The novel's setting on Otsego Lake in central, upstate New York, is the same as that of The Pioneers, the first of the Leatherstocking tales to be published (1823).
This second book of the Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy is the best known. The Pathfinder, written 14 years later in 1840, is its sequel.Cooper named a principal character Uncas after the most famous of the Mohicans.
This novel introduces Natty Bumppo as "Deerslayer", a young frontiersman in early 18th-century New York and serves as a prequel to Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales.
In this classic adventure story, frontiersman Natty Bumppo and his Mohican comrades battle hostile Huron warriors in their daring rescue of the kidnapped Munro sisters.