''The Oak Openings; or, The Bee Hunter'' is an 1848 novel by
James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 – September 14, 1851) was an American writer of the first half of the 19th century, whose historical romances depicting colonist and Indigenous characters from the 17th to the 19th centuries brought h ...
. The novel focuses on the activities of professional
honey-hunter Benjamin Boden, nicknamed "Ben Buzz". The novel is set in
Kalamazoo, Michigan's Oak Opening, a wooded prairie that still exists in part today, during the
War of 1812
The War of 1812 (18 June 1812 – 17 February 1815) was fought by the United States of America and its indigenous allies against the United Kingdom and its allies in British North America, with limited participation by Spain in Florida. It bega ...
.
Background and publication history
After returning from his European travels in the 1830s, Cooper was persuaded by his niece's husband,
Horace H. Comstock
Horace Hawkins Comstock ( – March 15, 1861) was an American businessman, lawyer, and politician. He was very successful in business as a young man, purchased large quantities of land in the Michigan Territory in the early 1830s, founded the to ...
, to invest in Michigan real estate. The
Potawatomi
The Potawatomi , also spelled Pottawatomi and Pottawatomie (among many variations), are a Native American people of the western Great Lakes region, upper Mississippi River and Great Plains. They traditionally speak the Potawatomi language, a m ...
had ceded much of their land in central Michigan by 1833 and their former territory became known as "oak-openings". By 1837, Cooper's $6,000 investment was losing value, though he watched as his fellow New Yorkers attempted to colonize the area like honeybees. The experience inspired ''The Oak Openings; or, The Bee Hunter,'' and the novel became one of the first representations of beekeeping in American literature.
Though not the first author to use the term "oak openings",
Frederick Marryat
Captain Frederick Marryat (10 July 1792 – 9 August 1848) was a Royal Navy officer, a novelist, and an acquaintance of Charles Dickens. He is noted today as an early pioneer of nautical fiction, particularly for his semi-autobiographical novel ...
did so, Cooper popularized the term for the type of oak clad Savannah with the publication of the novel.
The novel is Cooper's last "wilderness novel" following his ''
Leatherstocking Tales
The ''Leatherstocking Tales'' is a series of five novels by American writer James Fenimore Cooper, set in the eighteenth-century era of development in the primarily former Iroquois areas in central New York. Each novel features Natty Bumppo, ...
'' and serves as a melancholy follow-up to that series. It is also the last of his novels to explore the relationships between Europeans and Native Americans in the early American expansion.
Analysis
The novel has a significant religious thematic focus.
The novel explores assumptions about individual and Native American ownership of property, a continuation of issues that some of Cooper's other works deal with, as in the tract ''
The American Democrat''.
The main character, Benjamin Boden, is compared symbolically to the bees which he tends through nicknames like "Buzzing Ben" and the French term ''le Bourdon'' ("the drone"), which shows him as an industrious laborer.
References
Further reading
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External links
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1871 Edition of the Novelrepublished by the University of Michigan Library's
Making of America Making of America (MoA) is a collaborative effort by Cornell University and the University of Michigan to digitize and make available a collection of primary sources relating to the development of U.S infrastructure. The Making of America collection ...
project
{{DEFAULTSORT:Oak Openings
Novels by James Fenimore Cooper
1848 American novels
Novels set in Michigan
Fiction about beekeeping