The Last of the Mohicans and ultimately capture the Huron village, but Magua escapes with Cora and two other Hurons; Uncas, Hawk-eye, and Heyward pursue them up to a high mountain. In a fight at the edge of a cliff, Cora, Uncas, and Magua are killed. The novel concludes with a lengthy account of the funerals of Uncas and Cora, and Hawk-eye reaffirms his friendship with Chingachgook. Tamenund prophesies: "The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red-men has not yet come again...". According to Susan Fenimore Cooper, the author's eldest daughter, Cooper first conceived the idea for the book while
The Last of the Mohicans visiting the Adirondack Mountains in 1825 with a party of English gentlemen. The party passed through the Catskills, an area with which Cooper was already familiar, and about which he had written in his first novel featuring Natty: "The Pioneers." They passed on to Lake George and Glens Falls. Impressed with the caves behind the falls, one member of the party suggested that "here was the very scene for a romance." Susan Cooper says that Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, made this remark. Cooper promised Stanley "that a book should actually be written, in which these caves should have