Clearly, Cooper is warning her contemporaries by suggesting that they discontinue the destruction of trees for purposes of fueling their homes. The continual destruction of the forests so radically alters the landscape that Cooper cannot conceive of continued deforestation. She not only seeks to educate her audience regarding the benefits of preservation; she also makes the preservation of the American landscape a moral imperative.
This moral duty for national preservation becomes linked to Cooper's feelings regarding the "red man," or Native Americans (93). Again, Cooper subtly portrays this sense of the loss of the indigenous peoples early in Rural Hours. When standing beside a clear running spring, she states, "one seems naturally to remember the red man; recollections of his vanished race linger there in a more definite form than elsewhere" (93). The rolling, clear water somehow evokes the "vanished" race: "yesterday they were here, to-day scarce a vestige of their existence can be pointed out among us" (94). However, later in Rural Hours, Cooper more overtly conveys her feelings regarding the colonists' treatment of the indigenous peoples, which she finds integral to the colonists' treatment of the landscape. While viewing a forest grove, she laments: "It needs but a few short minutes to bring one of these trees to the ground" (193). She reminds her readers that entire generations will come and go in the time that it takes for one of these mature trees to reach such magnificent heights:
The stout arm so ready to raise the axe to-day, must grow weak with age, it must drop into the grave; its bone and sinew must crumble into dust long before another tree, tall and great as those, shall have grown from the cone in our hand (193-94).
In the same paragraph, Cooper calls for a reinstitution of wilderness, claiming that the wild deer, the wolf and the bear "must return from beyond the great lakes," and then, significantly, that "the bones of the savage men buried under our feet must arise and move again. . . ere trees like those" ever appear again, so large, so wild (194).27