Lachlan McGillivray

Lachlan McGillivray (Dunmaglass, Inverness, Scotland, c. 1718 – 1799) was a prosperous fur trader and planter in colonial Georgia with interests that extended from Savannah to what is now central Alabama. He was the father of Alexander McGillivray and the great-uncle of William McIntosh and William Weatherford, three of the most powerful and historically important Native American chiefs among the Creek of the Southeast.

Details of Lachlan McGillivray's early life are sketchy; he left no account and his biographers often romanticized his tale. They claimed that he was fleeing the Highland rebellion of 1745 and that he arrived penniless in a strange land, though probably neither of these is true. He was born into the McGillivray (or M'Gillivray, as he himself wrote the name) family of the Clan Chattan, a large Scottish clan traditionally led by members of the McIntosh family.

More probable is that he emigrated in the late 1730s to either Charleston, South Carolina, or Augusta, Georgia, where members of his family had been engaging in the Indian trade for a generation. He may have arrived as an indentured servant to his relative Farquhar McGillivray, a merchant with interests along the southern Atlantic seaboard. Records attest that Farquhar McGillivray employed indentured servants, and it was not uncommon for such arrangements to be made between relatives.

Lachlan McGillivray was one of several Scottish Highlanders recruited by James Oglethorpe to act as settler-soldiers protecting the frontiers of Georgia from the Spanish in Florida, the French in the Alabama basin, and the Indian allies of the Spanish and the French. On January 10, 1736, Lachlan and 176 emigrants, including women and children, arrived on board the Prince of Wales to establish the town of Darien, Georgia, originally known as New Inverness. The town was founded in January 1736 and named after the Darien scheme, a former Scottish colony in Panama.

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