Complete and unabridged, with 54 full-page plates by Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty and George Catlin. A frontier settlement on Otsego Lake in 1793 is putting up a courthouse, shooting pigeons by the thousand and arguing about who owns the land, while an old hunter is prosecuted for killing a deer out of season. Cooper grew up in the village his father founded and wrote it as the first of the Leatherstocking tales. The trial of the old man is the book's argument, and the law wins. Fifty-four plates of forest, farmland and frontier weather by painters including George Catlin and Thomas Doughty run through the text, matching the novel's Otsego woods and clearing.