Leatherstocking Tales (2) influenced Riders of the Purple Sage

Cooper's Leatherstocking novels are the origin of the American frontier romance and of the figure every later western is built on: the white man raised at the edge of two cultures, more at home in the wilderness than in the settlement, who makes the settlement possible and has no place in it once it exists. Natty Bumppo goes by five names across five books and is skilled, solitary, morally certain and doomed to be displaced by what he protects. That is Shane, that is Hondo, and in Grey it is Lassiter. The other inheritance is the landscape. Cooper's forests are described at a length that has nothing to do with plot and everything to do with asserting that the continent is a subject; Grey does the same thing with the Utah canyon country, which is the part of Riders of the Purple Sage that readers remember.