statue of Hartmann/Bumpo, part of the Lederstrumpfbrunnen in Edenkobenmemorial plaque in Edenkoben with a wrong date of birth
Johann Adam Hartmann (1748-1836) was a German born trapper and frontiersman in New York State. Some consider him as a possible inspiration for Natty Bumpo, the main character in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales.
Hartmann was born in Edenkoben, Palatinate, Holy Roman Empire in 1748. His parents were Anna Maria Scholl, a native of Edenkoben and Johann Hartmann, a weaver who was originally from Switzerland. The couple married in 1737. Hartman left his hometown at the age of 16 to travel on the ship Boston from Rotterdam to Philadelphia. From there he moved to Upstate New York where he lived as frontiersman, trapper and hunter. When the American Revolutionary War broke out in 1775 Hartmann joined the American side and served as ranger at Fort Dayton. He participated in the Battle of Oriskany, where he got wounded by a shot.[1] One description of his war time career goes as follows:
He was a scout at Fort Dayton. In a skirmish in which he killed an Indian he was himself wounded in almost the same instant by a Tory's shot. Hartmann was a famous frontiersman and had many adventures. He was the ideal of the fearless soldier in the tried and true militia of Tryon County.
After the war Hartmann stayed in Herkimer County and lived of a disability pension, that he received as a veteran of the revolution. He died on April 5, 1836.[2]
The Leatherstocking Tales (German: Lederstrumpf) were hugely popular in Germany and in 1934 Carl Suesser published an article in Westermanns Monatshefte in which he suggested that Cooper might have been inspired by Hartmann when he created the character of Natty Bumpo.[2] Alfred H. Kuby pointed out in 1983, that Cooper has mentioned Hartmann in the first edition of The Pioneers (1823) and that during his travels in Europe Cooper had spent some time in the region where Hartmann was born.[1]
The city of Edenkoben dedicated a plaque to Hartmann on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the Battle of Oriskany. Due to some computation error, that only got discovered after the plaque had been set up, it contains the wrong year of birth, 1743 instead of 1748.[1] The German sculptor Gernot Rumpf designed a fountain for the city of Edenkoben, which was completed in 1990.[3] The Lederstrumpfbrunnen (lit. Leatherstocking fountain) features three major statues of figures related to the Leatherstocking Tales, one of them is a statue of Hartmann/Bumpo displayed with a hunting rifle and a dog.
External links
Im Wilden Westen der Pfalz - report on the German radio broadcaster SR 3 Saarlandwelle on May 12, 2005 (German)
Notes
1 2 3 4 Alfred H. Kuby: Johann Adam Hartmann - Der Lederstrumpf vom Mohawktal. In: Roland Paul (Hrsg.): 300 Jahre Pfälzer in Amerika. Pfälzische Verlagsanstalt, 1983, pp. 155-157. (German/English)
1 2 Carl Suesser: War Lederstrumpf ein Deutscher?. In: Westermanns Monatshefte. Illustrierte Deutsche Zeitschrift, May 1934. Braunschweig 1934, pp. 245–249 (German)
↑ Stephanie Jacobs: Wider den 'Unrat der Gründerjahre'. Paul Cassirer und die Pan-Presse. In: Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt-Steiner (ed.), Thomas Raff (ed.): Ein Fest der Künste: Paul Cassirer: der Kunsthändler als Verleger. C. H. Beck, 2006, p. 108 (German)
Related Research Articles
The Humboldt University of Berlin is a public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin, Germany.
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is an historical romance novel written by James Fenimore Cooper in 1826.
The Bavarian State Opera is a German opera company based in Munich. Its main venue is the Nationaltheater München, and its orchestra the Bavarian State Orchestra.
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, a frontiersman known to European-American settlers as "Leatherstocking", "The Pathfinder", and "the trapper". Native Americans call him "Deerslayer", "La Longue Carabine", and "Hawkeye".
The Pioneers, or The Sources of the Susquehanna; a Descriptive Tale is a historical novel by American writer James Fenimore Cooper. It was the first of five novels published which became known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Published in 1823, The Pioneers is the fourth novel in terms of the chronology of the novels' plots.
Chingachgook is a fictional character in four of James Fenimore Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales, including his 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans. Chingachgook was a lone Mohican chief and companion of the series' hero, Natty Bumppo. In The Deerslayer, Chingachgook married Wah-ta-Wah, who had a son with him named Uncas, but died while she was still young. Uncas, who was at his birth "last of the Mohicans", grew to manhood but was killed in a battle with the Huron warrior Magua. Chingachgook died as an old man in the novel The Pioneers, which makes him the actual "last of the Mohicans," having outlived his son.
Edenkoben is a municipality in the Südliche Weinstraße district, in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It lies approximately halfway between Landau and Neustadt an der Weinstraße. Edenkoben is one of the towns situated along the German Wine Route. Edenkoben is the seat of the Verbandsgemeinde Edenkoben.
Weimar Classicism was a German literary and cultural movement, whose practitioners established a new humanism from the synthesis of ideas from Romanticism, Classicism, and the Age of Enlightenment. It was named after the city of Weimar, Germany, because the leading authors of Weimar Classicism lived there.
Heinz Heimsoeth was a German historian of philosophy.
The Deerslayer, or The First War-Path (1841) was James Fenimore Cooper's last novel in his Leatherstocking Tales. Its 1740–1745 time period makes it the first installment chronologically and in the lifetime of the hero of the Leatherstocking tales, Natty Bumppo. The novel's setting on Otsego Lake in central, upstate New York, is the same as that of The Pioneers, the first of the Leatherstocking Tales to be published (1823). The Deerslayer is considered to be the prequel to the rest of the series. Fenimore Cooper begins his work by relating the astonishing advance of civilization in New York State, which is the setting of four of his five Leatherstocking Tales.
The Prairie: A Tale (1827) is a novel by James Fenimore Cooper, the third novel written by him featuring Natty Bumppo. His fictitious frontier hero Bumppo is never called by his name, but is instead referred to as "the trapper" or "the old man". Chronologically The Prairie is the fifth and final installment of the Leatherstocking Tales, though it was published before The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841). It depicts Natty in the final year of his life, still proving helpful to people in distress on the American frontier. The book frequently references characters and events from the two books previously published in the Leatherstocking Tales as well as the two which Cooper would not write for more than ten years. Continuity with The Last of the Mohicans is indicated by the appearance of the grandson of Duncan and Alice Heyward, as well as the noble Pawnee chief Hard Heart, whose name is English for the French nickname for the Delaware, le Coeur-dur.
Nathaniel "Natty" Bumppo is a fictional character and the protagonist of James Fenimore Cooper's pentalogy of novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales.
American pioneers were European American and African American settlers who migrated westward from the Thirteen Colonies and later United States to settle in and develop areas of North America that were occupied by Native Americans.
Paul Oskar Höcker was a German editor and author, who also wrote under the pseudonym Heinz Grevenstett. He was one of the 88 signatories of the 1933 proclamation of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft.
Paul Hörbiger was an Austrian theatre and film actor.
Hellmut Lange was an actor and journalist who became famous as an action hero on TV and eventually succeeded as presenter on popular TV show Kennen Sie Kino? or Do You Know Film?
Cuno von Uechtritz-Steinkirch was a German sculptor.
The Lederstrumpfbrunnen is a fountain in the German city of Edenkoben. It commemorates the frontiersman Johann Adam Hartmann (1748-1836), who was born in this city and considered by some as a possible inspiration for the character Natty Bumppo of the Leatherstocking Tales novels by the American writer James Fenimore Cooper.
Stephan Ley was a German music educator, Beethoven researcher and musicologist.
Alfred Gold was an Austrian writer, theatre critic, journalist, art collector, and dealer.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
