Indian Reserve (1763)

Indian Reserve
Territory of British America
1763–1783
Flag
Indian Reserve west of Alleghenies in 1775, after Quebec was extended to the Ohio River. Map does not reflect border as most recently adjusted by Treaty of Camp Charlotte (1774) and Henderson Purchase (1775) that opened West Virginia, most of Kentucky, and parts of Tennessee to white settlement.
History
• Royal Proclamation	7 October 1763
• Treaty of Fort Stanwix	5 November 1768
• Vandalia (colony)	27 December 1769
• Quebec Act	22 June 1774
• Transylvania (colony)	14 March 1775
• Treaty of Paris	3 September 1783
Preceded by Succeeded by Illinois Country United States
Today part of	Canada United States

"Indian Reserve" is a historical term for the largely uncolonized land in North America that was claimed by France, ceded to Great Britain through the Treaty of Paris (1763) at the end of the Seven Years' War—also known as the French and Indian War—and set aside for the First Nations in the Royal Proclamation of 1763.^[1][2] The British government had contemplated establishing an Indian barrier state in a portion of the reserve west of the Appalachian Mountains, bounded by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and the Great Lakes. British officials aspired to establish such a state even after the region was assigned to the United States in the Treaty of Paris (1783) ending the American Revolutionary War, but abandoned their efforts in 1814 after losing military control of the region during the War of 1812.^[3]

In the modern United States, it consisted of all the territory north of Florida and New Orleans that was east of the Mississippi River and west of the Eastern Continental Divide in the Appalachian Mountains, and that formerly comprised the eastern half of Louisiana (New France). In modern Canada, it consisted of all the land immediately north of the Great Lakes and south of Rupert's Land of the Hudson's Bay Company, and also a buffer between the Province of Quebec and Rupert's Land stretching from Lake Nipissing to Newfoundland.

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 organized much of the new territorial cessions in North America to Britain into three colonies: East Florida, West Florida, and Quebec. The remainder of the new British territory was left to Native Americans. The delineation of the Eastern Divide, following the Allegheny Ridge of the Appalachians, confirmed the limit to British settlement established by the Treaty of Easton of 1758, before Pontiac's War. Additionally, all European settlers in the territory, who were mostly French, were supposed to quit the territory or obtain official permission to remain. Many of the settlers moved to New Orleans and the French land on the west side of the Mississippi, especially St. Louis, which in turn had been ceded secretly to Spain to become Louisiana (New Spain). However, many of the settlers remained and the British did not actively attempt to evict them.^{[citation needed]}

In 1768, lands west of the Alleghenies and south of the Ohio River were ceded to the colonies by the Cherokee with the Treaty of Hard Labour and by the Six Nations with the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. However, several other aboriginal nations, especially the Shawnee and Mingo, continued to inhabit and claim their lands that other tribes had sold to the British. This conflict caused Dunmore's War in 1774, which was ended by the Treaty of Camp Charlotte, in which these nations agreed to accept the Ohio River as the new boundary.

Restrictions on settlement were to become a flash point in the American Revolutionary War, following the Henderson Purchase of much of Kentucky from the Cherokee in 1775. The renegade Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe did not agree to the sale, nor did the Royal Government in London, which forbade settlement in the region. As an act of revolution in defiance of the British Crown, white pioneer settlers began pouring into Kentucky in 1776, opposed by Dragging Canoe in the Cherokee–American Wars, which continued until 1794.