leans and
extended along the Mississippi. A hundred and sixty miles northeast of
the Choctaw towns were the Chickasaws, the bravest and most successful
warriors of all the tribes south of the Iroquois. The Cherokees, in part
seated within the Carolinas, on the upper courses of the Savannah River,
mustered over six thousand men at arms. East of them were the Catawba
towns. North of them were the Shawanoes and Delawares, in easy
communication with the tribes of Canada. Still farther north, along the
Mohawk and other rivers joining with the Hudson and Lake Ontario stood
the "long houses" of the fiercest and most warlike of all the savages,
the Iroquois or Six Nations.

The Indians along the English borders outnumbered the colonists
perhaps ten to one. If the Spanish and the French had succeeded in
the conspiracy to unite on their side all the tribes, a red billow
of tomahawk wielders would have engulfed and extinguished the English
settlements. The French, it is true, made allies of the Shawanoes, the
Delawares, the Choctaws, and a strong faction of the Creeks; and they
finally won over the Cherokees after courting them for more than twenty
years. But the Creeks in part, the powerful Chickasaws, and the Iroquois
Confederacy, or Six Nations, remained loyal to the English. In both
North and South it was the influence of the traders that kept these red
tribes on the English side. 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