The Iroquois were held loyal by Sir William
Johnson and his deputy, George Croghan, the "King of Traders."
The Chickasaws followed their "best-beloved" trader, James Adair;
and among the Creeks another trader, Lachlan McGillivray, wielded
a potent influence.
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. 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.
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