, 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!