Expansion and War on the Frontier

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Threats to Indian Survival . From 1754 to 1763 fighting raged along the western and northern expanses of British North America as American colonials and British soldiers warred against the French. On both sides Indian allies did much of the fighting; Indians had a vital interest in trading furs and deerskins with Europeans and had become dependent on manufactured goods and food they obtained in this trade. They willingly went to war for their white trading partners, killing both European settlers and other Native Americans. Ironically, in helping to win the war on the frontier, British-allied Indians created more-favorable conditions for whites to settle on their lands.

The Proclamation of 1763 . The British government tried to reward their Indian allies with the Proclamation of 1763, forbidding white settlers from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. The Crown wanted nothing to disturb their partners in the fur trade and knew independent-minded settlers threatened lucrative trading alliances. However, the British were unable to close the floodgates that opened in the mid 1700s. Thousands of settlers were already living beyond the mountains, enough that four thousand of them died, either in battle or from Indian raids, in the French and Indian War. Great Britain’s victory in 1763 only made the frontier more attractive, removing the French threat and cutting off arms and food supplies to French Indian allies.

Pontiac’s Rebellion . Pontiac was an Ottawa chief who in 1763 led a confederation of several tribes of the Mississippi River valley and lower Great Lakes region. No longer able to play the French against the English, Pontiac’s alliance sought to drive the English from the territory west of the Allegheny Mountains. They were forced to accept a peace in 1766 after killing thousands of whites and taking eleven western forts. Settlers from the English colonies continued to pour over the mountains. These settlers were determined to drive all Indians away from white settlements despite the Indians’ allegiance to the British. Land speculators also encouraged the settlers to acts of hostility against Indians, hoping to open up more land and increase the value of their holdings. This combination of circumstances prompted the Paxton Boys’s massacres of peaceful Christianized Indians.

Source

Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years’ War in America (New York: Norton, 1988).