The five novels in The Leatherstocking Tales (collected in two Library of America volumes), Cooper's great saga of the American wilderness, form a pageant of the American frontier. Cooper's hero, Natty Bumppo, is forced ever farther into the heart of the continent by the advance of civilization that he inadvertently serves as advance scout, missionary, and critic. 
Leatherstocking first appears in The Pioneers (1823),...

In 1757, during the French and Indian War, half-sisters Cora and Alice Munro set out to join their father, the British Commander of Fort William Henry. After they are betrayed by Magua, the sisters are rescued by Hawkeye whose efforts to lead them to safety are aided by the noble Mohican Uncas, the last of this tribe.

In The Pioneers, Natty Bumppo, forced by a local landowner to obey new hunting laws, rebels and finds allies in the landowner's daughter and a mysterious stranger. In The Last of the Mohicans, Hawkeye, a scout, leads a small band of Americans fleeing from the British and their Indian allies in the French and Indian War.