Stories of Ohio by William Dean Howells

The French king gave up the West to the English king in 1763, but, as we have seen, the Indians had no part in the bargain. They only knew that they were handed over by those who had been their friends to those who had been their enemies, and they did not consent. They had made war upon the English colonists before, and now, in spite of the failure of Pontiac, and in spite of Bouquet's march into the Ohio country, they kept up their warfare for forty years, with a truce when it was convenient, and a treaty of peace when it was convenient, but with a steadfast purpose to drive the English settlers out, and to hold the wilderness for themselves. It was not until long after their power was broken by the American arms in 1794 that their struggle ended in the region which ten years later became the state of Ohio.

There was misunderstanding on both sides. The Indians naturally supposed that their own country belonged to them, and the colonists supposed that their eastern and western borders were the two oceans. These were commonly the boundaries which the English king had given them; and when he had not been quite clear about it in his grants of territory which he had never even imagined, they did not allow him to deal less splendidly with them than such a prince ought. He had, as we know, given the Ohio Company of Virginia a large tract of the best land beyond the Ohio even while the French still claimed the West, and he had encouraged the Virginians to believe they had a right to settle it and to fortify it. But after the capture of Quebec, when the West, as well as Canada, fell into the power of Great Britain, the English king, or rather his ministers, began to change their minds about letting the colonists take up lands in the Back Country, as they called it. The jealousy between the colonies grew less, but the jealousy between them and Great Britain grew greater; there were outbreaks here and there against her rule, and there was discontent nearly everywhere. The colonists were disappointed and embittered that the West should be treated as a part of Canada, by the mother country, when it ought to have been shared among the English provinces.