James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier: The Pioneers as History

Plot Summary By Chapter 

[Part One]: Christmas Eve and Christmas, 1793. 

Chapter 1:

 [Prelude] Lyrical description of the headwaters of the Delaware and Susquehanna 

Rivers, and their present (1823) economic and social prosperity. On Dec. 24, 1793, the widowed 

Judge Marmaduke Temple is bringing his only daughter Elizabeth home to Templeton 

(Cooperstown) from boarding school in New York, in a sleigh driven by the slave Agamemnon. 

As they approach their destination, a deer bounds by and is shot at both by Judge Temple and by 

Natty Bumppo and Oliver Edwards, who appear out of the woods. Judge Temple claims the deer, 

but Natty proves that Edwards shot it and that Temple has in fact accidentally wounded Edwards 

with a buckshot pellet in the shoulder. Temple takes Edwards into the sleigh to seek medical 

treatment in Templeton.