindle romance story, Alice and Uncas: A Last of the Mohicans Tale, in 2016.

Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789‐1867) of Stockbridge displayed strong feminist leanings and advocated the idea of Native American equity in her 1827 novel Hope Leslie, a historical romance set nearly a century earlier in Massachusetts Bay Colony. The sympathetically portrayed character Magawisca is a Mohawk.

William Cullen Bryant (1794‐1878) relied on an old legend for his poem “Monument Mountain” (1824), in which a young Indian woman meets a tragic end. Far more violent is a variation ascribed to L.H. Hale.

Kenneth Roberts (1885‐1957) in Northwest Passage (1937) features the character Captain Robert Rogers and his famed Rangers — which historically included a company of Mohicans from Stockbridge under the command of Captain Jacob. One Stockbridge ranger really did die during the raid on the Abenaki town of St. Francis in Quebec in 1756 and three were captured.

Alice Dalgliesh (1893‐1979) related the story of a young girl and her father during travels to New Milford, Conn., in 1707 to establish a farm near the Weantinock tribe. The novel The Courage of Sarah Noble was published in 1954. Despite being a Newbury Award runnerup, its depiction of Indians for a young audience proved controversial, in no little part for its inaccuracies as pointed out by Indian Studies scholars.

Two‐time Newbury Award winner Elizabeth George Speare (1908‐1994) set The Prospering (1967) in early Stockbridge, then called Indian Town. She relates the story of missionary John Sergeant and his conversion of Indians to Christianity. The main character is Elizabeth, the youngest of three daughters of Ephraim Williams Sr. “In the difficult years of her growing up, Elizabeth witnesses the evolution of the mission settlement into the gracious and beautiful town of Stockbridge,” a dustjacket blurb says.

Alice Mary (Ross) Colver (1892‐1988) wrote The Measure of the Years (1954) about the struggles of Prue Martin’s pioneer family in Indian Town. A summer resident, Colver researched the book at the Historical Room at the Stockbridge Library.

Hal Borland (1900‐1978) of Weatogue, Salisbury, wrote a juvenile novel, When the Legends Die (1963), about a Ute Indian youth living in wilderness Colorado. The book was made into a film in 1972.

In Indian Town in the 1750s, Solomon, the Mohican hero of With Sacred Honor (2012) by William T. Johnson, is in love with an English woman, Catherine, with the complexities that entails. He becomes a scout with Hobbs’ company of rangers to fight the French and Iroquois. — Bernard A. Drew