"

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 n