The Prairie

The Prairie: A Tale is a novel by James Fenimore Cooper, published in 1827. It is the third of his books to feature the frontier hero Natty Bumppo, who is never named in it and is called instead the trapper or the old man, and chronologically it is the fifth and final instalment of the Leatherstocking Tales.

Bumppo is in the last year of his life here, still useful to people who are in trouble on the frontier, and the novel follows a wagon party of squatters who have gone far past the fertile river bottoms into the less productive plains. The group takes in Ishmael and Esther Bush and their numerous family, Esther's brother Abiram White, a niece named Ellen Wade whose bearing suggests a better background, and the naturalist Dr Obed Bat.

The book refers back to the two Leatherstocking novels that had already appeared and forward to two that Cooper would not write for more than a decade, and its continuity with The Last of the Mohicans is marked by the appearance of the grandson of Duncan and Alice Heyward. The old man's knowledge of the prairie and of the peoples who live on it is what keeps the settlers alive, and across the story he is drawn into the troubles of a family that has carried its own violence with it.