Known in the United States as the “French and Indian War,” the mid-18th-century conflict between France and England called the Seven Years’ War in Europe took place both in North America and on European soil. Although the Seven Years’ War was not fought in Michigan, when France was defeated (formalized by the Treaty of Paris in 1763) they were forced to give up their sites in the Pays d’en haut, including Forts Michilimackinac, Pontchartrain, and St. Joseph. Although the British took advantage of the trade networks that the Native peoples had developed and used along with the French, English attitudes toward the French and their culture were mostly negative. Thus, the British and later the Americans tried to stand apart from the region’s French heritage as they constructed an Anglicized world.
These three principal sites of French settlement in Michigan fared differently after the coming of the British and then the Americans. The French were deported from the St. Joseph area in 1780, and Americans faced few impediments to settlement after 1830 when much of the land was forcibly ceded by the Natives to the U.S. government. At Michilimackinac, English traders anxious to take advantage of the new leadership arrived in advance of British troops in 1761. Once these troops arrived, a period of complex and sometimes violent adjustments among the French, British, Odawa, and Ojibwe inhabitants began. Though the British remained in charge, French and French-Canadian traders and their families continued to live at Michilimackinac, and the fur trade, which remained the principal economic engine at the Straits, continued to bear the imprint of its French origins.
The site of Fort Pontchartrain and Detroit had its own distinctive pattern of change: with a sizable French population that resisted Anglicization, the people there retained their language and remained rooted in their old ways of farming and exploiting the land and its resources, seen not just in the immediate Detroit area but also to the south on the River Raisin. A continued influx of French-Canadians helped to maintain French practices.
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