The Deerslayer

The Deerslayer (1841), or The First Warpath, was the last of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Its 1740-1745 time period makes it the first installment chronologically and in the lifetime of the hero of the Leatherstocking Tales, Natty Bumppo. The novel’s setting on Otsego Lake in central, upstate New York, is the same as that of The Pioneers, the first of the Leatherstocking Tales published (1823). The Deerslayer is considered the prequel to the rest of the series. Fenimore Cooper begins his work by relating the astonishing advance of civilization in New York State, the setting of four of his five Leatherstocking Tales.