A reflection of indian life in the works of fenimore cooper

Chapter II. The reflection of Indians life in F.Cooper’s literay works.

2.1. “Leatherstocking Tales” is a book describing Indians life.
James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales is made up of five different novels. These novels include The Pioneers; or, The Sources of the Susquehanna , The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 , The Prairie: A Tale , The Pathfinder; or, The Inland Sea , and The Deerslayer; or, The First War-Path . These novels were based upon the fictional life of Natty Bumppo, a former wilderness scout, and his conflicts between "rival versions of the American Eden: the 'God's Wilderness' of Leatherstocking and the cultivated garden of Judge Temple" . Many critics have tried to analyze these novels. Things that they have examined are the order of the novels and the symbolism of nature.
The Pioneers is both the first and the finest detailed portrait of frontier life in American literature; it is also the first truly original American novel. The main subject of the book is the conflict between two different views of the frontier—that of Natty Bumppo (here called Leather-Stocking), who sees the land as “God’s Wilderness,” and that of another main character who wants to tame and cultivate the land. The Last of the Mohicans takes the reader back to the French and Indian War. This work was succeeded by The Prairie, in which the very old and philosophical Leather-Stocking dies, facing the westering sun he has so long followed. Identified from the start with the vanishing wilderness and its native inhabitants, Leather-Stocking becomes an unalterably elegiac figure.
Cooper intended to bury Leather-Stocking with The Prairie, but many years later he resuscitated the character and portrayed his early maturity in The Pathfinder and his youth in The Deerslayer. While all of The Leatherstocking Tales have been criticized as artless, some critics see The Deerslayer as the best of the five novels. Mark Twain mocked it (and The Pathfinder) in “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences.”
22