About the book Curiously although "The Deerslayer" was the last of J. F. Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales to be written, the novel is considered to be the prequel to the rest of the series. It is set is the years 1740 to 1745 and that makes it the first installment chronologically in the lifetime of the hero of the Leatherstocking tales, Natty Bumppo. 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.