The novel is set primarily in the area of Lake George, New York, detailing the transport of Colonel Munro's two daughters, Alice and Cora, to a safe destination at Fort William Henry.

Among the caravan guarding the women are the frontiersman Natty Bumppo, Major Duncan Heyward, singing teacher David Gamut, and the Indians Chingachgook and Uncas, the latter two being the novel's title characters.

[7][8] This allowed settlers to view themselves as the original people of the land and reinforced their belief in European ethnic and racial superiority through, among other rationalisations, the tenets of scientific racism.

[9][10] Cooper grew up in Cooperstown, New York, which his father had established on what was then a western frontier settlement that had developed after the Revolutionary War.

On 2 August General Webb, who commanded the area from his base at Fort Edward south of the lake, sent 200 regulars and 800 Massachusetts militia to reinforce the garrison at William Henry.

[citation needed] Monro sent messengers south to Fort Edward on 3 August requesting reinforcements, but Webb refused to send any of his estimated 1,600 men north because they were all that stood between the French and Albany.

[citation needed] When the withdrawal began, some of Montcalm's Indian allies, angered at the lost opportunity for loot, attacked the British column.

Heyward is dissatisfied with Magua's shortcut, and the party roams unguided and finally join Natty Bumppo, known as Hawk-eye, a scout for the British, and his two Mohican friends, Chingachgook and his son Uncas.

Knowing they will be killed instantly but that the British party will make valuable captives, Hawk-eye and the Mohicans escape, with a promise to return for their companions.

Magua admits that he is seeking revenge against Cora's father, Colonel Munro, for turning him into an alcoholic with whiskey (causing him to be temporarily cast out of the Hurons) and then whipping him at a post for drunken behavior.

At this, Munro agrees to Montcalm's terms: that the British soldiers, together with their women and children, must leave the fort and withdraw from the war for eighteen months.

Hawk-eye, the Mohicans, Heyward, and Colonel Munro survive the massacre and set out to follow Magua, and cross a lake to intercept his trail.

Here, they find Gamut (earlier spared by the Hurons as a harmless madman), who says that Alice is held in this village and Cora in one belonging to the Lenape (Delaware).

Uncas and Hawk-eye escape by traveling to the Delaware village where Cora is being held, just as the Hurons suspect something is amiss and find Magua tied up in the cave.

Magua tells his tribe the full story behind Heyward and Hawk-eye's deceit before assuming leadership of the Hurons, who vow revenge.

This makes a showdown between the Hurons and Delawares inevitable, but to satisfy laws of hospitality, Tamenund gives Magua a three-hour head start before pursuit.

The novel concludes with a lengthy account of the funerals of Uncas and Cora at the Delaware village, and Hawk-eye reaffirms his friendship with Chingachgook.

[20] The party passed through the Catskills, an area with which Cooper was already familiar, and about which he had written in his first novel featuring Natty Bumppo: The Pioneers.

Cooper promised Stanley "that a book should be written, in which these caves should have a place; the idea of a romance essentially Indian in character then first suggesting itself to his mind.

Cooper felt that Lake George was too plain, while the French name, Le Lac du St. Sacrement, was "too complicated".

His daughter said that as a young man he had few opportunities to meet and talk with Native Americans: "occasionally some small party of the Oneidas, or other representatives of the Five Nations, had crossed his path in the valley of the Susquehanna River, or on the shores of Lake Ontario, where he served when a midshipman in the navy.

"[20] He read what sources were available at the time—Heckewelder, Charlevoix, William Penn, Smith, Elliot, Colden, Lang, Lewis and Clark, and Mackenzie.

[24][25] In the period when Cooper was writing, deputations from the Western tribes frequently traveled through the region along the Mohawk River, on their way to New York or Washington, D.C.

"[27] Mark Twain notably derided the author in his essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses", published in North American Review (July 1895).

In the early 1940s, Twain scholar Bernard DeVoto found that there was more to the essay, and pieced together a second one from the extra writing, titled "Fenimore Cooper's Further Literary Offenses," in which Twain re-writes a small section of The Last of the Mohicans, claiming that Cooper, "the generous spendthrift", used 100 "extra and unnecessary words" in the original version.

But, he wrote that in general, "the book must needs have some interest for the reader since it could amuse even the writer, who had in a great measure forgotten the details of his work.

The romanticized images of the strong, fearless, and ever-resourceful frontiersman (i.e., Natty Bumppo), as well as the stoic, wise, and noble "red man" (i.e., Chingachgook), were notions derived from Cooper's characterizations more than from anywhere else.

The Last Tomahawk directed by Harald Reinl was a 1965 West German/Italian/Spanish co-production setting elements of the story in the era after the American Civil War.

This adaptation is heavily influenced by American movies and western comics and is filled with absurd humor and anachronistic jokes.