The Royal Proclamation of 1763 forbade the settlement of colonists west of the Appalachian crest, but by then decades of warfare over control of the North American interior had reduced the power of the native people to keep settlers out of these lands now designated "Indian Territory." The Iroquois in particular faced tremendous pressure to cede lands to the advancing colonists, and through the Fort Stanwix Treaty of 1768 they did just that, ceding to British authorities land south of the Susquehanna and Ohio Rivers, land they claimed as theirs but did not occupy. It was a convenient pact. Lands of other tribes were sold in order to secure for the Iroquois their ancestral lands in New York State. Unfortunately for the Iroquois, however, this situation did not last: the American Revolution increased the pressure to dispossess native people of their land, and most tribes (including the Iroquois) supported Great Britain in order to hold off American settlers. When the United States was victorious, the Americans forced some Iroquois into new cessions in the Fort Stanwix Treaty of 1784, whereby natives agreed to cede western Pennsylvania and Ohio to the new American government. The pattern of 1768 had been repeated. The 1784 treaty was considered by almost all native people—including many Iroquois—as being signed under duress by people who were not recognized by the native people as having authority to sign treaties with the government. The questionable legality of the 1784 cessions and subsequent American encroachment on the ceded land in Pennsylvania and Ohio led directly to the Indian wars of the 1780s and 1790s. Control over these disputed lands was not settled until after the War of 1812.
