In The Pioneers, Cooper’s main theme is destruction of the beautiful wilderness and it’s animals. In chapter XXII the ‘Slaughter of the Pigeons’ scene in The Pioneers, Cooper vividly describes the heartless and gruesome war between man and pigeon. He starts with detailed descriptions of the land so the reader can fully grasp how wonderful this part of the wilderness was. He writes, “the green wheat fields were seen in every direction, spotted with the dark and charred stumps that ad, the proceeding season, supported some of the proudest trees of the forest” (Cooper 832). Then he goes on to explain the authority of the United States symbolic bald eagle and the migration of the flocks of birds. Cooper tells how all the men, women and children wait for this time …show more content…
Leather-Stocking says, “This comes of settling a country! Here have I known the pigeons to fly for forty long years and, till you made your clearings, there was nobody to skear or to hurt them…hurting nothing; being as harmless as a grater-snake” (Cooper 835). Inserting Leather-Stocking’s opinion, gives the reader some background on the pigeons and the uselessness of the killing of these birds. His use of word choice, like musket man, innocent suffers, and blue-coated boys, push the reader to make the connection to the civil war and the evils of the British. Even the very last sentence of the chapter, “they killed nearly as many pigeons on that day, as there were French-men destroyed on the memorable occasion of Rodney’s Victory” (Cooper 838) leaves the reader with the idea of how useless destruction of this wilderness was. Cooper also uses regional dialect, for example grampus, and calls out specific people. He leaves his audience with the general idea that this great annihilation of our country’s land and animals needs to stop or there will be nothing left. He creates the idea in the readers head without blatantly stating that there will be no food for new generations or growing populations if this