66 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
occupied Florida called Guale. From the time the first settlers squat
ted on Indigenous land in Georgia, rangers were in the forefront of
ethnic cleansing, clearing the region for British settlement. Briga
dier General James Oglethorpe, commander in chief of the Georgia
colony, tried but failed to turn his own small regular army into rang
ers, so he commissioned Hugh Mackay Jr. to organize the regulars
into a Highland ranger force. A settler agent for the Georgia colony,
Mackay was a former British army officer and a Scots Highlander.
The Highlanders were reputed to be tough, fearless fighters-in
other words, brutal killers. h was unusual at the time to put a local
militia officer in command of army regulars.^28
The Indigenous population of Georgia consisted primarily of the
Cherokee Nation. The colonizers realized it would be impossible to
persuade the Cherokees to accept or defend Georgia settlers if war
broke out between Britain and Spain over British encroachment into
Spanish Guale. Traders from Carolina had already brought small
pox and rum to the Cherokees, which had killed many in their vil
lages and made them suspicious of all English people. Oglethorpe
himself visited Cherokee towns but was rebuffed. Meanwhile Span
ish agents were also trying to win over the Cherokees to fight on
their side against the British. In the fall of 1739, on the verge of
war, Oglethorpe won commitment from some Cherokee villages in
exchange for corn, but he was aware that, like other Indigenous na
tions, the Cherokees would likely play one colonial power against
the other for their own interests and could change sides at any mo
ment. In December, English invasion farther into Spanish territory
began. Anglo and Scots rangers and their Indigenous allies destroyed
Spanish plantations and intimidated the Maroon communities in
northern Florida composed of local Indigenous families and escaped
African slaves from the British colonies. The rangers sacked and
looted, burned and pillaged, while hunting scalps of Spanish-allied
Indigenous people and runaway slaves. Lasting nearly a month, the
operations ravaged Florida, in part because the Spanish put up little
fight. During the 1740s, the British War Office and Parliament com
missioned two companies of colonial rangers and authorized more
than a hundred men for full-time duty in the Highland Rangers in
Georgia. 2 9 Ranging, looting, and scalp hunting continued.