McGillivray, Duncan, -1808.

Duncan McGillivray was born in Inverness-shire, Scotland, in the 1770s and died in 1808. He was the second son of Donald McGillivray and Anne McTavish, the sister of fur trader Simon McTavish. In the 1790s, McGillivray moved to Montreal along with his brother William and accepted a job in the North West Company, offered to him by his uncle Simon McTavish. Prior to this, Simon McTavish financed McGillivray’s secondary schooling. McGillivray had one child named Magdalene in 1801 with an unknown Indigenous woman. William McGillivray, a clerk who joined the North West Company in 1814, may have been fathered by McGillivray and an unknown Cree woman, as he was described as a “half-breed of the Cree Nation” by Governor George Simpson. Due to the rivalry between the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, in 1798, McGillivray was accused by an officer of the HBC of having stolen furs from the Ojibwe so that they could not pay their debts to the HBC, but this accusation never amounted to anything.

Revised on June 10, 2024, by Leah Louttit-Bunker

http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mcgillivray_duncan_5E.html https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ram/1924-v3-n1-ram1237/300038ar/