Pioneers

"The Pioneers" (1823) is the first of five novels in James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales." Cooper introduces his buckskin hero, Natty Bumppo, and sets him on the trail that leads to the author's best-known book, "The Last of the Mohicans." Natty steps out of the woods exactly the way Americans have liked their frontier heroes ever since: the tall, lean man of "robust and enduring health." Cooper puts on a turkey shoot to prove Natty's skill with a rifle, and throws the frontiersman into a conflict that would echo in practically every Western to come. Natty roams freely. He is the Deerslayer, but he shoots the wrong deer on land that isn't his. The man of frontier justice learns an early lesson about civilized law in the settlement, and he does what only the frontier allows: He follows the setting sun. Cooper sends him off in a style the writer called "descriptive," a style the modern reader might call cinematic -- a flow of pictures. Natty shoulders his rifle, calls the hounds to follow him, and no one with a sense of adventure wants to stay behind.