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Over 250 years ago, in the early 1700s, the southeastern United States saw a unique cultural blending as Scottish fur traders, often Highlanders displaced after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1745, integrated into Native American tribes like the Creek and Cherokee. These traders, seeking new opportunities in the fur and deerskin trade, frequently married into the tribes, a practice encouraged by tribal leaders to secure alliances and access to European goods like metal tools and guns. The Cherokee, with their matrilineal kinship system, readily incorporated these mixed-race children into their clans, leading to a significant number of Creek and Cherokee chiefs with Scottish ancestry. One prominent example is Alexander McGillivray, born in 1750 in what is now Alabama, whose father, Lachlan McGillivray, was a Scottish trader who arrived in the 1730s, marrying a Creek woman of the Wind Clan, as noted in historical accounts of the period.The Cherokee Nation also saw influential leaders of Scottish descent, such as John Ross, born in 1790 in present-day Alabama, who was 7/8 Scottish through his father, Daniel Ross, a trader, and his mother, Mollie McDonald, who was one-quarter Cherokee. Ross, known as Guwisguwi or "Little White Bird," became the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1828, leading his people through the devastating Trail of Tears, the forced removal from their ancestral lands in the Southeast to Oklahoma in 1838–1839, during which about 4,000 Cherokee died. This period of intermarriage and leadership was not without conflict; Creek chiefs like William Weatherford and William McIntosh, both of Scottish descent, clashed during the Creek War of 1813–1814, with Weatherford leading the traditionalist Red Sticks against McIntosh, who favored assimilation, highlighting the tensions between preserving tribal identity and adapting to European influence.A widely circulated claim suggests that up to half of the current Cherokee Nation can trace their lineage to a single Scottish fur trader, Ludovick Grant, who married into the tribe in the early 1700s after being transported to South Carolina following his capture as a Jacobite. While DNA research supports a significant Scottish influence in Cherokee genealogy, the exact proportion is debated, as intermarriage with many Scottish traders, not just one, contributed to the mixed ancestry. The Cherokee Nation today, with over 300,000 enrolled citizens, reflects this blended heritage, with leaders like Ross shaping its history, though the romanticized narrative of a single progenitor oversimplifies the complex intermingling of cultures that defined the Cherokee experience in the 18th and 19th centuries.