Pioneers of the Old Southwest [20]
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 offscourings 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
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 offscourings 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