discovered. The success of this venture
encouraged the author, in the next year, to bring Leather-Stocking
forward, for what he intended to be the last time, in _The Prairie_. The
closing chapter of that story describes the death and burial of
Leather-Stocking.

But the public could not have enough of Natty Bumppo, and the result was
that, after leaving him in his grave, Cooper resurrected
Leather-Stocking as the hero of two more novels. In _The Pathfinder_,
published in 1840, he described Natty Bumppo at the age of forty years;
and _The Deerslayer_, the last published of the series, gave a youthful
picture of Leather-Stocking at the age of twenty. When the
_Leather-Stocking Tales_ were afterward published complete they of
course followed the logical order in the presentation of the hero's
life, without regard to the dates of original publication. The actual
order in which they were written, however, suggests an interesting
glimpse of Cooper's method of work in developing his most successful
character.

It is generally believed that an old hunter named Shipman, who lived in
Cooperstown during Fenimore Cooper's boyhood, suggested to the novelist
the picturesque character of Leather-Stocking. The persistence of this
tradition requires some explanation, for it is not strikingly confirmed
by what Cooper himself had to say of the matter. In the preface of the
_Leather-Stocking Tales_, written after the series was complete, he
said: "The author has often been asked if he had any original in his
mind for the character of Leather-Stocking. In a physical sense,
different individuals known to the writer in early life certainly
presented themselves as models, through his recollection; but in a moral
sense this man of the forest is purely a creation."

In the face of this, the most that can be said for the current
tradition is that Cooper's assertion does not exclude it from
consideration. What he lays stress upon is that the inner spirit of
Leather-Stocking was the novelist's creation. His statement is not
inconsistent with the possibility that he had the hunter Shipman chiefly
in mind as the prototype of Leather-Stocking, with some characteristics
added from other hunters, of whom there were many in the early days of
Cooperstown. The heat with which he denies having drawn upon the
character of his own sister in portraying the heroine of _The Pioneers_
seems to betray a feeling, which later writers have not often shared,
that