With the French defeated at the close of the Seven Years' War (1756–63), Great Britain had new problems—far greater ones than she could handle. The war with France had resulted in the accumulation of many debts. The British were now in charge of a remote New World frontier that was populated by hostile Native American tribes. And no sooner had the French been expelled from North America than there was trouble with the Indians.

Native Americans had no great love for the British colonists. They had welcomed British settlers to the New World in the early 1600s, but gradually the land-hungry colonists pushed the Native tribes out of their homeland along the eastern seaboard. The displaced tribes, in turn, drove other tribes off their ancestral lands and into the southern Great Lakes area.

The Native Americans in the Great Lakes...