The Prairie

Natty Bumppo, the trapper, wrinkled and old, takes to the vast stage of the American Prairie for the final act of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Set in a "bleak and solitary place" with "bruised and withered grass," colored by the "hues and tints of autumn," offering little "that was flattering to the hopes of an ordinary settler of new lands," Cooper brings his reverence for nature and his vivid descriptions to a new and largely unknown wilderness in the third of the Leatherstocking Tales, and the final episode in Leatherstocking’s life.