New York is the principal colonial territory through which the novel’s frontier conflict unfolds: a province of lakes, forts, wooded routes, and Indigenous homelands contested by European powers. Its geography enables military movement, while its history records the displacement of the peoples who first possessed it; the narrative’s wilderness is therefore at once an arena of action and a landscape shaped by colonial seizure.

Territory and Naming

The novel’s prefatory account describes the region as a place whose history and geography have been obscured by competing names. Dutch, English, and French settlers assigned their own names to Indigenous peoples and places, while Indigenous communities used different names for themselves and their rivals. The narrator groups Lenni-Lenape, Lenope, Delawares, Wapanachki, and Mohicans as related names for one people or stock, and notes that the names Mengwe, Maquas, Mingoes, and Iroquois could be used for politically allied opponents. This naming confusion is presented not as a trivial inconvenience but as part of the difficulty of recovering Indigenous histories and traditions.

The lakes at the heart of the story show how names register competing claims. Lake Champlain forms a long passage from Canada deep into New York, while the lake at its southern end was called Lake George by the English and Lac du Saint-Sacrement by the French. The narrator says those names displaced the Indigenous appellation Horican. In the preface, the author also acknowledges having adopted Horican as a fictional name for Lake George, drawing on an old map’s reference to the Horicans; the lake’s original Indigenous name is explained as meaning the Tail of the Lake, reflecting its shape in relation to Lake Champlain.

Routes, Forts, and War

New York’s waterways and portages make it a corridor of imperial warfare. The connection between the Hudson and the lakes was served by a rough route widened for wagons, linking Fort Edward with Fort William Henry at a distance of less than five leagues. Fort William Henry guarded the southern end of the portage, while Fort Edward held the approaches farther south. When news arrived that Montcalm was advancing up Lake Champlain, the narrative stresses the imbalance between the small force at Fort William Henry and the more than five thousand men available to General Webb at Fort Edward. The province’s geography offered opportunities for reinforcement, but the British command remained within its works rather than striking at the advancing French force.

The same terrain governs movement away from the forts. The travelers enter a rugged, sparsely traversed district between the watersheds of Lake Champlain, the Hudson, the Mohawk, and the St. Lawrence. Progress there depends on wilderness knowledge: Hawkeye studies trees and streams, consults Chingachgook, and uses the likely course of the Huron trail to search for signs of the party they pursue. Lakes and narrow passages likewise shape travel; at the islands and channels of Lake George, the canoe party advances cautiously because an ambush may lie along the route used by Montcalm’s retreating army. New York’s landscape is thus not passive scenery: its watercourses, forests, and difficult crossings determine what can be tracked, defended, or reached.

Indigenous Homelands and Dispossession

The preface identifies the Mohicans as the original possessors of the country first occupied by Europeans in this part of the continent and describes them as the first to be dispossessed. It presents their disappearance from the region as part of the wider advance of colonial settlement. The narrative’s account of the later landscape makes the contrast explicit: roads and thriving settlements have appeared, but the wilderness where the story’s later incidents occurred remains largely wild, even though Indigenous people have deserted that part of the state. Of the tribes named in the book, the preface says, only a small number of Oneidas remain on reservations in New York; others have left their ancestral regions or disappeared altogether.

Chingachgook gives this historical loss a personal and familial form. He recalls a time when his people lived from the lake, forest, and air, before Dutch newcomers brought fire-water and his people surrendered land. He describes their retreat from the shores, his own separation from his ancestors’ graves, and the dwindling of his family until Uncas is the last of the Mohicans. His testimony connects New York’s colonial history to a specific loss of home, inheritance, and continuity rather than treating Indigenous disappearance as an abstract change in population.

A Landscape of Colonial Change

The book’s closing preface compares the region as it appeared in the story with its later development. Watering places and roads have entered areas once crossed without paths; Glen’s has grown into a village, while William Henry and a later fortress survive only as ruins, and another village stands on the Horican’s shore. The author emphasizes that the transformation is uneven: settlement has advanced, yet much of the wilderness remains, and the Indigenous inhabitants have nevertheless vanished from it. The resulting landscape holds two histories at once—the physical persistence of forest and lake, and the political transformation that has removed the people who once claimed them.

New York therefore joins military history, travel, and dispossession within one setting. Its routes help shape the British-French contest, but the names imposed on its waters and the loss of Indigenous homelands expose the deeper cost of colonial control. The province is not merely where the adventure takes place; it is the ground on which competing empires move and Indigenous sovereignty is steadily displaced.