The Pathfinder
Natty Bumppo, called the Pathfinder, is in his middle years and guiding a party across the country towards Lake Ontario, the inland sea of the title.
About
The Pathfinder is a historical novel by the American writer James Fenimore Cooper, published in 1840 and the fourth of his Leatherstocking Tales.
Natty Bumppo is the scout and hunter who appears in the other books of the series, and here he is in middle age, guiding a group through country that is still contested and then across the water. The party includes Mabel Dunham, the daughter of a sergeant, and the novel makes room for her as more than a passenger: the journey and the fighting around the blockhouse are shaped by what the men are competing over. Cooper served on Lake Ontario as a young midshipman, and the storms and the navigation in the book come from that experience rather than from hearsay. It is a novel of sieges, ambushes and forest craft, and Natty is unusual among frontier heroes in preferring the wilderness to the settlements that keep pressing on it.
It is the third of the Leatherstocking Tales in the order of their events, although the author wrote it after the others.
Book details
- Author
- James Fenimore Cooper
- First published
- 1840
- Series
- Leatherstocking Tales, book 3
- Subgenre
- Historical adventure, Frontier fiction
- Primary genre
- Historical Fiction
- Tags
- No tags for this book.
- Reading order
- Also on this shelf: The Pioneers (book 1), The Deerslayer (book 1), The Last of the Mohicans (book 2)
Rating
Review
Editor profile
Baby Bat
Goodreads and social links will be added soon.
- Goodreads — link coming soon
- Social media — link coming soon