No sooner was New France vanquished than the British began building new forts and blockhouses in the hinterland. [Footnote:  By the hinterland is meant, of course, the regions beyond the zone of settlement; roughly, all west of Montreal and the Alleghanies.] Since the French were no longer to be reckoned with, why were these forts needed?  Evidently, the Indians thought, to keep the red children in subjection and to deprive them of their hunting-grounds!  The gardens they saw in cultivation about the forts were to them the forerunners of general settlement.  The French had been content with trade; the British appropriated lands for farming, and the coming of the white settler meant the disappearance of game.  Indian chiefs saw in these forts and cultivated strips of land a desire to exterminate the red man and steal his territory; and they were not far wrong.

Outside influences, as well, were at work among the Indians.  Soon after the French armies departed, the inhabitants along the St Lawrence had learned to welcome the change of government.  They were left to cultivate their farms in peace.  The tax-gatherer was no longer squeezing from them their last sou as in the days of Bigot; nor were their sons, whose labour was needed on the farms and in the workshops, forced to take up arms.  They had peace and plenty, and were content.  But in the hinterland it was different.  At Detroit, Michilimackinac, and other forts were French trading communities, which, being far from the seat of war and government, were slow to realize that they were no longer subjects of the French king.  Hostile themselves, these French traders naturally encouraged the Indians in an attitude of hostility to the incoming British.  They said that a French fleet and army were on their way to Canada to recover the territory.  Even if Canada were lost, Louisiana was still French, and, if only the British could be kept out of the west, the trade that had hitherto gone down the St Lawrence might now go by way of the Mississippi.

The commander-in-chief of the British forces in North America, Sir Jeffery Amherst, despised the red men.  They were ’only fit to live with the inhabitants of the woods, being more nearly allied to the Brute than to the Human creation.’  Other British officers had much the same attitude.  Colonel Henry Bouquet, on a suggestion made to him by Amherst that blankets infected with small-pox might be distributed to good purpose among the savages, not only fell in with Amherst’s views, but further proposed that dogs should be used to hunt them down.  ’You will do well,’ Amherst wrote to Bouquet, ’to try to inoculate the Indians by means of Blankets as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this Execrable Race.  I should be very glad if your scheme for hunting them down by dogs could take effect, but England is at too great a Distance to think of that at present.’  And Major Henry Gladwyn, who, as we shall see, gallantly held Detroit through months of trying siege, thought that the unrestricted sale of rum among the Indians would extirpate them more quickly than powder and shot, and at less cost.