[Illustration: LEATHERSTOCKING]
This sequence may be easily remembered from the fact that the first chief words in the titles, "Deerslayer," "Mohicans," "Pathfinder," "Pioneers," and "Prairie," are arranged in alphabetical order. These books are the prose Iliad and Odyssey of the eighteenth-century American pioneer. Instead of relating the fall of Ilium, Cooper tells of the conquest of the wilderness. The wanderings or Leatherstocking in the forest and the wilderness are substituted for those of Ulysses on the sea. This story could not have been related with much of the vividness of an eye-witness of the events, if it had been postponed beyond Cooper's day. Before that time had forever passed, he fixed in living romance one remarkable phase of our country's development. The persons of this romantic drama were the Pioneer and the Indian; the stage was the trackless forest and the unbroken wilderness.
[Illustration: COOPER AT THE AGE OF FORTY FIVE]
The Last of the Mohicans has been the favorite of the greatest number of readers. In this story Chingachgook, the Indian, and Uncas, his son, share with Hawkeye our warmest admiration. The American boy longs to enter the fray to aid Uncas. Cooper knew that the Indian had good traits, and he embodied them in these two red men. Scott took the same liberty of presenting the finer aspects of chivalry and neglecting its darker side. Cooper, however, does show an Indian fiend in Magua.
Cooper's work in this series brings us face to face with the activities of nature and man in God's great out of doors. Cooper makes us realize that the life of the pioneer was not without its elemental spirit of poetry. We may feel something of this spirit in the reply of Leatherstocking to the trembling Cora, when she asked him at midnight what caused a certain fearful sound:—
"'Lady,' returned the scout, solemnly, 'I have listened to all the sounds of the woods for thirty years, as a man will listen, whose life and death depend so often on the quickness of his ears. There is no whine of the panther, no whistle of the catbird, nor any invention of the devilish Mingos, that can cheat me. I have heard the forest moan like mortal men in their affliction; often and again have I listened to the wind playing its music in the branches of the girdled trees; and I have heard the lightning cracking in the air, like the snapping of blazing brush, as it spitted forth sparks and forked flames; but never have I thought that I heard more than the pleasure of him, who sported with the things of his hand. But neither the Mohicans, nor I, who am a white man without a cross, can explain the cry just heard.'"
In addition to the five Leatherstocking Tales, three other romances show special power. They are:—
The Spy; a Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821).
The Pilot; a Tale of the Sea (1824).
The Red Rover; a Tale (1828).