The Mammoth Book of the West Read Online Free Page A

Their most famous exploit was the massacre of the St Francis Indians in 1759 at their village on the St Lawrence River. The village had long been a source of bloody raids, and New Englanders did not restrain their joy at its destruction.
    Important though the Iroquois and Rogers’s Rangers were to British victory, its main cause was a change of ministry in London. The new regime, led by the energetic and charismatic William Pitt the Elder, swept out the dusty relics who staffed Britain’s army and replaced them with dynamic, brilliant unknowns. One of these, General James Wolfe, was dispatched to North America, which he dutifully won for king and country. The
coup de grâce
was administered on the Plains of Abraham beside the city of Quebec on 13 September 1759, when the French defenders were panicked into a bitter battle they could not win and which resulted in the Union Jack flying over France’s New World capital. A year later Montreal fell. Although official peace was still two years away, the French military in North America could now only lose. Their Indian allies,seeing the way the war was heading, returned to their homes. Some even opportunistically changed to the British side, tempted by Rogers’s promise that under British dominion their “Rivers would flow with rum – that Presents from the Great King would be unlimited – that all sorts of Goods would be in the utmost plenty and so cheap.”
    By the terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, the French lost all their possessions on the continent. Canada and all land east of the Mississippi went to Britain. With no use for its holdings beyond the Mississippi, France transferred the western half of the giant territory of Louisiana to its ally, Spain. But Spain herself also had to pay the victor a price. She ceded the long-held land of flowers, Florida, to Britain.
    To the victor in the Seven Years’ War went the spoils. So too all the difficulties of ruling a troublesome people, white and red. The ink on the Treaty of Paris was hardly dry before the tribes of the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes were rising up in arms. Unhappy at being transferred to the rule of Britain, the tribes’ unhappiness only increased when the British commander Jeffrey Amherst virtually abolished the annual gifts that were the staple of their economy. To Amherst the native peoples were “more nearly allied to the Brute than to the Human Creation” and he wanted to “extirpate them root and branch”. (He would recommend that smallpox germs be somehow spread among the tribes.) With the threat of poverty and death before them, the natives of the region, led by Pontiac of the Ottawas, launched a revolt which captured all the western forts except Pitt (Duquesne), Niagara and Detroit. The frontier from New York to Virginia was ravaged by the torch and tomahawk.
    Already wearied by the war with the French, the British decided to give the insurgents no further cause fordiscontent. On 7 October 1763, the British government issued a proclamation limiting White settlement to the east of the Appalachian crest.
    The proclamation astounded America. With the removal of France, thousands of colonialists were expected to swarm into the fertile Ohio Valley. Many were volunteers who had served in the colonial militia with the lure of land as payment for service rendered. It now seemed that the interior would be barred to them forever. But when the shock died down, the colonialists realized that the proclamation was unenforceable. They simply ignored it and marched over the mountains. They had conquered one West, the wilderness up to the Appalachians. Now they would settle another, that between the Appalachians and the Mississippi.

Daniel Boone and the Bluegrass
    As early as 1750 Dr Thomas Walker of the Loyal Land Company had led a surveying party into Kentucky, after finding (or being shown by Indians) the massive gateway through the mountains which he named “Cumberland Gap”, in honour of the Duke