The term Sixty Years' War is used by academic historians to provide a framework for viewing this era as a whole, rather than as isolated events.

Pontiac found allies willing to attack British forts from Detroit in modern day Michigan, to Pennsylvania and New York, and even down the Mississippi.

The war spilled onto the frontier, with British military commanders in Canada working with North American Indian allies to provide a strategic diversion from the primary battles in the east coastal colonies.

A large confederacy of Native American nations resisted settlement and sought to establish the Ohio River as the boundary between themselves and the United States.

After years of minor skirmishes between militias and Native Americans, the United States launched a series of punitive campaigns deep into the Great Lakes region.

The war between the United States and British Canada eventually ended after numerous bloody border engagements as a stalemate, after resisting a set of American invasions seeking to assimilate the northern Canadian British and French colonials into the independent American union of states, a prime goal of the original western "War Hawks" agitators, south of the border.

After the peace treaty signed in Ghent reached North America in 1815, joint efforts began establishing the Great Lakes as a permanent boundary between the two nations.

Andrew Cayton argues that while the wars in the Great Lakes region were downplayed by colonial powers along the Atlantic coast, their influence is immense.

The Ohio River continued to act as a border between southern states and the Northwest Territory, where slavery had been outlawed, setting regional differences that would help shape the American Civil War.