The Prairie noble death and bury him. In the spirit of Daniel Boone, who is said to have thought "a population of ten to the square mile inconveniently crowded," "The Prairie" incorporates the historical phenomenon of the migration of settlers into the territories of the Louisiana Purchase. "The trapper" exemplifies frontiersmen like Daniel Boone in his quest for the wide open spaces of the American west. The Ishmael Bush party is an early wagon train. Novelist and social critic James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) was the first major American writer to deal imaginatively with American life, notably in his five "Leatherstocking Tales". He
The Canterbury Tales tales are interlinked by common themes, and some "quit" (reply to or retaliate against) other tales. Convention is followed when the Knight begins the game with a tale, as he represents the highest social class in the group. But when he is followed by the Miller, who represents a lower class, it sets the stage for the "Tales" to reflect both a respect for and a disregard for upper class rules. Helen Cooper, as well as Mikhail Bakhtin and Derek Brewer, call this opposition "the ordered and the grotesque, Lent and Carnival, officially approved culture and its riotous, and high-spirited