“11———— Adair
12 John Adair m. Jennie Kilgore
22 Edward Adair m. Elizabeth Martin.”
The name of the mother of these two sons of “—— Adair” is not given. Starr’s genealogical table gives the descendants down to recent times, among them those of the Mayes family. The blank in the name of the father may be supplied from a sketch of Joel Bryan Mayes, a Cherokee chief, and chief justice of the court of last resort of the Cherokee Nation, in Appleton’s Encyclopedia of American Biography, IV, 275: Mayes “was born in the Cherokee reservation in Georgia, October 2, 1833. His mother was of mixed blood and descended on the paternal side from James Adair, an Indian agent [trader] under George III.”[[24]]
Starr in a letter to the editor says: “John and Edward Adair, brothers, married Cherokees and have had a numerous progeny. Their descendants furnished the most brilliant strain in the old Cherokee Nation, especially when their blood was blended with the blood of descendants of General Joseph Martin,[[25]] of Virginia-Tennessee, whose descendants have always been numerous in the Nation. Two of these, William Penn Adair and Lucian Burr Bell were the brainiest men that I ever met.” Elizabeth Martin, mentioned above, was in girlhood a resident of Lower East Tennessee, at Wachowee on a branch of Hiwassee River. Her mother, Betty, was the daughter of the great Nancy Ward, the Beloved Woman of the Overhill Cherokees and friend of the white race, and her father was General Joseph Martin, agent of Virginia among the Cherokees.[[26]]
Miss Skinner in her Pioneers of the Old Southwest, seemingly fascinated by Adair, gives 15 of 285 pages to him and his book. She attributes the arrest of Briber to Adair. “As a Briton, Adair contributed to Priber’s fate.... Since the military had failed, other means must be employed; the trader provided them.” This is without justification in fact. She is fairer elsewhere in her estimate of Adair, whom she called “Tennessee’s first author”: “His voluminous work discloses a man not only of wide mental outlook but a practical man with a sense of commercial values.... The complete explanation of such a man as Adair we need not expect to find stated anywhere—not even in and between the lines of his book. The conventionalist would seek it in moral obliquity; the radical in a temperament that is irked by the superficialities that comprise so large a part of conventional standards. The reason for his being what he was is almost the only thing Adair did not analyze in his book. Perhaps, to him, it was self-evident.”
That Adair was a man of liberal education, for his period, seems clear. A self-disclosure is that of his applying himself to the mastery of the rudiments of the Hebrew language among the redmen whom he was studying. A curious picture that calls for an effort at visualization is that of Adair, the forest student, traversing the toilsome trail to Charles Town with peltry to trade for books. It is somewhat difficult to see him, again, at the head of a band of painted warriors faring forth along the Massac trace through the dense woods of what is now West Tennessee, or along the early Natchez trail, west of the Tennessee River and in the same region, bound for the North on a mission which was, in essence, one for the British Empire and against that Empire’s antagonist for the Great Valley of the Mississippi. Yet harder to see in the lover of erudition is the rollicking Adair, in near-abandon in a period of stress, finding “brave and cheerful companionship” with an illiterate and coarse-grained white man, the two riding carelessly along a dangerous path, singing as they went, each braced by “a hearty draught of punch,” and further companioned by a keg of rum. Wherever and however seen, his was an unusual figure, riding, we may be sure, a coveted Chickasaw steed through vast forest reaches, silhouetted against a background of forest-green. Whether knight errant or dare-devil, or a commingling of both, he rode into mundane immortality. He has broken into every book of comprehensive biography, in whatever language, which has any sort of pretension of thoroughness.
Adair was a good diplomat in dealing with his inferiors. He was not diplomatic in his attitude towards those who were officially his superiors. An acridity of speech, an unsmooth temper and not a little vanity brought him to breach with such when he deemed himself mistreated. In an audience with Governor Glen his own words “seemed to lie pretty sharply upon him.” Adair was a good hater: of Glen, the French and the Romanists, in particular. But, as is not unusual in such cases, he was ardent in his friendships—for the Chickasaws in particular. As “an English Chickasaw,” he recognized in that tribe all that was best in the Amerind: love of their land, constancy in hatred and friendship, sagacity, alertness and consummate intrepidity.
The Book
Adair purposed a publication of his book several years before the date of its actual London publication in 1775. In the South Carolina Gazette of September 7, 1769, it was said: “An account of the origin of the primitive inhabitants and a history of those numerous warlike tribes of Indians, situated to the westward of Charles Town are subjects hitherto unattempted by any pen.... Such an attempt has been made by Mr. James Adair, a gentleman who has been conversant among the Cherokees, Chickesaws, Choctaws, etc., for thirty-odd years past; and who, by the assistance of a liberal education, a long experience among them and a genius naturally formed for curious enquiries, has written essays on their origin, language, religion, customary methods of making war and peace, etc.” It was also announced that the author was “going over to England soon to prepare for publication.” The Savannah Georgia Gazette of October 11, 1769, carried a similar item, of date New York, February 27th.