Wallace Stegner has described him to a T:

Far from handsome (looks went with the effete and civilized), he is nevertheless fearless, self-reliant, omnicompetent, a keen tracker and a dead shot, a mortal enemy and the most loyal of friends. He is also the soul of chivalry, protecting and saving Cooper’s females when they go implausibly astray in the wild woods. An orphan, untutored, Natty has kept the innocence of the natural man. From his brief contact with the Moravians, or from the woods themselves, he has imbibed a noble magnanimity, a sensitivity to beauty and a deep if unorthodox piety. Homeless in the civilized sense, he has made the wilderness his home, and no witches, devils or fears assail him there: he feels the presence of God in every leaf.

Stegner is describing no mere literary character, but rather a mythic hero, a “demigod in buckskin.” The fact that a contemporary author could paint such a vivid and idealizing portrait of Leatherstocking nearly two centuries after Cooper invented him is just one sign of the hold he still has on the modern imagination. He is one of those made-up people, like Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, who live far beyond the pages of the books in which they are born. They become national icons.

The Pioneers is a book about a young nation undergoing swift and comprehensive changes. The story begins in 1793, just ten years after the end of the American Revolution and a mere two years after the ratification of the Constitution. The citizens and subjects of the new nation were engaged—some of them freely and some, like Judge Temple’s slave Agamemnon, under compulsion—in the wholesale transformation of the North American landscape and its peoples. The novel’s setting, the environs of New York’s Otsego Lake, about sixty miles west of Albany, is a scene of change so rapid that one of the characters imagines she can see it mutating under her very eyes. Here, as in so many other states and territories of the new nation, the influx of settlers, the development of natural resources, the clearing of land, the proliferation of farms, the erection of schools, churches, and municipal buildings, and the refinement of civil society seemed to many to be signs of inevitable progress and limitless potential.

Yet even amidst the bounty of Judge Temple’s “Patent” (the vast land holdings he had cheaply acquired after their confiscation from Loyalists during the Revolution), there are already signs of ultimate limits and costs. Leatherstocking, a longtime resident hunter in the region, complains to Temple that game is getting harder and harder to find as a result of the Judge’s “clearings and betterments.” And even Temple is alarmed at the number of trees falling to the ax and being consumed in roaring hearth fires like his own. But whereas the principled Leatherstocking always refuses to participate in the settlers’ wanton destruction of flora and fauna (he kills what he needs, nothing more), Temple periodically gets caught up in the excitement, despite his proto-conservationist views. He laments the spectacular waste generated by the overkill of pigeon shoots and net fishing, yet, in the midst of such depredations, he is as excited as any other settler by the easy pickings. It is this ambivalence, as much as the novel’s gorgeous descriptions of pristine landscapes and its moralistic warnings against their impending destruction, that makes The Pioneers one of the first important American literary works of ecological consciousness.

Judge Temple believes that, ultimately, the law will succeed in controlling rampant deforestation and promiscuous hunting. He consoles himself with this belief, even as he watches the land, water, and air being plundered without check all around him. For example, with the approach of spring, sugar maples are carelessly gouged with deadly wounds to collect the running sap when small incisions would have done just as well, and would have minimized the risk to the irreplaceable “growth of centuries.” Later in the spring, the settlers shoot down vast flocks of migrating passenger pigeons (a species of pigeon now extinct; the last one died in a zoo in 1914) in their flight over Templeton, and the ground is strewn with thousands of dead and half-dead birds. Characteristically, Temple gets caught up in the bloodlust and later regrets his actions as he contemplates the sea of wounded birds: “I see nothing but eyes, in every direction, as the innocent sufferers turn their heads in terror. . . . I think it is time to end the sport; if sport it be.” Yet in the very next chapter, Temple participates eagerly in the netting of thousands of fish from the lake. Then, contemplating a haul that vastly exceeds the needs of the settlers, he once again succumbs to remorse, calling it “a fearful expenditure of the choicest gifts of Providence.” He offers Leatherstocking a portion of the catch, but the hunter refuses: “I eat of no man’s wasty ways.” Whereas Temple believes that regulation, in the form of laws, will ultimately curb these “wasty ways,” Leatherstocking holds to a morality that precedes and, in his view, transcends legal restraint.

Judge Temple’s faith in the law runs deep, and not only because he sees in it the hope of environmental protection. The law also backs his ownership of the land and of the resources it contains, despite the fact that others have strong moral claims to assert. Leatherstocking, for instance, had been a resident of the Otsego Lake region for decades before Temple arrived to assert his claim. Temple freely acknowledges Leatherstocking’s precedence and the freedom he has hitherto enjoyed to hunt when and where he likes. But the judge insists such claims of “natural” rights must yield to the advance of settlement and to the development of a system of restraints adequate to the protection of a more complex society. When Leatherstocking kills a deer “out of season,” he is dismayed to discover that the law—and Judge Temple himself—will indeed move against him.

Leatherstocking’s great friend and companion, the Delaware chief Chingachgook (also known as Indian John and John Mohegan), represents another kind of claim—that of displaced Indian tribes, the hunting cultures of which required an abundance of game. The clearing of the forests for farming has thinned or eliminated animal populations (such as beaver and deer) upon which aboriginal societies depended. Chingachgook is treated as the solitary ghost of a civilization and way of life that the white settlers, including those most sympathetic to the Indian, agree cannot be restored.