Talk:Hawkeye State

Despite the one citation listed, the content of this article appears to derive almost entirely from a different source, i.e., it is apparently an edited version of an entry from the web page netstate.com. This Wikipedia article, however, unlike the netstate.com web page, only mentions Chief Black Hawk as the inspiration for the nickname "Hawkeye, and omits the actual origin of this name and any mention of its relevance to Iowa. The name "Hawkeye," of course, comes originally from the protagonist of James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of The Mohicans." This novel was one of the five Leatherstocking Tales. The character's actual name is Natty Bumppo, and he has various nicknames in the five novels that make up the Tales; Hawkeye is one used in "The Last of The Mohicans."

That this character is recognized as the original source for the Iowa nickname is documented in a 1952 article in The Annals of Iowa, which states, "Twelve years after the publication of Cooper's book [i.e., "Last of the Mohicans"} Iowa and its people, in 1838, acquired the sobriquet 'Hawkeye,' through suggestion and publicity by Judge David Rorer of Burlington, a scholarly and cultured man of literary attainments [the suggestion, it appears, is that he must have read Cooper's novels], assisted by James G. Edwards, the talented and alert editor of the Fort Madison Patriot, who in 1843 moved his paper to Burlington and changed its name to the Burlington Hawkeye."

Neither this Annals of Iowa article nor other sources sought today indicate what seems obviously to be the specific connection between Hawkeye and the state of Iowa [and one that is known to at least some of the residents of Cooperstown NY, near this writer's current location]: "The Prairie," which is the last of The Leatherstocking Tales, chronologically (though it was the third one published, in 1827, just a year after "Last of The Mohicans"). Neither "Hawkeye" nor "Natty Bumppo" is used to name the protagonist in "The Prairie" (he is called "the trapper"), but Cooper says in a later introduction written in 1832, "The reader, who has perused the two former works [i.e., "The Pioneers" and "The Last of The Mohicans"], of which this is the natural successor, will recognise an old acquaintance in the principal character of the story."

As its title suggests, "The Prairie" is set some hundreds of miles west of the Mississippi River. Natty Bumppo, now an old man but still a man of the wilderness, has gone west with the frontier, leaving New York State, a land now virtually entirely settled and tamed by the descendants of Europeans. The year is 1804, before American political boundaries have been established and geographical names fixed to the lands of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, so although the name "Iowa" is not used in this book, Iowans have always had a plausible claim on Hawkeye as their pioneering, if fictional, ancestor. That Judge Rorer made such a claim in 1838 appears well-documented. Connecting Chief Black Hawk to the name "Hawkeye" may have carried some sentimental weight in Iowans approving and adopting the nickname, to be sure; historically, however, Natty Bumppo, the singular archetype of the white American male pioneer, came first. 99.197.178.55 (talk) 20:19, 21 November 2015 (UTC) Bob Millner

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