France had ceded to England as a result of the war all the vast territory which lay upon the St. Lawrence and between the Mississippi and the eastern mountains, north and south. It was possible to provide a government for the province of Quebec and for the lands in the far south, in Florida and beside the mouths of the Mississippi; but between these lay the long regions which stretched, unsettled, along the great streams which ran everywhere into the Mississippi,—the Illinois country, the country round about the Ohio, the regions by the Cumberland,—all the boundless “back country” which lay directly behind the colonies at the west. The Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations in London wished to keep settlers out of these lands, in order that they might be left as a great hunting ground for the Indians, and so remain a permanent source of supply for the fur skins which enriched trade between the mother country and her colonies. But, meanwhile, whether settlers made their way thither or not, it was necessary to carry England’s power among the Indians, and make them know that she, and not the King of France, was now sovereign there. This the Indians were slow to believe. They could not know what treaty-makers in Europe had decided: they did not believe that the French would leave and the English come in in their stead at the western forts; and it moved them hotly to think of such a change. The French had made them welcome at their frontier posts, and did not drive off the game, as Duquesne had told them, ere this fatal war began. The French had been willing to be comrades with them, and had dealt with them with a certain gracious courtesy and consideration; while the English treated them, when they dared, like dogs rather than like men, drove them far into the forests at their front as they advanced their settlements, bullied them, and often cheated them in trade. It was intolerable to the northern Indians to think of these men whom they feared and hated being substituted for the French, with whom they found it at least possible to live. [Illustration: BOUNDARY MONUMENT ON THE ST. CROIX] They were dangerous neighbors, and the danger was near and palpable. The war with the French was hardly over when English settlers began to pour across the Alleghanies from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia,—men of the stern and sober Scots-Irish breeding for the most part, masterful and imperious, and sure to make the lands they settled upon entirely their own. There were already tribes among the Indians in the northwest who had been driven out of Pennsylvania by the earlier movements of these same people, and who had taken with them to their new homes the distress and the dread of exile. It were fatal, they knew, to wait. If the English were ever to be driven within the barriers of the Alleghanies again, it must be done now, and all the tribes must rally to the desperate business.