The French and Indian War began in 1754 and ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763. The war provided Great Britain enormous territorial gains in North America, but disputes over subsequent frontier policy and paying the war's expenses led to colonial discontent, and ultimately to the American Revolution.
The war had an equally profound but very different effect on the American colonists. First of all, the colonists had learned to unite against a common foe. Before the war, the thirteen colonies had found almost no common ground and they coexisted in mutual distrust. But now thay had seen that together they could be a power to be reckoned with. And the next common foe would be Britain.
With France removed from North America, the vast interior of the continent lay open for the Americans to colonize. But The English government decided otherwise. To induce a controlled population movement, they issued a Royal Proclamation that prohibited settlement west of the line drawn along the crest of the Alleghenny mountains and to enforce that meassure they authorized a permanent army of 10,000 regulars (paid for by taxes gathered from the colonies; most importantly the "Sugar Act" and the "Stamp Act"). This infuriated the Americans who, after having been held back by the French, now saw themselves stopped by the British in their surge west.
For the Indians of the Ohio Valley, the third major party in the French and Indian War, the British victory was disastrous. Those tribes that had allied themselves with the French had earned the enmity of the victorious English. The Iroquois Confederacy, which had allied themselves with Britain, fared only slightly better. The alliance quickly unraveled and the Confederacy began to crumble from within. The Iroquois continued to contest the English for control of the Ohio Valley for another fifty years; but they were never again in a position to deal with their white rivals on terms of military or political equality.
