From the Publisher: Young Major Heyward is assigned to escort Cora and Alice Munro through the dangerous frontier wilderness and deliver them safely to their father at Fort William Henry. But their guide, the evil Magua, leads the two women and their escorts into a trap. The frontiersman Hawkeye and his Mohican companions set out to rescue the kidnapped women, but the sly and clever Magua is the most murderous of enemies. To help students experience...

Taking place just a few years after the Louisiana Purchase, The Prairie follows Ishmael and Esther Bush as they travel west from the Mississippi River with their fourteen children, Ellen Wade, a doctor, and Esther's brother. While searching for a place to camp, the group meets Natty Bumppo, a legendary man now in his late eighties. Referred to as "the trapper" Natty helps the family settle somewhere safe. Later, as he roams through the forest, he...

Set in 1793 and 1794, The Pioneers tracks the changes of a small town called Templeton, built on the advancing frontier of New York. Natty Bumppo, a hero raised by Native Americans, lives in a cabin, secluded in a forest near Templeton. As the Christmas Eve snow falls, Natty, more commonly known as Leatherstocking, embarks on a tense hunt for a deer. As he tracks the deer down, he runs into Judge Marmaduke Temple, the man who founded the town of Temple....

The Pathfinder shows Natty at his old trick of guiding tender damsels through the dangerous woods, and the siege at the blockhouse and the storm on Lake Ontario are considerably like other of Cooper's sieges and storms. Natty, in this novel commonly called La Longue Carabine, keeps in a hardy middle age his simple and honest nature, which is severely tested by his love for a young girl. She is a conventional heroine of romance. A certain soft amiability...

The story opens with Ishmael, his family, Ellen and Abiram slowly making their way across the virgin prairies of the Midwest looking for a homestead, just two years after the Louisiana Purchase, and during the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. They meet Natty Bumppo, the trapper, who has left his home in New York state to find a place where he cannot hear the sound of people cutting down the forests.