Literary Explorations.

With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Eastern newspapers, magazines, and books began to carry the accounts of official explorers, such as Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, Stephen Long, and John Fremont. The adventures of unofficial explorers, such as painter George Catlin and trader Josiah Gregg, also became popular. This new interest in the West inspired Eastern literary figures such as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to produce their own impressions of the frontier. While such literary accounts were often shaped by reading rather than firsthand experience, they had a tremendous influence upon future visions of the West.

Cooper.

James Fenimore Cooper created an immensely influential vision of the West in his Leatherstocking novels, the first of which was The Pioneers (1823), set near Otsego Lake, New York, in the late eighteenth century. The novel's fundamental...