COOPER'S

"LEATHER-STOCKING"

TALES:

COMPRISING

THE DEERSLAYER.

THE PATHFINDER.

THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS.

THE PIONEERS.

THE PRAIRIE.

LONDON:

GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS,

THE BROADWAY, LUDGATE.

DEERSLAYER;

OR,

THE FIRST WAR-PATH.

A Tale.

BY

J. FENIMORE COOPER,

AUTHOR OF "THE PATHFINDER," ETC. ETC.

THE DEERSLAYER.

CHAPTER I.

"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its rour;
I love not man the less, but nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet can not all conceal."
Childe Harold.

ON the human imagination, events produce
the effects of time. Thus, he who has travelled
far and seen much is apt to fancy that he has
lived long; and the history that most abounds
in important incidents soonest assumes the
aspect of antiquity. In no other way can we
account for the venerable air that is already
When
gathering around American annals.
the mind reverts to the earliest days of colonial
history, the period seems remote and obscure,
the thousand changes that thicken along the
links of recollections throwing back the origin
of the nation to a day so distant as seemingly
to reach the mists of time; and yet four lives
of ordinary duration would suffice to transmit
from mouth to mouth, in the form of tradition,
all that civilized man has achieved within the
limits of the republic! Although New York
alone possesses a population materially ex-
ceeding that of either of the four smallest
kingdoms of Europe, or materially exceeding
that of the entire Swiss Confederation, it is
little more than two centuries since the Dutch
commenced their settlement, rescuing the re-
gion from the savage state. Thus, what seems
venerable by an accumulation of changes, is
reduced to familiarity when we come seriously
to consider it solely in connection with time."
This glance into the perspective of the past
will prepare the reader to look at the pictures
we are about to sketch with less surprise than
he might otherwise feel; and a few additional
explanations may carry him back in imagina-
tion to the precise condition of society that we
desire to delineate. It is matter of history
that the settlements on the eastern shores of
the Hudson, such as Claverack, Kinderhook,
and even Poughkeepsie, were not regarded as
safe from Indian incursions a century since;
and there is still standing on the banks of the
same river, and within musket-shot of the
wharves of Albany, a residence of a younger
branch of the Van Rensselaers, that has loop-
boles constructed for defence against the same
Crafty enemy, although it dates from a period

scarcely so distant. Other similar memorials of the infancy of the country are to be found scattered through what is now deemed the very centre of American civilization, affording the plainest proofs that all we possess of security from invasion and hostile violence, is the growth of but little more than the time that is frequently filled by a single human life.

The incidents of this tale occurred between the years 1740 and 1745, when the settled portions of the colony of New York were confined to the four Atlantic counties, a narrow belt of country on each side of the Hudson, extending from its mouth to the falls near its head, and to a few advanced "neighbourhoods" on the Mohawk and the Schoharie. Broad belts of the virgin wilderness not only reached the shores of the first river, but they even crossed it, stretching away into New England, and affording forest covers to the noiseless moccasin of the native warrior, as he trod the secret and bloody war-path. A bird'seye view of the whole region east of the Mississippi must then have offered one vast expanse of woods, relieved by a comparatively narrow fringe of cultivation along the sea, dotted by the glittering surfaces of lakes, and intersected by the waving lines of rivers. In such a vast picture, of solemn solitude, the district of country we design to paint sinks into insignificance, though we feel encouraged to proceed by the conviction that, with slight and immaterial distinctions, he who succeeds in giving an accurate idea of any portion of this wild region must necessarily convey a tolerably correct notion of the whole.

Whatever may be the changes produced by man, the eternal round of the seasons is unbroken. Summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, return in their stated order, with a sublime precision, affording to man one of the noblest of all the occasions he enjoys of proving the high powers of his far-reaching mind, in compassing the laws that control their exact uniformity, and in calculating their never-ending revolutions. Centuries of summer suns had warmed the tops of the same noble oaks and pines, sending their heats even to the tenacious roots, when voices were heard calling to each other, in the depths of a forest, of which the leafy surface lay bathed in the brilliant light of a cloudless day in June, while the trunks of the trees rose in gloomy grandeur in the shades beneath. The