Despite these disabilities the author wrote a book of absorbing interest. His intimate sympathetic pictures of Indian life as it was before the tribes had been conquered are richly valuable to the lover of native lore and to the student of the history of white settlement. The author believes, as he must, in the supremacy of his own race, but he nevertheless presents the Indians' side of the argument as no man could who had not made himself one of them. He thereby adds interest to those fierce struggles which took place along the border; for he shows us the red warrior not as a mere brute with a tomahawk but as a human creature with an ideal of his own, albeit an ideal that must give place to a better. Even in view of the red man's hideous methods of battle and inhuman treatment of captives, we cannot ponder unmoved Adair's description of his preparations for war--the fasting, the abstention from all family intercourse, and the purification rites and prayers for three days in the house set apart, while the women, who might not come close to their men in this fateful hour, stood throughout the night till dawn chanting before the door. Another poetic touch the author gives us, from the Cherokee--or Cheerake as he spells it--explaining that the root, chee-ra, means fire. A Cherokee never extinguished fire save on the occasion of a death, when he thrust a burning torch into the water and said, Neetah intahah--"the days appointed him were finished." The warrior slain in battle was held to have been balanced by death and it was said of him that "he was weighed on the path and made light." Adair writes that the Cherokees, until corrupted by French agents and by the later class of traders who poured rum among them like water, were honest, industrious, and friendly. They were ready to meet the white man with their customary phrase of good will "I shall firmly shake hands with your speech." He was intimately associated with this tribe from 1735 to 1744, when he diverted his activities to the Chickasaws.
It was from the Cherokees' chief town, Great Telliko, in the Appalachians, that Adair explored the mountains. He describes the pass through the chain which was used by the Indians and which, from his outline of it, was probably the Cumberland Gap. He relates many incidents of the struggle with the French-- manifestations even in this remote wilderness of the vast conflict that was being waged for the New World by two imperial nations of the Old.
Adair undertook, at the solicitation of Governor Glen of South Carolina, the dangerous task of opening up trade with the Choctaws; a tribe mustering upwards of five thousand warriors who were wholly in the French interest. Their country lay in what is now the State of Mississippi along the great river, some seven hundred miles west and southwest of Charleston. After passing the friendly Creek towns the trail led on for 150 miles through what was practically the enemy's country. Adair, owing to what he likes to term his "usual good fortune," reached the Choctaw country safely and by his adroitness and substantial presents won the friendship of the influential chief, Red Shoe, whom he found in a receptive mood, owing to a French agent's breach of hospitality involving Red Shoe's favorite wife. Adair thus created a large proEnglish faction among the Choctaws, and his success seriously impaired French prestige with all the southwestern tribes. Several times French Choctaws bribed to murder him, waylaid Adair on the trail--twice when he was alone--only to be baffled by the imperturbable self-possession and alert wit which never failed him in emergencies.
Winning a Choctaw trade cost Adair, besides attacks on his life, 2200 pounds, for which he was never reimbursed, notwithstanding Governor Glen's agreement with him. And, on his return to Charleston, while the Governor was detaining him "on one pretext or another," he found that a new expedition, which the Governor was favoring for reasons of his own, had set out to capture his Chickasaw trade and gather in "the expected great crop of deerskins and beaver...before I could possibly return to the Chikkasah Country." Nothing daunted, however, the hardy trader set out alone.
"In the severity of winter, frost, snow, hail and heavy rains succeed each other in these climes, so that I partly rode and partly swam to the Chikkasah country; for not expecting to stay long below [in Charleston] I took no leathern canoe. Many of the broad, deep creeks...had now overflowed their banks, ran at a rapid rate and were unpassable to any but DESPERATE PEOPLE... the rivers and swamps were dreadful by rafts of timber driving down the former and the great fallen trees floating in the latter.... Being forced to wade deep through cane swamps or woody thickets, it proved very troublesome to keep my firearms dry on which, as a second means, my life depended."
Nevertheless Adair defeated the Governor's attempt to steal his trade, and later on published the whole story in the Charleston press and sent in a statement of his claims to the Assembly, with frank observations on His Excellency himself. We gather that his bold disregard of High Personages set all Charleston in an uproar!
