McGillivray, it will be remembered, was the son of Adair's friend Lachlan McGillivray, the trader, and a Creek woman whose sire had been a French officer.

A brilliant and beautiful youth, he had given his father a pride in him which is generally denied to the fathers of sons with Indian blood in them.

The Highland trader had spared nothing in his son's education and had placed him, after his school days, in the business office of the large trading establishment of which he himself was a member.

At about the age of seventeen Alexander had become a chieftain in his mother's nation; and doubtless it is he who appears shortly afterwards in the Colonial Records as the White Leader whose influence is seen to have been at work for friendship between the colonists and the tribes.

When the Revolutionary War broke out, Lachlan McGillivray, like many of the old traders who had served British interests so long and so faithfully, held to the British cause.