In 1749 the Marquis of Galissoniere was governor general of Canada.

The treaty of Aix la Chapelle had been signed; but this had done nothing to settle the vexed question of the boundaries between the English and French colonies.
Meanwhile, the English traders from Pennsylvania and Virginia were poaching on the domain which France claimed as hers, ruining the French fur trade, and making friends with the Indian allies of Canada.

Worse still, farmers were pushing westward and settling in the valley of the Ohio.
In order to drive these back, to impress the natives with the power of France, and to bring them back to their allegiance, the governor of Canada, in the summer of 1749, sent Celoron de Bienville.

He had with him fourteen officers, twenty French soldiers, a hundred and eighty Canadians, and a band of Indians.

They embarked in twenty-three birch-bark canoes, and, pushing up the Saint Lawrence, reached Lake Ontario, stopping for a time at the French fort of Frontenac, and avoiding the rival English port of Oswego on the southern shore, where a trade in beaver skins, disastrous to French interests, was being carried on, for the English traders sold their goods at vastly lower prices than those which the French had charged.
On the 6th of July the party reached Niagara, where there was a small French fort, and thence, carrying their canoes round the cataract, launched them upon Lake Erie.