When James Fenimore Cooper's daughter Susan looked back to the beginning of her father's career as an American romancer, she pointed to the publication of The Last of the Mohicans in 1826 as having produced “quite a startling effect” in Europe – especially in Europe – as well as in America because, she claimed, “the freshness of the subject” added “greatly to the vivid interest of the narrative.” The “subject” to which she was principally alluding was the American Indian, the one truly original subject available to American writers, particularly vis-a-vis European fiction. The romance of the New World could hardly be said to exist without the imaginative exploitation of the country's aborigines, and another notable American romancer, Hawthorne, would note ruefully that his own abhorrence of “an Indian story” had shut him out “from the most peculiar field of American fiction.” No writer, he went on, “can be more secure of a permanent place in our literature, than the biographer of the Indian chiefs.” Susan Cooper was making her claim for the uniqueness of her father's work precisely on this point, and she was therefore obliged to deal with the prior claim of Brockden Brown. “As yet,” she notes, “there had been but one American work of the imagination in which the red man was introduced with any prominence: ‘Edgar Huntley,’ by Brockden Brown, a writer of undoubted talent, but scarcely known in England” – an odd mistake, but we observe that she was simply trying to stake out her father's territory as securely as possible and was therefore brushing Brown aside.