The Pioneers

What It's About

Set in the 1790s in Templeton, a young settlement on the shores of a lake in upstate New York, this is the first of the Leatherstocking Tales to be published. The town is modelled on Cooperstown, the community Cooper's father founded. The story follows a year in the settlement's life, season by season. Judge Marmaduke Temple, the town's founder, is trying to bring order and prosperity to the wilderness. His daughter Elizabeth has just returned home from school. Natty Bumppo, the elderly hunter known as Leather-Stocking, lives in a cabin on land the Judge now owns, alongside the Mohican elder Chingachgook and a mysterious young man, Oliver Edwards, who is drawn into the Temples' circle after a hunting accident. As the settlers clear forests, fish the lake dry and enforce new game laws, Natty finds that the freedom he has always lived by is being legislated out of existence.

Key Concepts

The novel's central tension is between progress and preservation. Cooper gives vivid scenes of wasteful exploitation, such as a mass pigeon shoot and net-fishing that strips the lake, and sets them against Natty's restrained, respectful use of the land. It also asks who owns the land and by what right, and whether written law can be just when it ignores older claims and customs. Cooper does not simply side against the settlers, since the Judge is presented as a well-meaning man. Critics have long found the plot slow and the dialogue stiff, but the book is widely praised for its landscape descriptions and its portrait of a community in transition.

About the Author

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was an American novelist, born in New Jersey and raised in Cooperstown, New York. He left Yale without graduating and served as a midshipman in the US Navy before turning to writing. He became one of the first American writers to win a large international readership, and spent several years living in Europe. Later in life he was also known as an outspoken critic of American society.