ctaws and Chickasaws and the
Southern Cherokees. He had long been wooed by the Louisiana authorities,
but there is no evidence that he had made alliance with them prior to
the Revolution.

* Probably about 1741 or 1742. Some writers give 1739 and others
1746. His father landed in Charleston, Pickett ("History of Alabama")
says, in 1735, and was then only sixteen.

Early in the war he joined the British, received a colonel's commission,
and led his formidable Creeks against the people of Georgia. When the
British were driven from the Back Countries, McGillivray, in his British
uniform, went on with the war. When the British made peace, McGillivray
exchanged his British uniform for a Spanish one and went on with the
war. In later days, when he had forced Congress to pay him for his
father's confiscated property and had made peace, he wore the uniform
of an American Brigadier General; but he did not keep the peace, never
having intended to keep it. It was not until he had seen the Spanish
plots collapse and had realized that the Americans were to dominate the
land, that the White Leader ceased from war and urged the youths of his
tribe to adopt American civilization.

Spent from hate and wasted with dissipation, he retired at last to the
spot where Lachlan had set up his first Creek home. Here he lived his
few remaining days in a house which he built on the site of the old
ruined cabin about which still stood the little grove of apple trees his
father had planted. He died at the age of fifty of a fever contracted
while he was on a business errand in Pensacola. Among those who
visited him in his last years, one has left this description of him:
"Dissipation has sapped a constitution originally delicate and feeble.
He possesses an atticism of diction aided by a liberal education, a
great fund of wit and humor meliorated by a perfect good nature and
politeness." Set beside that kindly picture this rough etching by James
Robertson: "The biggest devil among them [the Spaniards] is the half
Spaniard, half Frenchman, half Scotchman and altogether Creek scoundrel,
McGillivray."

How indefatigably McGillivray did his work we know from the bloody
annals of the years which followed the British-American peace, when the
men of the Cumberland and of Franklin were on the defensive continually.
How cleverly Mire played his personal role we discover in the letters
addressed to him by Sevier and Robertson. These letters show th