These woodcut illustrations were printed in an 1892 ten-volume edition of The Works of James Fenimore Cooper published by Peter Fenelon Collier and Sons. (The separate volumes can be accessed through Google Books here.) I have been unable to ascertain the artist.

Note: These images are in the public domain. For more information, see A Primer on Image Rights on OBA.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789 – 1851) was a prolific author of American romances, full of poetic description after the manner of Walter Scott, but incorporating for the first time into fiction the wild American wilderness and the interactions of colonists (for good and ill) with Native Americans. Less remembered is that he began as a writer of sea-stories He is best known as author of The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Deerslayer (1841), and The Pilot (1823). Chambers’s Cyclopaedia says “His novels, upon the whole, and in spite of conspicuous faults, well deserve all the favour they received; the sea-tales and stories of frontier life being out of sight his best.” Their entry concludes,

When Cooper is treated—as he still often is, even in America—mainly as a writer of boys’ books, he has an injustice done him. He wrote too much; many of his men are as conventional as his women usually are; his conversations are stilted; his style is careless; and his prejudices are constantly aired. But he had a very true and very great gift as a story-teller; he was the first to take the virgin forest and the prairie into the domain of fiction, and he wrote the prose epic of the planting of his country. Modern ethnologists do not sneer, as it was once the fashion to do, at his Indians as mere creations of the fancy. Some of his characters are permanent additions to the literature; and his power is best felt when he is compared with his predecessor, Brockden Brown. ‘He belongs emphatically to the American nation,’ as Washington Irving said; and his painting of nature under new aspects gave him a name that with never die.

More Information:

• Thomas Lounsbury’s Life of James Fenimore Cooper (1882)
• W.B. Shubrick Clymer’s James Fenimore Cooper (1901)