ire length of the Mississippi River, floated north to south by LaSalle in the 1680s and enabling France to claim Louisiana, to present-day Detroit, founded by Antoine Cadillac in 1701, to New Orleans, the port founded in 1718 that gave a major trading outlet to the fertile Midwest--alarmed the English, whose colonies were pretty much concentrated up and down the Atlantic coast and whose subjects felt threatened by both French and Indians on their western borders. The manner of French colonization of Indian peoples in the Midwest says something about the encounter between Indians and the English colonialists who dominated the shaping of American culture in the late eighteenth century and after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. That manner came down to the fact that the French did not enslave the Indians as the Spanish had done in Florida and California. Black slavery was not endemic to New France as it was to the British-dominated colonies that became the antebellum South. In the French and Indian War (Seven Years War in Europe), Indians by and large sided with the French and against the English. Indeed, the British government faced a dilemma inasmuch as it wanted to persuade the Indians away from French influence even as the American colonists were demanding security from the Indians, whom their ever-increasing numbers were pushing farther inland from the Atlantic coast.
After 1763, in the aftermath of the English victory in the Seven Years War, the power calculus in both Europe and the New World shifted. Freed of the French threat in North America, the colonists appear to have felt more comfortable pushing the Indians more and more out of the way of expansion and settlement westward toward the Mississippi. There was no more French threat, and despite Pontiac's uprising against British encroachment on Indian lands in 1766 ("Pontiac" 321; Becker 210-211) perforce a less serious Indian threat against the security of British colonists. On...