Monday, December 15, 2014

McGillivrays In The South


From Pioneers of the Old Southwest:...:

Lachlan McGillivray was a Highlander. He landed in Charleston in 1735 at the age of sixteen and presently joined a trader's caravan as packhorse boy.

Jim's Photo Of Charleston, SC, Houses
A few years later he married a woman of the Creeks. On many occasions he defeated French and Spanish plots with the Creeks for the extermination of the colonists in Georgia and South Carolina. His action in the final war with the French (1760), when the Indian terror was raging, is typical. News came that four thousand Creek warriors, reinforced by French Choctaws, were about to fall on the southern settlements. At the risk of their lives, McGillivray and another trader named Galphin hurried from Charleston to their trading house on the Georgia frontier. Thither they invited several hundred Creek warriors, feasted and housed them for several days, and finally won them from their purpose.

McGillivray had a brilliant son, Alexander, who about this time became a chief in his mother's nation perhaps on this very occasion, as it was an Indian custom, in making a brotherhood pact, to send a son to dwell in the brother's house. We shall meet that son again as the Chief of the Creeks and the terrible scourge of Georgia and Tennessee in the dark days of the Revolutionary War.


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