fter 1763, treaties between Indigenous nations and the Crown evolved from treaties of peace and friendship into treaties for the acquisition of lands by the Crown. The Crown assumed that it already had sovereignty over the Indigenous nations and their territories in eastern North America and began to negotiate what it regarded as land cession treaties in accordance with the provisions of the Royal Proclamation.
During this period, the Indigenous nations were generally left to govern themselves internally in accordance with their own political structures and laws. Their complete independence as sovereign nations was nonetheless reduced as the Crown extended its jurisdiction over them, usually without their consent and often in violation of alliance treaties such as the 1664 Two-Row-Wampum Treaty and the 1764 Treaty of Niagara.
In 1776, the Thirteen Colonies declared their independence from Britain. The resulting American Revolutionary War ended in 1783 with the Treaty of Versailles, whereby Britain acknowledged the independence of the United States and agreed upon the present international boundary that extended from the Atlantic Ocean west to the Lake of the Woods.
After 1783, British North America was geographically confined to the region north of the international boundary. The Crown needed land for British settlers, especially the United Empire Loyalists who fled to Canada from the United States. It therefore began to negotiate land cession treaties in what is now southern Ontario. As settlement extended west and north, more treaties were negotiated, including the Robinson-Huron and Robinson-Superior treaties of 1850.
Further west, the Hudson's Bay Company continued to exercise its authority and assert the trade monopoly that the Crown had granted to it by the Rupert's Land Charter of 1670. However, this monopoly was nonetheless challenged by its competitor, the North West Company, which operated out of Montreal, until the two companies merged in 1821 under the banner of the Hudson's Bay Company. In the 1810s, the Red River Settlement was established under the authority of the Hudson's Bay Company at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers where the city of Winnipeg now stands.
Towards the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, the Métis people began to emerge as a distinct nation. They developed a cultural, social and political consciousness and organization separate from First Nations and Europeans. In 1849, they successfully challenged the Hudson Bay Company's fur trade monopoly when Guillaume Sayer, who had been charged with illegally trading furs, was released without any sentence by the Company's court in the Red River Settlement.
Britain and the United States settled their western territorial claims by the Convention of 1818 and the Oregon Boundary Treaty of 1846, which together extended the international boundary along the 49th parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Salish Sea.
From 1846 until the creation of the colony of British Columbia in 1858, the Hudson's Bay Company exercised governmental authority on behalf of the Crown in the areas of the West Coast that were under the Crown's control. From 1850 to 1854, Governor James Douglas entered into 14 treaties with Indigenous nations on Vancouver Island to acquire some of their lands. These treaties established reserves for these nations and guaranteed their hunting and fishing rights.