well acquainted with the great damages I had done to them and feared others I might occasion, as to confine me a close prisoner… in the Alebahma garrison. They were fully resolved to have sent me down to Mobile or New Orleans as a capital criminal to be hanged… but I doubted not of being able to extricate myself some way or other. They appointed double centries over me for some days before I was to be sent down in the French King's large boat. They were strongly charged against laying down their weapons or suffering any hostile thing to be in the place where I was kept, as they deemed me capable of any mischief.… About an hour before we were to set off by water I escaped from them by land.… I took through the middle of the low land covered with briers at full speed. I heard the French clattering on horseback along the path… and the howling savages pursuing…, but my usual good fortune enabled me to leave them far enough behind.…
One feels that a few of the pages given up to Leviticus might well have been devoted to a detailed account of this escape from “double centries” and a fortified garrison, and the plunge through the tangled wilds, by a man without gun or knife or supplies, and who for days dared not show himself upon the trail.
There is too much of “my usual good fortune” in Adair's narrative; such luck as his argues for extraordinary resources in the man. Sometimes we discover only through one phrase on a page that he must himself have been the hero of an event he relates in the third person. This seems to be the case in the affair of Priber, which was the worst of those “damages” Adair did to the French. Priber was “a gentleman of curious and speculative temper” sent by the French in 1736 to Great Telliko to win the Cherokees to their interest. At this time Adair was trading with the Cherokees. He relates that Priber,
more effectually to answer the design of his commission… ate, drank, slept, danced, dressed, and painted himself with the Indians, so that it was not easy to distinguish him from the natives,—he married also with them, and being endued with a strong understanding and retentive memory he soon learned their dialect, and by gradual advances impressed them with a very ill opinion of the English, representing them as fraudulent, avaritious and encroaching people; he at the same time inflated the artless savages with a prodigious high opinion of their own importance in the American scale of power.… Having thus infected them… he easily formed them into a nominal republican government—crowned their old Archi-magus emperor after a pleasing new savage form, and invented a variety of high-sounding titles for all the members of his imperial majesty's red court.
Priber cemented the Cherokee empire “by slow but sure degrees to the very great danger of our southern colonies.” His position was that of Secretary of State and as such, with a studiedly provocative arrogance, he carried on correspondence with the British authorities. The colonial Government seems, on this occasion, to have listened to the traders and to have realized that Priber was a danger, for soldiers were sent to take him prisoner. The Cherokees, however, had so firmly “shaked hands” with their Secretary's admired discourse that they threatened to take the warpath if their beloved man were annoyed, and the soldiers went home without him—to the great hurt of English prestige. The Cherokee empire had now endured for five years and was about to rise “into a far greater state of puissance by the acquisition of the Muskohge, Chocktaw and the Western Mississippi Indians,” when fortunately for the history of British colonization in America, “an accident befell the Secretary.”
It is in connection with this “accident” that the reader suspects the modest but resourceful Adair of conniving with Fate. Since the military had failed and the Government dared not again employ force, other means must be found; the trader provided them. The Secretary with his Cherokee bodyguard journeyed south on his mission to the Creeks. Secure, as he supposed, he lodged overnight in an Indian town. But there a company of English traders took him into custody, along with his bundle of manuscripts presumably intended for the French commandant at Fort Alabama, and handed him over to the Governor of Georgia, who imprisoned him and kept him out of mischief till he died.
As a Briton, Adair contributed to Priber's fate; and as such he approves it. As a scholar with philosophical and ethnological leanings, however, he deplores it, and hopes that Priber's valuable manuscripts may “escape the despoiling hands of military power.” Priber had spent his leisure in compiling a Cherokee dictionary; Adair's occupation, while domiciled in his winter house in Great Telliko, was the writing of his Indian Appendix to the Pentateuch. As became brothers in science, they had exchanged notes, so we gather from Adair's references to conversations and correspondence. Adair's difficulties as an author, however, had been increased by a treacherous lapse from professional etiquette on the part of the Secretary: “He told them [the Indians] that in the very same manner as he was their great Secretary, I was the devil's clerk, or an accursed one who marked on paper the bad speech of the evil ones of darkness.” On his own part Adair admits that his object in this correspondence was to trap the Secretary into something more serious than literary errata. That is, he admits it by implication; he says the Secretary “feared” it. During the years of their duel, Adair apparently knew that the scholarly compiler of the Cherokee dictionary was secretly inciting members of this particular Lost Tribe to tomahawk the discoverer of their biblical origin; and Priber, it would seem, knew that he knew!
Adair shows, inferentially, that land encroachment was not the sole cause of those Indian wars with which we shall deal in a later chapter. The earliest causes were the instigations of the French and the rewards which they offered for English scalps. But equally provocative of Indian rancor were the acts of sometimes merely stupid, sometimes dishonest, officials; the worst of these, Adair considered, was the cheapening of the trade through the granting of general licenses.
Formerly each trader had a license for two [Indian] towns.… At my first setting out among them, a number of traders… journeyed through our various nations in different companies and were generally men of worth; of course they would have a living price for their goods, which they carried on horseback to the remote Indian countries at very great expences.… [The Indians] were kept under proper restraint, were easy in their minds and peaceable on account of the plain, honest lessons daily inculcated on them… but according to the present unwise plan, two and even three Arablike peddlars sculk about in one of those villages… who are generally the dregs and offs-courings of our climes… by inebriating the Indians with their nominally prohibited and poisoning spirits, they purchase the necessaries of life at four and five hundred per cent cheaper than the orderly traders.… Instead of showing good examples of moral conduct, beside the other part of life, they instruct the unknowing and imitating savages in many diabolical lessons of obscenity and blasphemy.