Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/368

348 and bloody struggles in the wilderness and on the frontiers, with naval encounters, sieges, and changing success and failure, with occasional pauses by truce and diplomacy, — was substantially brought to a decision by what we call emphatically the French and Indian War. The final struggle was protracted for seven years, the period closing a little more than a decade before the opening of our Revolutionary War. By the Peace of Paris, in 1763, France ceded to Great Britain all her territory here lying east of the Mississippi; retaining Louisiana, as then so defined, which, however, by a secret treaty she ceded at the time to Spain, to be regained afterwards by France, and then sold to our Government. While France was still maintaining her hold upon Canada and the Ohio Valley, she had won to her side the Western Indian tribes, and had even to some degree conciliated her old-time relentless foes, the Iroquois of New York. But from the first tokens of the crippling and failing of the sway of France, her Indian allies began to manifest their inconstancy and fickleness and their mercenary spirit by trimming for English friendships. The English had already encroached upon the fur-trade; and though their enterprise of this sort had been perilous, it had proved profitable enough to prompt extension. England, as has been observed on a previous page, had now an opportunity which she wasted or trifled with, so as to turn against her the fiercest and most disastrous and the most concentrated struggle against their destiny which the Indian tribes had ever been goaded into making since their first collision with the white man. The effect in the diplomacy of the courts of the cession by France to Britain of Canada and the Ohio Valley was to transfer all the Indian tribes of those vast regions to British sway. The Indians became as much subjects of the British Crown as were the white colonists. They had no part in this treaty transfer, whatever might have been their part in the war which was closed by it. They had no idea of being thus made over,