Researching James Cooper

After a stint on a commercial voyage, Cooper served in the U.S. Navy as a midshipman, where he learned the technology of managing sailing vessels which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. The novel that launched his career was The Spy, a tale about espionage set during the American Revolutionary War and published in 1821. He also created American sea stories. His best-known works are five historical novels of the frontier period, written between 1823 and 1841, known as the Leatherstocking Tales, which introduced the iconic American frontier scout, Natty Bumppo. Cooper's works on the U.S. Navy have been well received among naval historians, but they were sometimes criticized by his contemporaries. Among his more famous works is the romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece. Throughout his career, he published numerous social, political, and historical works of fiction and non-fiction with the objective of countering European prejudices and nurturing an original American art and culture.

Cooper was born in New York. He worked for the California Geological Survey (1860–1874) with Josiah Dwight Whitney, William Henry Brewer and Henry Nicholas Bolander. He was primarily a zoologist, but he also made significant botanical collections from San Diego to Fort Mohave, Arizona in 1861. Cooper was active in the California Academy of Sciences, eventually becoming Director of the Museum.

He obtained his medical degree in 1851 and practiced in New York City until 1853. Spencer F. Baird, the Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution at that time, helped Cooper work with the Pacific railroad survey parties working in the Washington Territory. He joined this survey under Captain George McClellan as a surgeon until 1854. In 1855 he visited San Francisco and the Panama Isthmus. He collected many birds during this expedition.

In 1860, he returned west and joined the Blake Expedition that went from St. Louis up to the Missouri River and into Idaho and Washington. He worked as a contract surgeon for brief periods with the US Army and Josiah Whitney, the chief of the California Geological Survey. Along with Baird he wrote a book on the birds of California "Ornithology, Volume I, Land Birds" in 1870.

His marriage in 1866 made it difficult for him to balance his interest in natural history. He worked in San Mateo, Oakland, San Francisco and finally settled in 1875 in Hayward. He wrote on his difficulties in a letter in 1870

His father William Cooper was also a naturalist.

While in the Legislature, he was one of six Northern Ontario MPPs who absented themselves from a vote to censure the federal government for "not prosecuting the war with sufficient diligence".

Following his time in politics, he became an investor in the city's media; with coinvestors George Miller and Bill Plaunt, he purchased the Sudbury Star and radio station CKSO in 1950, and launched CKSO-TV in 1953. He died at a nursing home in 1979.