The story opens with Ishmael, his family, Ellen, and Abiram making across the virgin prairies of the Midwest searching for a homestead. They meet the trapper (Natty Bumppo), who has left his home in New York State to find where he can't hear the sound of individuals cutting down the timberlands. All that evening, a band of Teton warriors takes Ishmael's animal, stranding the immigrants. The doctor returns the following morning along with his donkey after a band of Teton warriors takes Ihmael's animals. He escapes with Inez, Paul, and Middleton, whom Abiram had been keeping hostage, and escapes with her and Ellen. The Indians endeavor to recapture the catcher by encompassing them with a prairie fire, yet he lights up a backfire to save everybody.They get together with Hard-heart, a Pawnee Indian who endures the fire enclosed by buffalo skin and endeavors to disappear to his town. Middleton, Inez, Paul, and Ellen return just in time to witness the Trapper's death.The Prairie (1827) is a novel by James Fenimore Cooper, the third novel composed by him featuring Natty Bumppo. It was published in two volumes in 1827, the third of five books published as The Leatherstocking Tales. Sequentially, The Prairie is the fifth and last portion of the Leatherstocking Stories, though it was distributed before The Pathfinder (1841) and The Deerslayer (1842). The book ends with the death of the octogenarian frontiersman Natty Bumppo, called Hawkeye.