Len Barcousky, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (12-4-04):

When in 1754 the French built Fort Duquesne, a sturdy log fort at the Forks of the Ohio, the British perceived a deadly threat to their coast-hugging colonies.

But what seemed like French aggression to royal governors in Williamsburg and Philadelphia was more a panicky defensive move, according to historian Jonathan Dull.

Dull, who has been editing the papers of Benjamin Franklin for the past 27 years, was one of a dozen speakers recently at a French and Indian War seminar on "Cultures in Conflict." The event drew more than 100 history buffs, re-enactors, park rangers, historians and journalists to Shenandoah University in Winchester, Va. The location was appropriate. Winchester was where George Washington placed his headquarters for overseeing a chain of frontier forts built to protect British colonists from Indian raiders.

Overreacting to the presence of a handful of English traders in the area around modern-day Pittsburgh, the French government had concluded that the British were seeking to drive a wedge between its territories in Canada and Louisiana. They began to build a series of forts in the Ohio Valley. " France went to war to save Canada," Dull said.

And what a conflict it became. Eventually spreading to Europe, Asia and Africa as the Seven Years' War, it is often called the first world war.

Control of the land around what became Pittsburgh was a prime objective in the early years of the struggle, which began 250 years ago. At what is now called Jumonville Glen in Fayette County, Washington, wearing a British uniform and nominally commanding militia and Indian troops, killed or captured all but one member of a French force sent out from Fort Duquesne.

Understandably, that hostile act angered the French who sent out a larger army and forced Washington's surrender at Fort Necessity.

The classic, and maybe only, joke about the conflict is: "Who won the French and Indian War? The French or the Indians?" The reality, of course, is that the war in North America embroiled French and British regulars, French-speaking Canadians, Colonial militiamen and almost a dozen Native American tribes. And it was this larger cast of characters that were the subjects of attention in Winchester.

"Who won?" turns out to be a really complicated question.

At first blush it seems like the British won. They claimed Canada, Florida and some rich Caribbean islands as spoils of war. They gained nominal control of the Ohio Valley, although they had to make vague promises, never kept, to their Indian allies to keep white settlers on the east side of the Alleghenies.

What the British soon found was that protecting a worldwide territorial empire was very expensive. That meant new taxes, and those new taxes produced restive colonials. While American farmers and merchants saw themselves as full partners in a crusade to defeat the French, the short-sighted British government treated them as ungrateful, greedy subjects.

When the war started, the Iroquois Confederacy, based in upstate New York, controlled a huge swathe of North America. Its tribal council had a 150-year tradition of successful diplomacy with the British and French. For much of the war, its component tribes stayed neutral.

War's end found their influence in the Ohio Valley reduced but their own villages mostly untouched. With the departure of the French, however, they had lost much of their bargaining power. They became overly dependent on the English Indian agent Sir William Johnson for trade goods and gifts. "Not warfare, but welfare marked the end of Iroquois autonomy," explained Timothy Shannon, an associate professor of history at Gettysburg College....