It was not until 1758 that General John Forbes forced the evacuation of the fort at the Forks of the Ohio. The French then abandoned the entire valley. Fort DuQuesne became Fort Pitt and the English were in control of the Ohio River.
The war was savagely fought out on all fronts in America. Other French citadels fell—Louisburg, Frontenac, Niagara, Ticonderoga, and Crown Point. Eventually, Quebec and Montreal, those ancient fortresses on the St. Lawrence River, capitulated to the British. Then, in 1763, by the Treaty of Paris, France ceded Canada and all her territory east of the Mississippi River to Great Britain, except for one small plot encompassing New Orleans. Spain likewise ceded Florida.
The English flanks no longer needed protection. The way west was open and the frontier was boundless!
Settlers spilled through the gaps of the Appalachians, into Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois. And the fur traders, making way for them as they pressed upon their trading grounds, pushed on, ever westward, across the plains after the turn of the century to the Rocky Mountains and the coastal rivers of the Pacific.
But the era of the early fur trader, typified by the white trader and the Indian hunter, had come to an end. As the frontier began rolling across the great plains of America, the white man became trapper as well as trader. When he took over the function of the Indian, who had formerly caught the beaver, a whole new conception of the fur trade in America was born. A new era commenced—that of the fur trapper.
The fur trader of early America had played out his historically important role.
Bibliography and Acknowledgements
Adams, Charles Francis, Three Episodes in Massachusetts History, Cambridge, 1892.
Adventures of Marco Polo, ed. by Richard J. Walsh, New York, 1948.
Adventurers of Purse and Person, Virginia, 1607-1625, compiled and ed. by Anna Jester and Martha Woodruff Hiden, Princeton, 1956.