The English colonists were greatly superior to the French in number; but they laboured under the disadvantage that the colonies were wholly independent of each other, with strong mutual jealousies, which paralysed their action and prevented their embarking upon any concerted operations.  Upon the other hand, Canada was governed by the French as a military colony.  The governor was practically absolute, and every man capable of bearing arms could, if necessary, be called by him into the field.  He had at his disposal not only the wealth of the colony, but large assistance from France, and the French agents were, therefore, able to outbid the agents of the British colonies with the Indians.

For years there had been occasional troubles between the New England States and the French, the latter employing the Indians in harassing the border; but, until the middle of the eighteenth century, there had been nothing like a general trouble.  In 1749 the Marquis of Galissoniere was governor general of Canada.  The treaty of Aix la Chapelle had been signed; but this had done nothing to settle the vexed question of the boundaries between the English and French colonies.  Meanwhile, the English traders from Pennsylvania and Virginia were poaching on the domain which France claimed as hers, ruining the French fur trade, and making friends with the Indian allies of Canada.  Worse still, farmers were pushing westward and settling in the valley of the Ohio.

In order to drive these back, to impress the natives with the power of France, and to bring them back to their allegiance, the governor of Canada, in the summer of 1749, sent Celoron de Bienville.  He had with him fourteen officers, twenty French soldiers, a hundred and eighty Canadians, and a band of Indians.  They embarked in twenty-three birch-bark canoes, and, pushing up the Saint Lawrence, reached Lake Ontario, stopping for a time at the French fort of Frontenac, and avoiding the rival English port of Oswego on the southern shore, where a trade in beaver skins, disastrous to French interests, was being carried on, for the English traders sold their goods at vastly lower prices than those which the French had charged.

On the 6th of July the party reached Niagara, where there was a small French fort, and thence, carrying their canoes round the cataract, launched them upon Lake Erie.  Landing again on the southern shore of the lake, they carried their canoes nine miles through the forest to Chautauqua Lake, and then dropped down the stream running out of it until they reached the Ohio.  The fertile country here was inhabited by the Delawares, Shawanoes, Wyandots, and Iroquois, or Indians of the Five Nations, who had migrated thither from their original territories in the colony of New York.  Further west, on the banks of the Miami, the Wabash, and other streams, was a confederacy of the Miami and their kindred tribes.  Still further west, in the country of the Illinois, near the Mississippi, the French had a strong stone fort called Fort Chartres, which formed one of the chief links of the chain of posts that connected Quebec with New Orleans.