Situating the origins of American environmental fiction in early Republic natural histories, Indian captivity narratives, juvenile literature, and the subsequent development of a uniquely American brand of environmental fiction that began with James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, Matthew Wynn Sivils argues that these works of early environmental thought contributed to a growing cultural conception of the environment¿s importance in shaping the identity of the fledgling nation decades before the influences of Emerson¿s Nature and Thoreaüs Walden.