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.
The bold deeds of the early traders, if all were to be told, would require a book as long as the huge volume written by James Adair, the "English Chickasaw." Adair was an Englishman who entered the Indian trade in 1785 and launched upon the long and dangerous trail from Charleston to the upper towns of the Cherokees, situated in the present Monroe County, Tennessee.

Thus he was one of the earliest pioneers of the Old Southwest; and he was Tennessee's first author.