In southwestern Quebec, the American forces had much better success there owing to the leadership of Virginia militia leader George Rogers Clark.

In 1778, 200 men under Clark, supplied and supported mainly by Virginia, came down the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky, marched across southern Illinois, and then captured Kaskaskia without loss of life.

Of these, roughly 50,000 Loyalists settled in the British North American colonies, which then consisted of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Prince Edward Island (created 1769).

The Loyalists who settled in western Nova Scotia wanted political freedom from Halifax, so Britain split off the colony of New Brunswick in 1784.

Sir Alexander Mackenzie led the first starting out in 1792 overland from Lake Athabasca via the Peace and Fraser Rivers, reaching the Pacific ocean near present-day Bella Coola on 20 July 1793.

[8] Mackenzie became the first European to reach the Pacific overland north of the Rio Grande which preceded the Lewis and Clark Expedition by twelve years.

These men pushed into the wilderness territories of the Rocky Mountains and Interior Plateau and all the way to the Strait of Georgia on the Pacific Coast expanding British North America Westward.

The War Office, after 1854 and until the 1867 confederation of the Dominion of Canada, split the military administration of the British colonial and foreign stations into nine districts: North America and North Atlantic; West Indies; Mediterranean; West Coast of Africa and South Atlantic; South Africa; Egypt and The Sudan; Indian Ocean; Australasia; and China.

[10] Following the war, the Royal Navy spent a dozen years charting the barrier reef around Bermuda to discover the channel that enabled access to the northern lagoon, the Great Sound, and Hamilton Harbour.

Prior to 1784, the Bermuda Garrison had been placed under the military Commander-in-Chief America in New York during the American War of Independence, but was to become part of the Nova Scotia Command until the 1860s (in 1815, Lieutenant-General Sir George Prevost was Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief in and over the Provinces of Upper-Canada, Lower-Canada, Nova-Scotia, and New-Brunswick, and their several Dependencies, Vice-Admiral of the same, Lieutenant-General and Commander of all His Majesty’s Forces in the said Provinces of Lower Canada and Upper-Canada, Nova-Scotia and New-Brunswick, and their several Dependencies, and in the islands of Newfoundland, Prince Edward, Cape Breton and the Bermudas, &c. &c. &c. Beneath Prevost, the staff of the British Army in the Provinces of Nova-Scotia, New-Brunswick, and their Dependencies, including the Islands of Newfoundland, Cape Breton, Prince Edward and Bermuda were under the Command of Lieutenant-General Sir John Coape Sherbrooke.

[33] During the war, unsuccessful attempts were made by the Americans to invade Upper Canada, after overestimating the amount of support they would receive from Canadian colonists.

In English Canada, it is seen as a victory against American invasions, with heroic legends surrounding many of the participants (such as Isaac Brock and Laura Secord) and battles (especially those in the Niagara Peninsula).

The American Revolution led to intense competition between the British and the U.S. By the 1830s changing fashions in Europe had begun a steep decline in fur prices and an overall collapse in the market.

This area also became insufficient, and the trade expanded westward, most notably to the Ottawa River system, which by 1845 provided three quarters of the timber shipped from Quebec City.

After the War of 1812, the first half of the 19th century saw the growth of political reform movements in both Upper and Lower Canada, largely influenced by American and French republicanism.

[35] The radical reformers, such as William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau demanded equality or a complete break from British rule and the establishment of a republic.

A second rebellion by the Frères chasseurs of Robert Nelson broke out one year later, but the British put it down as well, with much loss of life and destruction of property.

He nonetheless had to make some concessions to win support, and the most notable of these was persuading the Colonial Office to grant amnesty to the rebels of 1837–38, and to abandon forced anglicization of the French-speaking population.

Support for independence was strengthened by events such as the Battle of Ridgeway, an 1866 invasion into Ontario by some 1500 Irish nationalists which was repulsed largely by local militia.

The competing imperial claims between Russia, Spain and Britain were compounded by treaties between the former two powers and the United States, which pressed for the annexation of most of what is now British Columbia, not recognizing the title of the many First Nations present.

With the signing of the Oregon Treaty in 1846, the United States agreed to establish its northern border with western British North America along the 49th parallel.

[41] Almost overnight, some ten to twenty thousand men moved into the region around present-day Yale, British Columbia, sparking the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush.

In order to normalize its jurisdiction, and undercut any Hudsons's Bay Company claims to the resource wealth of the mainland, the Crown colony of British Columbia was established August 2, 1858.

They questioned the Hudson's Bay Company's tenure of Rupert's Land and the Arctic territories, and launched a series of exploring expeditions to familiarize themselves and the settler population with the geography and climate of the region.

In 1854, the Governor General of British North America, Lord Elgin, signed a significant trade agreement with the United States on behalf of the colonies.

[43] Effective governance of the United Province of Canada after 1840 required a careful balancing of the interests of French and English- speaking populations; and between Catholics and Protestants.

A delegation from the Canadas made its way to a conference being held in Charlottetown in 1864 by representatives from the Maritimes who had intended to hold discussions regarding a federation of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

Federation emerged from multiple impulses: the British wanted Canada to defend itself; the Maritimes needed railroad connections, which were promised in 1867; British-Canadian nationalism sought to unite the lands into one country, dominated by the English language and British culture; many French-Canadians saw an opportunity to exert political control within a new largely French-speaking Quebec.

On a political level, there was a desire for the expansion of responsible government and elimination of the legislative deadlock between Upper and Lower Canada, and their replacement with provincial legislatures in a federation.

[47] Even Queen Victoria was supportive, noting "...the impossibility of our being able to hold Canada, but we must struggle for it; and by far the best solution would be to let it go as an independent kingdom under an English prince.