Alexander McGillivray

Creek leader and trader, born along the Coosa R in present-day Alabama, USA. The son of a Scottish merchant and an Indian, he was raised among the Creek, but his father saw that he was also educated in some of the white people's ways. With the outbreak of the American Revolution, he was appointed a colonel by the British and he encouraged Indian attacks on American settlements. After the Revolution, he would spend the rest of his life trying to build up a ‘united front’ of the Indians of the SE against the encroaching white settlements; it is agreed that he was also in part motivated by his desire to protect his own trading enterprise. To do this he made a treaty with Spain (1784) and then encouraged the Creeks to war against the frontier settlements (1785–7). He achieved some success, but in 1790 he went to New York City and signed a peace treaty. In 1792 he repudiated this and signed another treaty with Spain. In each of these treaties, he made sure that he was paid a generous sum for his support, and he died a rich man.

Alexander McGillivray (15 December 1750 – 17 February 1793) was a leader of the Creek (Muscogee) Indians during and after the American Revolution who worked to establish a Creek national identity and centralized leadership as a means of resisting American expansion onto Creek territory. His mother, Sehoy Marchand, was the daughter of Jean Baptiste Louis DeCourtel Marchand, a French officer at Fort Toulouse, and Sehoy Family of Wind, a full-blooded Creek woman of the prestigious Wind Clan. Educated in Charleston, South Carolina, where he learned Latin and Greek, he returned to the Wind clan at the beginning of the American Revolution after Georgia confiscated the property of his Loyalist father, who then returned to Scotland. In 1790, George Washington invited him to attend a conference in New York City that resulted in the Treaty of New York, an attempt to pacify the Southern frontier. "Alexander McGillivray, Emperor of the Creeks", Chronicles of Oklahoma 7:1 (March 1929) 106-120 (retrieved August 18, 2006).