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Blue. Below, and thank you for joining the American Revolution.

Today, episode 18, Pontiacs War. Now last week I talked about a few issues involving religion,

taxes, and trade, but no issue seemed more important to colonists than access

to new lands.

After all, that was what started the last war.

Colonists were more ready than ever for more expansion.

In some cases, the new settlements were relatively uncontroversial.

New England settlers moved by the thousands into the Newfoundland areas where French-speaking

Acadians had been expelled a few years earlier. By 1762, there were over 8,500

settlers in Nova Scotia, most of them newly settled from New England.

Other settlements not only raised issues with the Indians, but revived age-old conflicts between the colonies regarding their borders.

In New Hampshire, Governor Benning Wentworth provided land grants for more than 100 townships,

over 3 million acres west of the Connecticut River, land which New York claimed for itself and issued

competing land claims.

This would lead to fights a few years later that I will discuss in a future episode. Connecticut, which claimed its borders stretched all the way to the

Pacific Ocean, began to populate new settlements in the Wyoming Valley, the same area that Pennsylvania

had left, unofficially at least, to the eastern Delaware in order to secure the peace.

Other new settlements along the southern shores of the Great Lakes encroached on Mohawk and other Iroquois lands.

A few settlers even moved out to Detroit and further into the Illinois region, staking

claims near former French outposts now manned by the British Army.

Of course, the age-old fight over the Ohio Valley returned to heavy contention.

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