The novel is set in upstate New York in 1757. The plot revolves around an attempt to move the English Colonel Munro's two daughters, Cora and Alice, from one English fort to another. The journey takes them through wilderness occupied by not only French soldiers who are at war with the English, but also by members of several American Indian nations with various complicated alliances. Cooper gives readers the sense of an upstate New York that is both far more beautiful and far more dangerous than it would have been even in the 1820s. In Chapter 1, he writes:
[I]t would seem that, in time, there was no recess of the woods so dark, nor any secret place so lovely, that it might claim exemption from the inroads of those who had pledged their blood to satiate their vengeance, or to uphold the cold and selfish policy of the distant monarchs of Europe.
He concedes that the woods are not entirely "untouched," as the woods beyond the "frontier" of American civilization often are in the American imagination. There are roads and politics penetrating these woods, but in a way that makes them an even darker and scarier place to be. Englishmen, Frenchmen, and American Indians are waiting behind every tree to jump out at one another.
Still, Cooper has a certain nostalgia for this imaginary moment in history, before more of the woods were cleared and before the local land disputes were as settled as they are in the 1820s. He goes on in the same chapter to write:
Though the arts of peace were unknown to this fatal region, its forests were alive with men; its shades and glens rang with the sounds of martial music, and the echoes of its mountains threw back the laugh, or repeated the wanton cry, of many a gallant and reckless youth, as he hurried by them, in the noontide of his spirits, to slumber in a long night of forgetfulness.
Cooper seems to find something strikingly primal about the idea of all these warring people living in the woods and playing out their wartime music to echo through the "shades and glens." But his nostalgia covers over the fact that this same land was far from undisputed in the 1820s. American Indian nations were still being forced out of the area to make way for settlements such as Cooperstown, the one founded by Cooper's own father. Cooper's novel attempts to grapple with the issue of land theft from American Indian peoples, but it also pretends, unfairly, that this issue was settled long ago.
