The McGillivrays were one of the prominent families springing from pre-Revolutionary marriages between the white traders and backwoodsmen and the Southern Indians. The rapid progress made by the Cherokee and Creek nations can largely be traced to such unions, as the white stock invariably was excellent. The descendants from such mixed marriages are not to be confused with some of the Western squaw men’s offsprings of later times. The children of the Southern mixed-marriages, as in the case of Alexander McGillivray, were sent away to seaboard cities, or to Europe, to be educated. These returned with advanced ideas which they soon promulgated among their mothers’ people. One result in the South was an early introduction of schoolhouses and the importation of teachers. McGillivray was an excellent type of the fruit of such a mixed marriage. From his beautiful half-breed mother, Sehoy Marchand, he had inherited the vivacity and audacity, the brilliancy and polish of the French, and the more reserved traits of the Creeks. From his father, Lachlan McGillivray, he received a shrewd Scottish mind and an ability to solve complicated problems and profit thereby. He was born at Little Talassee in 1746 and was a year younger than Sevier. Of him a President of the United States, more than a century later, was to write— “Perhaps the most gifted man who was ever born on the soil of Alabama.”[1] If he was actuated by great ambitions, he entertained them legitimately; for his mother’s family of the Wind was very powerful; by inheritance and tutelage he was propelled to aspire to high things. His mental equipment, too, was that of a man licensed to dream of lasting success and influence. If he was crafty, his need, nay, the instinct of self-preservation, required craft. James Robertson, Sevier’s old friend, characterized him as being— “Half Spaniard, half Frenchman, half Scotchman, and altogether a Creek scoundrel.” But Robertson was biased in his judgment because of his hatred for Spain; and there was a strain of Spanish blood in the polyglot emperor. Others of his generation pictured him as fiend and treacherous in his dealings. These charges are not substantiated by any known facts and resulted from the stress and heat of the times. That he played one power against others with consummate adroitness is a matter of historic record—England, Spain and America. He wore the military trappings of the British, he was fond of his Spanish uniform, and finally the insignia of an American officer; the last after Washington made him a brigadier general. But at the time of Chucky Jack’s visit to Little Talassee he was all for Spain.