It’s probably well worth pausing for a moment to take a look at the situation in eastern North America at the start of the French and Indian War. When we look back at the colonial era, it’s to forget the amount of time it encompassed. For the French and British colonists of 1750, thinking back to the foundation of the first colonies was similar to us thinking back to the U.S. Civil War, and thinking back to the discovery of the New World by Columbus was similar to us looking back to the end of the colonial era. By 1750, many generations of colonists had been born and died in the New World. For the natives who had once inhabited the lands now dominated by the colonists, ravaged by disease and warfare, a time without the colonists was only a distant memory. Within the confines of the Thirteen Colonies and what are today known as Quebec and the Canadian maritime provinces, few native peoples remained. Those who had not fled west had converted to Christianity and adopted European agriculture and culture. Many had assimilated into the colonial settlements, while others lived separately in impoverished villages wracked by alcoholism. None remained independent from colonial governance, with the exception of Wabanaki Confederacy, who intermingled with the French colonists of what is today New Brunswick and were armed by the French for the sole purpose of keeping British settlements from expanding northward in what is today Maine.
For most native nations, an alliance with the French seemed a much better deal than allying with the British. Though the French controlled a vast trade network which stretched throughout the Great Lakes and Mississippi River Basin, they were more interested in controlling trade rather than territory, leaving native nations largely alone as long as they kept the peace with their neighbors and did not disrupt the trade network. The closest allies of the French were the Iroquoian nations of the eastern Great Lakes, which had formed a resurgent Huron Confederacy, and the Ojibwe who dominated the western Great Lakes. With a high degree of intermarriage with French voyageurs and conversion to Christianity, they formed the backbone of the French fur trade, acting as middlemen and cheap sources of labor, travelling with French traders far west and south from their native homelands.
South of the Great Lakes, in what is today the Midwest, the various Algonquian nations had largely stabilized in the decades following the Beaver Wars of the previous century, though with the occasional conflict still erupting between them. Though some large confederacies did exist, such as the Illinois Confederacy in what is today Illinois and the Wabash Confederacy largely in what is today Indiana, overall the nations were diffuse and lacking centralized control, with most towns and villages completely seeing to their own affairs. However, around the many French trading posts in the region, multicultural villages had arisen, with natives from many nations peacefully living alongside for longer periods of time than had ever happened before. Though the native nations of the Midwest were well aware of the growing colonial population to the east, they were less affected and therefore less concerned than those living in the Ohio Country. Rather, their concern was more with the rising power of the various horse empires developing to the west on the Great Plains, from which the enforced peace of the French trade monopoly promised the best defense.
Further east, the Iroquois Confederacy controlled a swatch of territory stretching from western New York south to the Ohio River. Thanks to their fearsome reputation, control of deer hunting grounds in the Ohio Country, and the willingness of the British to bend over backwards to maintain their alliance and thus a buffer between Quebec and New York, they had managed to maintain a significant degree of independence. However, with the buckskin trade beginning to wane they were increasingly facing the dilemma of a changing world, with some fighting to maintain their old ways of life while others pushed for greater assimilation and adoption of European agricultural practices and culture to survive. With the Ohio Country increasingly becoming less valuable to them, they became more willing to sell off chunks of it for further colonial settlement, greatly alarming the various Algonquian peoples that the Iroquois had allowed to live there.
In the southeast, the once powerful Chickasaw and Choctaw had been devastated in a forty year conflict which had acted as a proxy war between the French and British, leaving the Creek Confederacy and Cherokee as the most powerful native groups in the region. The Creek Confederacy, centered in what is today Mississippi, Alabama, and western Tennessee, kept to a policy of strict neutrality, trading with anyone who was willing. While the Cherokee, centered in what is today Georgia, Alabama, and eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, allied themselves closely with the British and were buffered from the French by the Creek and other native nations further west. However, the depletion of once plentiful deer herds was forcing all of the native nations in the southeast to consider how they might need to adapt in the future given realistically they could not return to the way of life they had led prior to the introduction of European trade goods. Debates regarding what to do were especially common amongst the Cherokee, who also faced an expanding colonial presence on their eastern border.
