As most high school students might recall, the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 gave Britain mastery of the Atlantic Seaboard and Canada, while France, the loser of that war, had to abandon its territories in Canada and colonial America, and remove itself from the New World.

Not surprisingly, the war did not result in the removal of the Indians. Indians had, after all, been in North America longer than the French and British combined.

Thus, in 1763, a rather awkward balance of power existed among the American colonists, the Indians and the British Parliament in London.

With the French gone, the American colonists, who were rapidly growing in population, saw an opportunity to expand westward where land was cheap and plentiful. So they began streaming into Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Michigan, much to the consternation of the Indians, who considered those lands their sacred hunting grounds.

In retaliation, Indian tribes began attacking these white settlers. Among the attackers was an Ottawa chief named Pontiac, whose armed rebellion -- Pontiac's Rebellion -- wreaked havoc from Ohio to the Great Lakes.

For its part, the British government became alarmed at this escalation of fighting between its colonial subjects and its Indian friends. Having just fought one costly war that began in part due to territorial disputes between colonists and Indians, neither King George III nor Parliament wanted to fight another.

So this week (Oct. 7) in 1763 they issued the Proclamation of 1763, which was designed to separate the colonists and Indians by prohibiting colonial settlement of all Indian lands west of the Alleghenies.

A secondary goal was to prevent the colonists from expanding too far inland because, as British authorities saw it, the more geographically spread out their colonial subjects became, the harder they would be to control.

Alas for the British, the colonists defied this proclamation on the grounds that -- as historian Barbara Tuchman so nicely put it -- "No faraway government of lords in silk knee-breeches had the right to prevent their taking possession of land they could conquer with axe and rifle."

Thus, Britain could only enforce its proclamation by sending more troops to America. The cost of this new army, when added to the staggering cost of the French and Indian War and the Indian rebellions that followed, left Parliament no choice but to levy new taxes on the colonists as a way to make them pay their share of these military expenses.

Those taxes, of course, had names like the Stamp Act and the Townsend Acts, which -- as most high school students also recall -- led to another rather costly war involving American colonists and British soldiers.

Only in this war they fought against each other.

Kauffmann's e-mail address is bruce@historylessons.net.