Die Steppe

James Cooper

The aging Natty Bumppo, known as Leatherstocking, lives on the prairie west of the Mississippi after the Louisiana Purchase. He is drawn between squatter Ishmael Bush’s settler family, men searching for the abducted Inez, and rival Pawnee and Sioux groups. Cooper combines pursuit, rescue, and mediation with questions about settlement expansion, Indigenous displacement, environmental change, and the tension between official law and personal justice.