It may seem counter-intuitive, but these footnotes on Fixing History, Chapter 5, lead us directly back to the French and Indian War.  That conflict started in 1754, and in 1756 it was compounded by the Seven Years’ War in Europe.  (For the complete series index, click here.)

1. Britain and France had to prosecute both conflicts on two continents.  They did so by enlisting native tribes to fight for them.  As there were dozens of major native people groups to choose from, the options were wide open.  But what was expedient for the current conflict caused problems for the American colonists in future years. 

2. The colonists expected that after the British won the war with France, they would be allowed to colonize in the formerly French regions.  This was not to be.  Britain issued the Proclamation Line of 1763 that specifically forbade settlement past the Appalachian Mountains.  A number of treaties adjusted that line, including the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, which allowed Daniel Boone to begin a settlement in Kentucky in the late 1760s.

3.  1774 where our story diverges from history, because in it, American Revolution never happened.  Britain continued its course of revising treaties with the native tribes.  Our story cites a fictional 1798 treaty as a possible outcome of that dynamic.  Eventually, King George III passed away, and his son George IV inherited the throne.  His other son, William IV, took over when brother George IV died in 1830.  That means William would be the “Sovereign of British America” when our story happens in 1833.

4.  Regarding the ‘f’ in place of the ‘s’ in old documents: Wikipedia makes a valiant attempt at defining when the so-called ‘long s’ is used, but I found the most helpful document to be a side-by-side comparison of editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica.  I followed that as a pattern.  Printers had mostly given up using the ‘long s’ in typeset documents by the early 1800s, but it persisted in handwriting for another fifty years. 

5.  The American population of Sacramento, California had to figure out how to live at the confluence of two large rivers.  While they gave ready shipping access to the San Francisco Bay, the rivers also flooded regularly.  The native populations knew when to evacuate.  Not so the settlers.  I discovered the Great Flood of 1862 during research for my historical novels set in that era.  I expanded on it with one of my first blog posts, where I also mentioned the flood of 1850.  Lost in the shuffle of summarizing was the flood of March 7, 1852, so that’s the one I introduced at the end of this chapter. The saga will continue in Chapter 6.