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.
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