Leatherstocking Tales

The Leatherstocking Tales follow Natty Bumppo across a life spent between Indigenous allies, colonial war, settlement and the westward movement of the early United States. Published out of narrative order, the five novels move from his youth at Otsego Lake in The Deerslayer through the French and Indian War in The Last of the Mohicans and The Pathfinder, then to the settled New York of The Pioneers and finally the Great Plains of The Prairie.

Across the sequence, Natty’s names and circumstances change—Deerslayer, Hawkeye, Pathfinder and Leatherstocking—but his distrust of possession, waste and crowded settlement remains recognisable. Chingachgook and Uncas connect his personal history to the fate of Indigenous communities, while the changing landscape turns the series into both an adventure cycle and an extended argument about conquest, law and expansion.