Both the British and the French had Indian allies during the war in general the Algonquian-speaking tribes favoured the British and their Iroquoian enemies the French. Although the setting is in what would today be part of the eastern United States, the film is officially classified as a Western because at this period much of upstate New York was still regarded as the Wild West.

(I know that by the fifties it was becoming acceptable to show a white hero in love with a beautiful Indian maiden, provided she was played by a white actress, as was done in 'Broken Arrow' and 'Across the Wide Missouri', but the opposite scenario would still have been taboo). He is a white man who grew up among American Indians such characters were popular with the makers of Westerns because they possessed all the hunting and tracking skills of the Indians and represented something exotic, yet could still be shown in romantic relationships with white heroines without breaching the Production Code's strictures against miscegenation.

In this film, however, the main character is always simply referred to as 'the Pathfinder', and his real name is never mentioned. Like 'The Last of the Mohicans', 'The Pathfinder' was one of James Fenimore Cooper's 'Leatherstocking' novels, all centred upon the character of Natty Bumppo, aka Hawkeye. (Others include the Daniel Day-Lewis 'The Last of the Mohicans' from 1992, another version of that story from 1936, which I have not seen, and 'North-West Passage' from the 1950s). Even the War of Independence has not been a particularly popular subject, despite its central role in American history, and 'The Pathfinder' is one of the few films about the French and Indian War. The opening up of the eastern half of the North American continent during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century has inspired comparatively few films compared with the vast number about 'how the West was won'. For some reason, Hollywood has always taken more interest in the Old West than in the Even Older East.

Original pathfinder movie