The Last of the Mohicans is a novel about race and the difficulty of overcoming racial divides. Cooper suggests that interracial mixing is both a good thing and a bad thing. The Autor praises the strong longtime friendship between Hawkeye, who is white and Chingachgook, who is a Mohican Indian. Hawkeye and Chingachgook’s shared communion with nature that sees through race, enabling them to team up against their Huron enemies and to save white military leaders like Heyward. On the other hand, though, The Author shows that he feels interracial romances are doomed and undesirable. The interracial love of Uncas and Cora ends in tragedy, and the forced interracial relationship between Cora and Magua is seen as unnatural. Through Cora, Cooper suggests that interracial desire can be inherited; Cora desires Indian men because her mother was part black. Near the beginning of the story we meet the French general Montcalm who has allied himself with several of the Indian tribes native to America and is moving a large army south in an attempt to take Fort William Henry from the British. Magua, an Indian scout, intercepts the information about the impending attack on the fort and relays it to the British General Webb, to whom he is loyal. Webb decides to send reinforcements to Fort William Henry to help Colonel Munro, who commands the fort. Shortly after the reinforcements leave for Fort William Henry, Webb dispatches the young Major Heyward to accompany Alice and Cora Munro, the colonel’s daughters, who insist upon visiting their father. As they leave, an Indian runner dashes by them. Alice watches him with uneasy feelings for no reason other than he is a different race than her. The Indian runner whose name is Magua, agrees to guide Heyward and the young women to Fort William Henry by means of a shortcut known only to the Indians. Soon after they leave Fort Edward, they