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In the mid-18th century about 1.5 million British colonists faced roughly 75,000 French settlers, so France held its North American claims through fur-trade kinship ties forged by coureurs de bois who married into Indigenous nations, while the Iroquois Confederacy played the two empires against each other. In 1749 Pierre-Joseph Céloron traveled 3,000 miles burying engraved lead plates to claim the Ohio Country, and local nations laughed at him. In 1752 French forces and allies attacked Pickawillany, where the Miami chief Old Briton had kept trading with the British, and he was reportedly boiled and eaten. France then built Fort Le Boeuf, Fort Presque Isle and Fort Duquesne.

In 1754 the 21-year-old George Washington ambushed a French party at Jumonville Glen, and the Mingo leader Tanaghrisson, a half-king whose authority over the Delaware and Shawnee was slipping, killed the wounded envoy Joseph Coulon de Jumonville to bind the British to his cause. General Edward Braddock’s column was destroyed on the Monongahela in 1755. Montcalm’s honors of war at Fort William Henry in 1757 enraged his Indigenous allies, and smallpox followed them home. Britain won at Quebec in 1759, but the debt behind the 1763 Treaty of Paris ended salutary neglect and the Proclamation of 1763 closed the West.

• Washington and Thomas Gage fought side by side at the Monongahela, two decades before commanding opposite sides in the Revolution.
• From 1755 Britain deported thousands of Acadians from Nova Scotia, and those who reached Louisiana became the Cajuns.
• William Pitt took on heavy debt to pay colonial militias and send regular troops.
• Voltaire dismissed the loss of Canada as a few acres of snow.
• Pontiac’s War broke out as settlers poured into the Ohio Valley after the French left.