In the 1790s Judge Marmaduke Temple presides over Templeton, a raw settlement at the headwaters of the Susquehanna modelled on Cooper’s own Cooperstown. The aging hunter Natty Bumppo and his old friend Chingachgook, now called John Mohegan, find the forests they knew being felled and fenced, and when Natty shoots a deer out of season the judge’s new game laws collide with the old ways.
The first of the Leatherstocking Tales, a rich picture of early American settlement; its attitudes to race are of 1823. Download the free EPUB.