Well, of course it'sThe Last of the Mohicans

I titled this post this way because I've been doing some research on the Mohicans in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. Apparently, the Mohicans were not actually a tribe of American Indians. Thus, the book is quite rightly about the last of the Mohicans because the Mohicans never existed in the first place.
The name Mohican could be coming from either the tribe Mohegans or Mahicans. Likely, Cooper was using Mahicans as his referent because one of his characters is named after a famous Mahican chief.
I thought this would be an interesting way to think about Cooper's novel, as tied up as it is with the idea of the disappearing Indian. Proper naming would imply proper understanding of the American Indian as a respected part of the world. As the Euro Americans believed neither, we can see how Cooper may have had a specific rhetorical choice behind his creating the "Mohican" people.