OR, THE SOURCES OF THE SUSQUEHANNA
First published in 1823, this is the first of Cooper’s ‘Leatherstocking’ tales, which relate experiences in the life of frontiersman Nathaniel ‘Natty’ Bumppo. Although the first of the series to be written and published, The Pioneers is actually the fourth story in the ‘Leatherstocking’ chronology. Commencing on Christmas Eve, 1793 it might best be summated as a year in the life of the pioneer community of Templeton, New York – a fictional setting based on Cooperstown, which Cooper’s own father had founded in 1786.
The novel’s main plot concerns the relationship between the ‘civilized’ residents of Templeton (including the founding Templeton family) and the land-dwelling trio of Bumppo, his young companion Oliver Edwards and the Mohican Indian Chingachgook. Over the course of the novel, this relationship is complicated by the contentious arrest of Bumppo for the slaying of a deer and Edwards’s attraction to Elizabeth Temple, despite his mysterious grudge against her father Sir Marmaduke. Relationships between these characters are used to symbolise wider tensions between a rapacious, wasteful civilization and sustainable, harmonious nature. Where The Spy explores aspects of the young American nation’s political birth, The Pioneers can be seen as a consideration of its citizens’ relationship with the land itself.