The definitive edition of the great epic of the American frontier, now in a deluxe boxed set
The five novels in The Leatherstocking Tales, Cooper's great saga of the American wilderness, tell the epic story of Natty Bumppo, or Leatherstocking, who first appears in The Pioneers as an aged hunter living on the fringe of settlement near Templeton (Cooperstown), New York, at the end of the eighteenth century. There he becomes caught in the struggles of party, family, and class to control the changing American land and to determine what sort of civilization will replace the rapidly vanishing wilderness. The Last of the Mohicans looks back to the earlier time of the French and Indian Wars, when Natty and two companions, survivors of a once-proud Indian nation, attempt a daring rescue and seek to foil French war plans. The Prairie takes up Natty in his eighties, driven by the continuous march of civilization to his last refuge on the Great Plains across the Mississippi. The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea, set just after the events narrated in The Last of the Mohicans, finds Natty escorting the daughter of a British sergeant to her father's station on the Great Lakes, where the French and their Indian allies are plotting a treacherous ambush. The Deerslayer brings the saga full circle and follows the young Leatherstocking on his first warpath.
