<P> According to Susan Fenimore Cooper, the author's eldest daughter, Cooper first conceived the idea for the book while 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 . </P> <P> 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 a place; the, idea of a romance essentially Indian in character then first suggesting itself to his mind ." </P> <P> Cooper began work on the novel immediately . He and his family stayed for the summer in a cottage belonging to a friend, situated on the Long Island shore of the Sound, opposite Blackwell's Island, not far from Hallett's Cove (the area is now part of Astoria). He wrote quickly and completed the novel in the space of three or four months . He suffered a serious illness thought to have been brought on by sunstroke and, at one point, he dictated the outline of the fight between Magua and Chingachgook (12th chapter), to his wife, who thought that he was delirious . </P> <P> In the novel, Hawkeye refers to Lake George as the Horican . Cooper felt that Lake George was too plain, while the French name, Le Lac du St. Sacrement, was "too complicated". Horican he found on an old map of the area; it was a French transliteration of a native group who had once lived in the area . </P>

Where was the last of the mohicans written