In this classic 1st novel in the LEATHERSTOCKING TALES, James Fenimore Cooper portrays life in a new settlement on New York’s Lake Otsego in the closing years of the eighteenth century. He describes the year’s cycle: the turkey shoot at Christmas, the tapping of maple trees, fishing for bass in the evening, the marshalling of the militia. But Cooper is also concerned with exploring the development of the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of the American experience. He writes of the conflicts within the settlement itself, focusing primarily on the contrast between the natural codes of the hunter, woodsman and frontier scout Natty Bumpp or Hawkeye and his Indian friend John Mohegan and the more rigid structure of law needed by a more complex society. Quite possibly America’s first best-seller (more than three thousand copies were sold within hours of publication in 1823 ).
It opens with a judge – Marmaduke Temple – returning by sledge through the deep Christmas snow of the mountains. He has been to collect his young, marriageable daughter Elizabeth from school in New York, and is returning to the town he has founded, Templeton, laid out by a local architect.
In the opening scenes judge and daughter come across the ageing frontiersman, Leatherstocking, out hunting with a good-looking assistant. The judge takes a pot shot at a deer which runs nearby but accidentally wounds the young man who is with Leatherstocking. Appalled at his own clumsiness, the judge offers the young man a ride into the little settlement and medical attention from the local sawbones.
Thus is set in train an essentially light-hearted love story between the judge’s daughter and the shy but thrillingly competent young woodsman, all set against a series of vivid scenes involving the broadly comic characters who inhabit the village.
The books in this classic serioes include The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841)