The States having secured their independence, the eagerness of American settlers to press over the Creek bounds had almost brought about an Indian war with the great republic. Scenes of bloodshed took place on the frontier; and if MacGillivray was cunning and not warlike, he showed the civilised virtue of humanity in sparing and rescuing captives. Peace was negotiated by an Indian deputation which he led to New York. A secret article provided for his being appointed a general in the U.S. service, with a pension of $1200. At the same time, or soon afterwards, the wily chief accepted similar distinctions and payments from the British and the Spanish Governments, and between them he must have enjoyed a considerable income for steadily promoting his own interests, while impartially betraying all his rival employers in turn.
But the arrangement which he brought about with young Uncle Sam roused the Indians against him. A rebel leader appeared in one “General” Bowles, who, originally a private soldier, in the course of many dubious adventures more than once played the pretender among the Creeks. A civil war raged in the Confederacy; MacGillivray at one time was driven to flight; but, still backed up by Milfort, he succeeded in partly restoring his power, though not with the same firmness. In the middle of his tortuous policies, he died at the age of fifty, leaving a son, who was sent home to Scotland, where old Lachlan is said to have been still alive in Inverness-shire. It was his half-breed nephew, William Weatherford, who, later on, led the last struggle of the Creeks against American encroachment.
As for Leclerc Milfort, he was left for a time struggling against Bowles and other rivals for authority. According to his own story, the French Revolution brought him back to France, where he laboured to persuade Buonaparte how easily an empire might be won in America. It is said that the First Consul was taken by the idea, and that in 1801 a small French expedition had even been prepared to conquer the Creek country under Milfort’s guidance. But vaster plans interfered with any such scheme, and in 1803, Louisiana and the great South-West were sold by France to the United States. The ex-chief had a chance to gratify his taste for fighting at home, when France was invaded in 1814; but he did not return to resume the authority of which he boasts in his book, so rare that I have never seen a copy except my own. If one only had all the truth about these two white adventurers, what a strange romance it would make!
The Highlands may be all the more prosperous for the new husbandry that drove so many of their sons to seek fortune in distant lands, often to find fame. It might be well for the people to have such enterprise roughly forced on a conservative spirit which scowled at the introduction of potatoes, turnips, and other improvements to their backward culture. What their good old days were in truth may be guessed in the smoky huts where they still love to pig together, stubbornly refusing to adapt themselves to an order in which sheep are found more profitable than men, and deer than sheep. The big sheep-farmer from the south makes more of the land than the easy-going crofter; yet the smallest drop of Celtic blood cannot but stir to see a clansman touching his hat for tips from
southron stockbrokers, and serving as obsequious attendant to the American millionaires who enclose his native heath. Naturally the Highlander is a gentleman, for all his faults, with instinctive courtesy to soften his somewhat sullen pride. More than once I have had a tip refused by a Highland servant, as nowhere else in the world unless in the United States before their social independence, too, began to be demoralised by the largesses of successful speculators, who, after piling up dollars by “rings” and “corners,” find they can buy less observance for their money at home than by corrupting a race declared by Mrs. Grant of Laggan, herself reared in America, “to resemble the French in being poor with a better grace than other people.”