The difficulty of crossing the mountains was not insuperable, but the French and Indian War, followed by Pontiac's Conspiracy, made outlying frontier settlement dangerous if not impossible.

The arbitrary restriction of western settlement by the Proclamation of 1763 did not stop the more adventurous but did hold back the mass of the population until near the time of the Revolution, when a few bands of settlers moved into Kentucky and Tennessee and rendered important but inconspicuous service in the fighting.

But so long as the title to that territory was in doubt no considerable body of people would move into it, and it was not until the Treaty of Peace in 1783 determined that the western country as far as the Mississippi River was to belong to the United States that the dammed-up population broke over the mountains in a veritable flood.
The western country and its people presented no easy problem to the United States: how to hold those people when the pull was strong to draw them from the Union; how to govern citizens so widely separated from the older communities; and, of most immediate importance, how to hold the land itself.

It was, indeed, the question of the ownership of the land beyond the mountains which delayed the ratification of the Articles of Confederation.

Some of the States, by right of their colonial charter grants "from sea to sea," were claiming large parts of the western region.