Leatherstocking Tales

The Leatherstocking Tales is a series of five novels (The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers, and The Prairie) by American writer James Fenimore Cooper, set in the eighteenth-century era of development in the primarily former Iroquois areas in central New York.

They do not necessarily correspond with the actual dates of the historical events described in the series, which are discrepancies Cooper likely introduced for the sake of convenience.

For instance, Cooper manipulated time to avoid making Leatherstocking 100 years old when he traveled to the Kansas plains in The Prairie.

[11][12] The Natty Bumppo character is generally believed to be inspired, at least in part, by the historic explorer Daniel Boone or the lesser known David Shipman.

[13][page needed] Critic Georg Lukacs likened Bumppo to Sir Walter Scott's "middling characters; because they do not represent the extremes of society, these figures can serve as tools for the social and cultural exploration of historical events, without directly portraying the history itself.