Cooper's stories were related to his real life. He could see that the wilderness was decreasing and created tension between himself and the public through his opinions in his books. His idea was that the American Indian was doomed to fade away wherever he came into contact with European settlers. Cooper knew that it was inevitable for indians and settlers could not live together and America was bound to be industrialized eventually eliminating the wilderness. With this background, Cooper described gifts in his story, "The Deerslayer." The Indians in the story and the white people both represented different societies and offered separate, but equal gifts. Both have different desires. The Indian's gifts are nomadic, while the White Man's gifts are urban. For example, the white men have guns while the Indians use the forest as weapons and create bows and arrows. Both gifts could not exist dually, and Cooper observed the Indian's gifts dying out from being overpowered by the white man's gifts. It shows the difference between the societies when Deerslayer wants to take the canoe back to its original owner, but the Indian wants to keep it because he stole it and successfully almost got away with it. However, the gun put an end to his life. Deerslayer shot the Indian, which was symbolic to the end of the wilderness. The White man was urbanizing it and washing out the Indian's gift of the appreciation of nature. Cooper foreshadowed what came to be true, the end of the wilderness, which can also go on to say that God was gone too and replaced by metal. Cooper was a trooper and with his novels shared his opinions about society. His thoughts were true, maybe that is why he is still widely read today.
Blossoming American ideals and inherited Indian ideals were were the basis for what came to be known as The American. We can find many of these traits in modern times. Though, as you noted, the Indian gifts are to be found in nature-and they protect nature as well, while American Ideals are urban. As you noted, one cannot exist within the other, so it is interesting how the Indian ideals were mutated into something that did not threaten the American goal of modernization. The lone hero who treks through the wilderness always must come back to the city (if only to tell us about what he has seen). Nowhere else in the world has there been this sort of a relation between an indigenous population and a industrializing one. Therein lies our history. Cooper foreshadowed it greatly, as did many other writers, who saw this period of time as the beginning of the end.
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