Last of the Mohicans

I recently did a cross country flight to the west coast. Along the way, I watched The Last of the Mohicans movie which covers one of the really interesting parts of US history, the French-Indian War. One of the reasons that period of history is so interesting is the frontier of the then colonies was where I live today in Ohio, which was then the so-called "Northwest Territory".

The main character in The Last of the Mohicans is played by Daniel Day Lewis. The character "Natty Bumppo" is a ranger, like Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. The ranger character is interesting, because he is on the frontier beyond the rules of society. "Society" is always and everywhere a corrupt cesspool, so the "ranger" character is one of the very few people who can truly be a whole/good man.

In the northwest territory days of Ohio, the corrupt gangsters of France fought with the corrupt gangsters of Britain over the remote country where neither gang was very powerful. In that scenario, the ranger type character acts outside the power pyramid and its arbitrary rules and necessarily deals with the natural order of things.

In other words, the frontier is the only place men can be full men, and where there can be actual justice and natural order.

James Fenimore Cooper wrote the book in the 1820s. It's interesting the lost America was being idealized when the country wasn't even 100 years old yet.

Another weird, tangential aside is the Ford Ranger truck embodies that concept of the Ranger character. The current Ranger, though, is not really a "ranger". The nissan equivalent of the old Ford Ranger is the Frontier.