Evidence of this lies in the fact that three conflicts between the English and the French occurred before their advancing frontiers met on the Pennsylvania border.  King William’s War (1689-1697), Queen Anne’s War (1701-1713), and King George’s War (1744-1748) owed their origins and their endings mainly to the intrigues and rivalries of European powers, although they all involved the American colonies in struggles with the French and their savage allies.

=The Clash in the Ohio Valley.=—­The second of these wars had hardly closed, however, before the English colonists themselves began to be seriously alarmed about the rapidly expanding French dominion in the West.  Marquette and Joliet, who opened the Lake region, and La Salle, who in 1682 had gone down the Mississippi to the Gulf, had been followed by the builders of forts.  In 1718, the French founded New Orleans, thus taking possession of the gateway to the Mississippi as well as the St. Lawrence.  A few years later they built Fort Niagara; in 1731 they occupied Crown Point; in 1749 they formally announced their dominion over all the territory drained by the Ohio River.  Having asserted this lofty claim, they set out to make it good by constructing in the years 1752-1754 Fort Le Boeuf near Lake Erie, Fort Venango on the upper waters of the Allegheny, and Fort Duquesne at the junction of the streams forming the Ohio.  Though they were warned by George Washington, in the name of the governor of Virginia, to keep out of territory “so notoriously known to be property of the crown of Great Britain,” the French showed no signs of relinquishing their pretensions.

[Illustration:  From an old print

BRADDOCK’S RETREAT]

=The Final Phase—­the French and Indian War.=—­Thus it happened that the shot which opened the Seven Years’ War, known in America as the French and Indian War, was fired in the wilds of Pennsylvania.  There began the conflict that spread to Europe and even Asia and finally involved England and Prussia, on the one side, and France, Austria, Spain, and minor powers on the other.  On American soil, the defeat of Braddock in 1755 and Wolfe’s exploit in capturing Quebec four years later were the dramatic features.  On the continent of Europe, England subsidized Prussian arms to hold France at bay.  In India, on the banks of the Ganges, as on the banks of the St. Lawrence, British arms were triumphant.  Well could the historian write:  “Conquests equaling in rapidity and far surpassing in magnitude those of Cortes and Pizarro had been achieved in the East.”  Well could the merchants of London declare that under the administration of William Pitt, the imperial genius of this world-wide conflict, commerce had been “united with and made to flourish by war.”

From the point of view of the British empire, the results of the war were momentous.  By the peace of 1763, Canada and the territory east of the Mississippi, except New Orleans, passed under the British flag.  The remainder of the Louisiana territory was transferred to Spain and French imperial ambitions on the American continent were laid to rest.  In exchange for Havana, which the British had seized during the war, Spain ceded to King George the colony of Florida.  Not without warrant did Macaulay write in after years that Pitt “was the first Englishman of his time; and he had made England the first country in the world.”