The Last of the Mohicans · Characters
Character guide
Key figures in The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper.
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Major Duncan Heyward
major
Also known as Heyward, Duncan, Major Heyward, Major Duncan Heyward
Heyward serves as escort to Colonel Munro's daughters and as the reader's conventional lens on a frontier that keeps exceeding his expectations. His courage is real but his confidence is brittle: he starts at a war-cry, misreads his guide, and must weigh his own honor against the cunning of enemies and the competence of backwoods allies. His courtship and his command decisions alike place him at the hinge of the novel's early action.
Magua
major
Also known as Le Renard Subtil, Le Renard, Le Subtil, Renard
Magua moves between two worlds as guide, interpreter, and enemy, and his quiet composure makes him more frightening than any open threat. His wound, his exile, and his memory of wrongs done him give his vengeance a logic that Heyward cannot answer. He is the engine of the novel's central pursuit, turning a wilderness journey into a contest of wits and grudges.
Hawkeye
major
Also known as La Longue Carabine, Killdeer, The Long Rifle
Known to enemies as La Longue Carabine, Hawkeye fights beside Chingachgook and Uncas with a marksmanship and a code that owe more to the forest than to any army. He can spare a dying enemy a bullet or refuse him one, and he argues his killings with a Calvinist plainness that shocks Heyward. His judgment and his rifle repeatedly decide who lives through the novel's early ambushes and sieges.
Uncas
major
Also known as Le Cerf Agile
Son of Chingachgook and the novel's most agile warrior, Uncas leaps into the thick of the Hurons to shield Cora and moves through the forest with a silence that unnerves his enemies. His loyalty to his father and his growing, unspoken regard for Cora give his prowess a tenderness that the frontier rarely allows. He embodies both the nobility and the doom of the Mohican line.
Cora Munro
major
Also known as Cora, Munro
Cora is the protective, maternal counterweight to her sister Alice, and she meets the Huron chief's proposals with a calm that masks both fear and calculation. Her willingness to offer herself in Alice's place reveals a self-command that the men around her often lack. Her composure under threat shapes the novel's central captivity and the choices that follow.
Alice Munro
major
Also known as Alice, Alice Graham
Alice perches on her father's knee and smooths his gray hair, a picture of daughterly devotion that Heyward watches with delight. Her beauty and gentleness draw both protection and menace, and her fear in the hands of the Hurons exposes how thin the frontier's civilities really are. Her safety becomes the emotional stake that drives the escapes and rescues of the early and middle chapters.
Chingachgook
major
Also known as Le Gros Serpent, Le Serpent, Sagamore
Chingachgook is the last hereditary chief of a dispossessed people, father to Uncas and brother-in-arms to Hawkeye, moving through the forest with a dignity that unsettles his white companions as much as it awes them. When danger gathers, he becomes a study in controlled deception: rifle untouched, tomahawk dropped, nostrils flared to catch what eyes cannot. His presence gives the early chapters their moral center, a living rebuke to the notion that civilization and nobility are the same thing.
David Gamut
supporting
Also known as David, Gamut
David Gamut drifts into the frontier party as a harmless eccentric, offering sacred song where others offer scoutcraft, and reading the wilderness through the lens of his own piety. His obliviousness — he notices corn feasts but not totems, consolation but not weaponry — makes him both comic relief and a quiet indictment of those who travel among Native peoples without seeing them. For the Mohicans and Hawkeye, his fragments of observation become unexpected intelligence, and his presence tests the patience and charity of everyone around him.
Colonel Munro
supporting
Also known as Munro, Colonel Munro
Munro governs his garrison with the stiff dignity of an old soldier and the wounded memory of a man who has already buried a wife and a reputation's worth of happiness. When Heyward asks for Alice's hand, Munro's response veers from bluster about thistles and chivalry to a confession of old grief, revealing a father whose love is tangled with suspicion and loss. His command decisions in the novel's middle stretch — and his refusal to be merely a soldier when his children are at stake — make him the hinge on which the siege's human cost turns.
Marquis de Montcalm
supporting
Also known as Montcalm, M. de Montcalm, Monsieur de Montcalm, Monsieur Montcalm
Montcalm arrives in the narrative as the polished foil to Munro: a European commander whose manners and courage are beyond question, and whose authority over his Native allies is the fragile thing on which everything depends. Cooper treats him as a study in the gap between personal honor and command responsibility, a man whose courtesy cannot undo what happens when restraint fails. His decisions in the siege chapters determine the fate of the fort and set the moral weather for everything that follows.
Tamenund
supporting
Also known as Thither Tamenund, Observing Tamenund, The just Tamenund
Tamenund presides over the Delaware council as living memory — a prophet whose arm is withered, whose arrow would not frighten a fawn, yet whose word still commands absolute silence. When Uncas is brought before him, the old man's recognition flickers between dream and history, and his struggle to place the young Mohican becomes a meditation on inheritance and loss. His judgment scene gives the novel its deepest reckoning with what the Delawares once were and what the rising generation might reclaim.
General Webb
minor
Also known as Webb
The British general at Fort Edward who delays sending reinforcements.
Huron Warrior
minor
Also known as Huron, the Huron, the unhappy Huron
A generic Huron warrior encountered by the party.
Major Effingham
minor
Also known as Major Effingham
A British officer and friend of the Munro family.
Sir William Johnson
minor
Also known as Sir William, Sir William Johnson
The British superintendent of Indian affairs.
