1763.] THE PEACE OF PARIS. 195 



West Indies ; and of these, several were already 

 ordered to England, to be disbanded. There 

 remained barely troops enough to furnish feeble 

 garrisons for the various forts on the frontier and 

 in the Indian country.^ At the head of this dilapi- 

 dated army was Sir Jeffrey Amherst, who had 

 achieved the reduction of Canada, and clinched 

 the nail which Wolfe had driven. In some 

 respects he was well fitted for the emergency; 

 but, on the other hand, he held the Indians in 

 supreme contempt, and his arbitrary treatment of 

 them and total want of every quality of concilia- 

 tion where they were concerned, had had no little 

 share in exciting them to war. 



While the war was on the eve of breaking out, 

 an event occurred which had afterwards an impor* 

 tant effect upon its progress, — the signing of the 

 treaty of peace at Paris, on the tenth of February, 

 1763. By this treaty France resigned her claims 

 to the territories east of the Mississippi, and that 

 great river now became the western boundary of 

 the British colonial possessions. In portioning out 

 her new acquisitions into separate governments, 

 England left the valley of the Ohio and the adja- 

 cent regions as an Indian domain, and by the 

 proclamation of the seventh of October following, 

 the intrusion of settlers upon these lands was 

 strictly prohibited. Could these just and neces- 

 sary measures have been sooner adopted, it is 

 probable that the Indian war might have been 



1 Mante, 485. 



