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Why does Natty Bumppo leave the settlers to live in a Pawnee village in The Prairie?
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James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper, painting by John Wesley Jarvis, 1822; in the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York.
In the novel The Prairie by James Fenimore Cooper, the aging frontiersman Natty Bumppo chooses to leave the party of settlers to live out his final days in a Pawnee village because he deeply distrusts the encroaching civilization brought by westward expansion.1
Throughout the Leatherstocking Tales, Bumppo is characterized as a man who views the wilderness as "Godâs Wilderness"âa sacred space that stands in direct opposition to the cultivated, settled world favored by those who wish to tame and develop the land. By joining the Pawnee, he seeks refuge from the "march of progress" and the agricultural frontier that he feels is destroying the natural world he has spent his life exploring.231