When it came to guardians for his exquisitely inept females, Cooper granted them the best: Chingachgook, Uncas, Hawkeye, and Duncan Heyward. Granted, Cooper did nothing to spare the males tribulation. The men might wear out both their moccasins and their nerves, tramping about in the fog and chasing cannonball tracks—and the women would applaud. That would be all the reward necessary for their chivalry. That Uncas and Chingachgook had probably never heard of ‘chivalry’ is beside the point. Hawkeye pointed them aright, being impervious to error and “a man without a cross” (Cooper 67). Two of the exceptional heroes that Cooper so masterfully hallucinated were Uncas and Major Duncan Heyward. Their differences were profound—but they each bore similarities. Surprising, perhaps, considering the…show more content… The grand vistas that Cooper paints in loquacious detail altered Uncas much more profoundly than Major Duncan Heyward. The life, character, and mind of Uncas are inextricably rooted in the land, the frontier. Without it, he would be nothing. A cigar store Indian, maybe, but no fighter, no warrior, no stone-faced knight in buckskin—all the traits that make up Uncas. The frontier changed Heyward’s outlook—to perhaps not appreciate—but realize, the amalgamation of races and ideas. The frontier also impacted him drastically because of the role it played in the tumultuous hair-raisers featured in The Last of the Mohicans. Without the difficulty of the terrain, the pursuit of Alice, Cora, and David Gamut (David was a definite afterthought) would not have altered events so dramatically for Heyward. On the other hand, Uncas was raised on the frontier, and it has made his life. It is the entire makeup of his being, just as tissues would not be without cells. In the same way, Uncas was because of the environment of his Mohican fathers. Indeed, Uncas knew “to love this land, this timeless, this forever land” (L’Amour