James Fenimore and Cooperstown People

From Katharine Jermain Chapman’s “Through the Glimmerglass,” 1946:

Todd explains to Susie:

“James Fenimore Cooper gets very lonely and cold sometimes sitting there in the park – He tells me stories about Cooperstown – if I tell them to you, Susie, will you write it down just the way he tells me? – ‘cause James Fenimore has traveled everywhere and he feels sad because no one seems to know what a very big man he is – Fenimore Cooper’s stories are read the whole world around.”

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“Aristocracy has gone by the board!” James Fenimore says you’ll never have a fine town when the real people eat and drink with their grocer. You have to have sort of superior people, those who read a lot and know things about the big world outside, to run the town right.

James Fenimore lost all patience with Cooperstown “Tradespeople” when they took the Three Mile Point property that belonged to the Coopers away from him and gave it to the Village of Cooperstown.

It was this way, Susie, James Fenimore had been in Europe three years and he’d seen lots and lots of the whole wide world. He knew grand people who could talk about everything that he understood and he could talk to folks that knew more about the world than he did.

So you see, when he came back to America and started to live in Cooperstown, he was ready to help everybody. Do you know no one would listen to him! They all thought he was just stuck-up and proud.

Mind you, Susie, over on the other side of the world he’d been telling everyone what a real live, grand place America was. “Everyone in our country is ‘Free and Equal,’” he said, but, when he came home, he found that they didn’t act that way at all. The very first thing that happened was they took his land away from him.

You know, Three Mile Point is the prettiest point on the whole lake and a nice, easy row from town; so all the townsfolk got to going there for their swimming and picnics; they were building a nice “pavilion” for meetings and dances right down on the Point by the beach.

Well, one day, soon after James Fenimore came home, he rode up to see his property. He went along the lake road and came down to the Point where he saw all the townspeople gathered for a picnic. It was the day of the opening of the “pavilion.” There was a band player, too, I guess. James Fenimore couldn’t believe his eyes at first. Then he got mad and he snapped his riding whip and rode right into the crowd and told them to get off his premises.

Gee, they were all mad. They said to James Fenimore, “You can’t put us off this land. Your uncle William gave this land to us years ago and we’ve always used it for ourselves and our families. It belongs to the Village of Cooperstown.” So there was a free-for-all fight right then and there. When James Fenimore rode home, he was so darn mad that he went to law but the lawyers (I guess they liked to swim at Three Mile Point themselves) sided with the townsfolk and gave the land belonging to James Fenimore to the Village to keep for their very own use despite all the Cooper family and James Fenimore Cooper besides.

You see, he never should have stayed away from home so long. They all treated him like a foreigner. After that, James Fenimore had a good mind to go right back overseas and never come back home, but ‘stead he loved it so in Cooperstown, that he just settled down in the village and built him a house for his wife and him to live in and pretty soon she had a child, as all women will, and that kind of settled him down for good.

One day – and it was a pretty day – James Fenimore was riding through the woods and he came out on the point below Three Mile where the lake stretches out in a wide bay towards Cooperstown. It was all so swell and pretty that James Fenimore said to himself, “I’ll just write up about this whole picture – stories about Otsego Lake and the Indians and those old days. I’ll show these Cooperstown people that “a Prophet (that’s a wise man, Susie, who knows and sees everything both before and behind) is not without fame save in his own country.”