“Frontiersmen came to dominate the West in the 1760s and early 1770s by sheer weight of numbers – and an unrestrained appetite for land. Because of the expense of garrisoning the frontier, the British Army withdrew from the West and left only small forces at Fort Gage (where the Kaskaskia River empties into the Mississippi River), Fort Michilimackinac, Detroit, Niagara, and Fort Pitt (until 1772) following Pontiac’s War. Moreover, the King and his servants at Whitehall assumed that their American subjects would abide by the Proclamation of 1763 and refrain from settling west of the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. The crown designed the proclamation as the first step in an orderly and limited expansion of the West, one intended to put to rest Indians’ fear that Americans would soon overrun their homelands. By the early 1770s, however, few in the colonies paid any attention to the Proclamation of 1763…”
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