The Lake Gun
1850
In 1850, James Fenimore Cooper turned his sharp eye toward the treacherous waters of American politics and produced something rather extraordinary: a short story that functions simultaneously as ghost story, political screed, and moral fable. The mysterious Lake Gun that boom across Seneca Lake has baffled settlers for generations, but when a curious traveler named Fuller arrives seeking answers, he finds something far more unsettling than geological mysteries. Teaming with an old mariner named Peter and a young Seneca Indian guide, Fuller collects the lake's legends like stones, each one leading closer to the story of See-wise, a Silver-tongued demagogue whose pride and false promises condemned him to drift forever upon the waters. Cooper's allegory is transparent enough to sting: See-wise is clearly modeled on William Henry Seward, the ambitious Whig senator whose political maneuvering Cooper despised. But the story transcends its immediate target. It asks what happens to a society that follows charismatic liars, and whether the lake itself some cosmic accountant, keeping books on broken promises. The result is a strange, gripping tale that reads like Washington Irving gone to war with Horace Greeley.
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“Men who, in their hearts, really care no more for mankind than See-wise cared for the fish, lift their voices in shouts of a spurious humanity, in order to raise themselves to power, on the shoulders of an excited populace. Bloodshed, domestic violence, impracticable efforts to attain an impossible perfection, and all the evils of a civil conflict are forgotten or blindly attempted, in order to raise themselves in the arms of those they call the people.””
— James Fenimore Cooper
