The Pioneers

The Pioneers is an 1823 historical novel by the American writer James Fenimore Cooper. It was the first of the five novels that became known as the Leatherstocking Tales, although in the internal chronology of the series it comes fourth.

The novel takes place in a settlement on the shore of Lake Otsego, in a district being turned from forest into farmland by Judge Marmaduke Temple and the families who have followed him. Cooper is less interested in adventure for its own sake than in the friction inside a new community: who owns the trees, who may shoot the deer, how a court operates where the law has only just arrived and what happens to the people who were already living there. Into that society comes Natty Bumppo, the hunter and frontiersman who is the first of the Leatherstocking characters, a man who understands the forest better than any of the farmers and is steadily losing the place he once had in it.

Cooper drew on his own childhood in a settlement founded by his father, and the book is as much a portrait of a community inventing its rules as it is a frontier story.