The Cask of Amontillado Poe may have borrowed Montresor's family motto "Nemo me impune lacessit" from James Fenimore Cooper, who used the line in "The Last of the Mohicans" (1826). Poe wrote his tale, however, as a response to his personal rival Thomas Dunn English. Poe and English had several confrontations, usually revolving around literary caricatures of one another. Poe thought that one of English's writings went a bit too far, and successfully sued the other man's editors at "The New York Mirror" for libel in 1846. That year English published a revenge-based novel called "1844, or, The Power of the S.F." Its plot
The Last of the Mohicans of the fight between Magua and Chingachgook (12th chapter), to his wife, who thought that he was delirious. In the novel, Hawkeye refers to Lake George as the "Horican". Cooper felt that Lake George was too plain, while the French name, "Le Lac du St. Sacrement", was "too complicated". Horican he found on an old map of the area; it was a French transliteration of a native group who had once lived in the area. Cooper grew up in Cooperstown, New York, the frontier town founded by his father. His daughter said that as a young man he had few