The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish

Set in the seventeenth century on frontier land later to become part of Connecticut, The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish is a fairly realistic story of the early American wilderness experience. Captain Mark Heathcote, a widower now for more than twenty years, decides (for religious reasons never fully particularized) to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony and resettle in a fertile valley of the Connecticut Territory, not far from Fort Hartford. The new settlement is called Wish-Ton-Wish, a name which, the author claims, is the Indian term for whippoorwill. Doubt has been cast on Cooper's translation of the word, but this disagreement is unimportant here, for the name has no bearing on the action of the novel.] A sturdy, resolute Puritan who had served in the English civil war, Captain Heathcote has also the more humble Christian qualities of forgiveness for evildoers and submission to the will of God. When his wife (his junior by some twenty years) had died in childbirth on the very day the Heathcotes had landed in the New World, the captain had overcome his grief enough to christen the baby boy with the meaningful name of Content. Now that he feels compelled to resettle, late in life, he does so without bitterness or rancor. With him go a considerable household including his son and the latter's wife, Ruth Harding Heathcote, a girl with many of the qualities required of a good wife and a good mother on the frontier. As several years pass, Wish-Ton-Wish grows and prospers. Content Heathcote takes over more and more of the responsibility for the management of the settlement while his aging father remains the moral guide of the little community. The old Puritan is known and respected for his sense of justice and his hospitality toward all men. He had paid the Indians a fair price for his land -- a rare virtue among English settlers -- and he made a point of turning no stranger from his door. The first action occurs on a day when Whittal Ring, a half-witted boy, rounds up a drove of colts he has been pasturing, and young Mark, Content's son, brings his flock back to the fold missing one of its thirty-seven sheep. An elderly and somewhat bedraggled stranger rides up to Wish-Ton-Wish (still an uncommon event at that remote site) and is welcomed by the captain to bed and board. At the conclusion of the evening meal, the unidentified guest shows his pistols and knives to young Mark, who, at fourteen, is fascinated by such weapons. In the middle of this demonstration, Whittal Ring observes on the haft of one knife what is unmistakably a tuft of the distinctive wool of the missing sheep; being a simpleton, the boy blurts out his discovery in no uncertain terms. After a few awkward moments, Captain Heathcote signals for everyone but the stranger to leave the room, and then he carries on a long, private conversation with his guest. When there is no longer the sound of voices in the dining room, Content, concerned about his father's safety, returns and finds, to his amazement, that the stranger has vanished. Still more odd than the disappearance of their guest is the order now given to Content to go at once to a designated place in the forest and bring home what he finds there.... James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 - September 15, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century.