The Last of the Mohicans

The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is a historical novel by the American writer James Fenimore Cooper, first published in 1826, the second of his five Leatherstocking Tales featuring the frontiersman Natty Bumppo, known here by his scout name Hawkeye. Set during the French and Indian War, the novel follows Hawkeye and his Mohican companions, the chief Chingachgook and his son Uncas, as they guide Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of the British commander of Fort William Henry, together with the British officer Duncan Heyward, through the dangerous wilderness of upstate New York toward their father's besieged fort. The party is repeatedly pursued by the vengeful Huron warrior Magua, a former ally of the British turned enemy after a personal grievance against Munro, and after the fort's surrender to the French general Montcalm, Magua incites a massacre of the retreating British column, capturing Cora and Alice; the novel's climax, set amid a running pursuit through the forest, ends with Uncas dying in an attempt to save Cora, who is killed alongside him, an ending that closes the Mohican line Uncas represented as the tale's title anticipates. Combining a Romantic idealization of Native American nobility, most fully embodied in Chingachgook and Uncas, with an equally Romantic celebration of the vanishing American wilderness, the novel became the best-selling and most influential of Cooper's works, shaping the popular image of the American frontier for generations of later readers and writers.