The Real First World War And The Making Of America   The Seven
Years’ War brought about that shift and, in doing so, opened a
third American epoch, which lasted from the mid-eighteenth
century to the beginning of the twentieth. The shift was not
immediately perceptible, for from beginning to end the war
reflected the importance of Indian power. The fortunes of war in
North America ebbed and flowed according to when the Indian
allies of the Europeans decided to engage or withdraw. When, in
1758, the French-allied Indians on the Ohio chose to make a
separate peace, Anglo-American forces could at last seize the
Forks of the Ohio, the site of modern Pittsburgh and the
strategic key to the transappalachian West, bringing peace to
the Virginia-Pennsylvania frontier. The following year the
Iroquois League shifted from neutrality to alliance with the
British, permitting the Anglo-Americans to take Fort Niagara and
with it crucial control of the Great Lakes. In 1760 Iroquois
diplomats preceding Gen. Jeffery Amherst’s