Lachlan McGillivray was a Highlander. He landed in Charleston in 1735 at the age of sixteen and presently joined a trader's caravan as pack-horse boy. A few years later he married a woman of the Creeks. On many occasions he defeated French and Spanish plots with the Creeks for the extermination of the colonists in Georgia and South Carolina. His action in the final war with the French (1760), when the Indian terror was raging, is typical. News came that four thousand Creek warriors, reinforced by French Choctaws, were about to fall on the southern settlements. At the risk of their lives, McGillivray and another trader named Galphin hurried from Charleston to their trading house on the Georgia frontier. Thither they invited several hundred Creek warriors, feasted and housed them for several days, and finally won them from their purpose. McGillivray had a brilliant son, Alexander, who about this time became a chief in his mother's nation—perhaps on this very occasion, as it was an Indian custom, in making a brotherhood pact, to send a son to dwell in the brother's house. We shall meet that son again as the Chief of the Creeks and the terrible scourge of Georgia and Tennessee in the dark days of the Revolutionary War.
The bold deeds of the early traders, if all were to be told, would require a book as long as the huge volume written by James Adair, the “English Chickasaw.” Adair was an Englishman who entered the Indian trade in 1785 and launched upon the long and dangerous trail from Charleston to the upper towns of the Cherokees, situated in the present Monroe County, Tennessee. Thus he was one of the earliest pioneers of the Old Southwest; and he was Tennessee's first author. “I am well acquainted,” he says, “with near two thousand miles of the American continent”—a statement which gives one some idea of an early trader's enterprise, hardihood, and peril. Adair's “two thousand miles” were twisting Indian trails and paths he slashed out for himself through uninhabited wilds, for when not engaged in trade, hunting, literature, or war, it pleased him to make solitary trips of exploration. These seem to have led him chiefly northward through the Appalachians, of which he must have been one of the first white explorers.
A many-sided man was James Adair—cultured, for his style suffers not by comparison with other writers of his day, no stranger to Latin and Greek, and not ignorant of Hebrew, which he studied to assist him in setting forth his ethnological theory that the American Indians were the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Before we dismiss his theory with a smile, let us remember that he had not at his disposal the data now available which reveal points of likeness in custom, language formation, and symbolism among almost all primitive peoples. The formidable title-page of his book in itself suggests an author keenly observant, accurate as to detail, and possessed of a versatile and substantial mind. Most of the pages were written in the towns of the Chickasaws, with whom he lived “as a friend and brother,” but from whose “natural jealousy” and “prying disposition” he was obliged to conceal his papers. “Never,” he assures us, “was a literary work begun and carried on with more disadvantages!”
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 pro-English 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, 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!
Adair is tantalizingly modest about his own deeds. He devotes pages to prove that an Indian rite agrees with the Book of Leviticus but only a paragraph to an exploit of courage and endurance such as that ride and swim for the Indian trade. We have to read between the lines to find the man; but he well repays the search. Briefly, incidentally, he mentions that on one trip he was captured by the French, who were so,