Tavish Gray (1834-1899) was the patriarch of the prominent Gray family of Louisiana during the 19th century. He led the Grays in their rivallry with the Braithwaite family, and he committed suicide in 1899 after discovering that his celebrated ancestor Ross Gray had not been an exiled Jacobite, but a Hanoverian spy.
Biography[]
Tavish Gray was born at Caliga Hall in Assumption Parish, Louisiana in 1834, and he belonged to the prominent Gray family; he was the brother of Rhodes sheriff Leigh Gray and later the father of Beau Gray. He long believed that his ancestors had been exiled from Scotland due to their support for the Jacobites in their 1745 rising, but he later discovered from Edinburgh University historian Malcolm Moffat that his ancestor Ross Gray had been a spy for the Duke of Cumberland before the decisive Battle of Culloden.
Gray owned a large tobacco and cotton plantation of the Old South, but, during the American Civil War, he was alleged to have become a "Yankee spy", and he became a Scalawag during Reconstruction. He became rivals with the Braithwaite family due to a dispute over Confederate gold, and this rivalry dragged on for over three decades. In 1899, Dutch van der Linde and his gang - using assumed names - allied with the Grays in their dispute with the Braithwaites and the Louisiana Raiders, and Tavish hired them to steal the Braithwaites' prize horses, promising that they would get a good price for them (which they ultimately did not). Meanwhile, Van der Linde and Micah Bell decided that it would be profitable to rob both the Grays and Braithwaites, as Van der Linde figured that the families would kill each other anyway. After Arthur Morgan and Sean MacGuire burned the tobacco fields at Caliga Hall on the Braithwaites' orders, Tavish decided to get his revenge by hiring the gang for a security "job" in Rhodes. Morgan, MacGuire, Bill Williamson, and Micah Bell were ambushed by the Grays, and MacGuire was killed. However, Dutch's gang retaliated by killing all of the ambushers, including Leigh Gray. Shortly after, Tavish received a letter from Malcolm Moffat revealing that his ancestor had betrayed the Jacobites, causing Tavish to fall into a depression and shoot himself on the back porch of the main building of his estate.
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