Bloodhounds were employed to track them in their retreats; and their very children were abstracted, and brought up in hatred of the blood they inherited. But the Celtic nature was soon averse to such modes of suppressing a warlike and time-honoured clan; and the Camerons alone maintained the war against the MacGregors, who, on being joined by the MacPhersons, met them in battle in Brae Lochaber, and gave one-half of them a lesson in charity, by cutting the other to pieces.
After the battle of Glenfruin, seven MacGregors, who were pursued by a body of Colquhouns, came over the mountains of Glencoe and Glenorchy, down by the lone and lovely shore of Lochiel and the birchen woods that border on the wild waters of the Spean, till they found a brief shelter in the farmhouse of Tirindrish, which was then occupied by a Cameron.
Alarmed by the approach of the Colquhouns, they fled again, and took shelter in a cavern, which the Cameron, actuated either by treachery or timidity, pointed out to the pursuers. The toil-worn fugitives were attacked with sword and pistol. Six were slain, and lie buried, where some pines, the badge of their clan, were lately planted, in memory of the event. The seventh fled to a little distance, but was overtaken, beheaded, and buried beside a stream, where a friend of the author lately found his skull, which the water had laid bare, by washing away the bank, in which the other bones lie yet embedded.
After their slaughter, the Colquhouns went back to Luss; but the farmhouse of Tirindrish was now said to be haunted from time to time by a headless figure. The Cameron became alarmed, and brought thither a Taischatr, or seer, who saw it also—the dim outline of a shadowy and bare-legged Highlander, without a head, but with a remarkable swelling on the right knee, a disease of which the treacherous farmer had long complained; and hence the seer intimated that the figure represented himself!
It proved but the shadow of a coming event; for soon after a party of MacGregors, true to the old Celtic instinct of revenge, came to Tirindrish, and, to punish the Cameron for having discovered the cavern to the Colquhouns, struck off his head, by order of Dugald Ciar Mhor. The place where the six fugitives perished is still named the MacGregor's Cave, and a cairn was built there by the MacDonalds in memory of the event.
Hundreds of such episodes followed the battle of Glenfruin; and more fully to suppress the fated surname, no minister of the church could, at baptism, give the name of Gregor to a child, under pain of banishment and deprivation; and the heads of the Clan Alpine became a marketable commodity under King William III., as the story of Duncan nan Cean remains to testify.
Yet in spite of all these savage laws the clan grew and flourished in the fastnesses of the Highlands, and in the battles of Montrose their shout of Ard Choille was heard farthest amid the ranks of the routed Covenanters. Hence the spirit of their Gathering—
The moon's on the lake, and the mist's on the bay,
And the clan has a name that is nameless by day—
Then gather, gather, gather, Grigalach!
* * * * * *
While there's leaves on the forest, or foam on the river,
MacGregor, despite them, shall flourish for ever!
Then gather, gather, gather, Grigalach!
Hence in 1645 they could muster a thousand swordsmen; a hundred years later seven hundred swordsmen, and when the Highland regiment of Clan Alpine was raised by the chief in 1799, one thousand two hundred and thirty of the clan and their kindred enlisted to fight for George III.
So little do tyranny and oppression avail in the end! They served but to bind Clan Alpine together like bands of steel; but they were never restored to their ancient rights, surname, or liberty, till an Act of the British Parliament was passed in their favour, only twenty-four years before the regiment was embodied.