The Prairie

In 1804, just after the Louisiana Purchase, the old trapper Natty Bumppo, now in his eighties, lives alone on the Great Plains beyond the Mississippi. He meets a family of rough squatters led by the giant Ishmael Bush, who are heading west with a kidnapped young woman hidden in a covered wagon, and helps a young army officer and an absent-minded naturalist to rescue her, amid prairie fires, buffalo stampedes and battles between the Pawnee and the Sioux, before he dies among the Pawnee who have adopted him.

Published in 1827, The Prairie was the third of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales and tells of Natty's last days. Read The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans.