By the mid-1700s, France and Britain were both playing chicken over who was going to control the major trade routes and Native American alliances that were possible in central North America. 

France was all like, "I've got the Mississippi River Valley and the Great Lakes." Great Britain, never one to stand down from a fight, puffed out its chest and said, "Oh yeah? Well, I've got the Eastern Seaboard and the most direct route to the ocean. So there."

While they duked it out over who was the most powerful, several Native American tribes tried to get in on the fight. As was typical for the Native Americans around this time, though, they were mostly ignored—until Britain or France needed their help, of course. 

At this point, the Native Americans knew that they couldn't make a military stand on their own against either European power, so their best shot was to ally with the side they thought would secure a better future for them.

So, three great empires—France, Great Britain, and the Iroquois League—clashed in the backcountry of Pennsylvania in a war fought between 1755 and 1760 that largely determined the future of the North American continent.

Enter: The French and Indian War. Who will win control of the eastern U.S.?

The United States wasn't predestined to become the nation that it did—a diverse and dynamic, English-speaking, continent-spanning power on the world stage. 

Claims of Manifest Destiny notwithstanding, things could've easily turned out quite differently. America became the nation that it is only because its history unfolded in a particular way—because certain crucial events, large and small, occurred at specific times and places. The French and Indian War, though nearly forgotten today, was one of those large events. The war, fought when America was still little more than a rustic outpost on the far periphery of the British Empire, made everything that happened after possible. 

If the French and Indian War had unfolded along a slightly different path—and there were many times when it easily could have—the United States as we know it probably wouldn't exist.

If the war had unfolded differently, you may have ended up reading this in French, not English...or maybe you'd be reading it in Mohawk. You might now need a passport to cross from Pennsylvania into Ohio. You might now celebrate Tanaghrisson's or Pontiac's birthday, rather than George Washington's, as a national holiday. Everything would be different.

On a fateful spring day in 1754, a young military officer named George Washington led his regiment of Virginia provincials into battle against French troops near the Forks of the Ohio River, in the wilds of western Pennsylvania. They didn't know it, but the destiny of America hung in the balance.