Siege of Fort Pitt the territory west of the Appalachian Mountains as they had agreed, the British remained on Native lands and reinforced their forts while settlers continued to push westward. The attacks led by Pontiac against the British in early May 1763, near Fort Detroit, mark what is generally considered to be the beginning of Pontiac's War. The siege of Fort Pitt and numerous other British forts during the spring and summer of 1763 were part of an effort by American Indians to reclaim their territory by driving the British out of the Ohio Country and back across the Appalachian Mountains. While many
Illinois campaign the region. When the American Revolutionary War began, in 1775, the Ohio River marked the border between the Illinois Country and Kentucky, an area recently settled by American colonists. The British had originally sought to keep American Indians out of the war, but in 1777 Lieutenant Governor Hamilton received instructions to recruit and arm Indian war parties to raid the Kentucky settlements, opening a western front in the war with the rebel colonists. "From 1777 on," wrote historian Bernard Sheehan, "the line of western settlements was under almost constant assault by white-led [Indian] raiding parties that had originated at Detroit."