Pioneers of the Old Southwest

Tr

e rangers, the surveyors, went westward over the trails which he had blazed for them years before. Their enduring works are commemorated in the cities and farms which today lie along every ancient border line; but

Tennessee) River. He was the pioneer settler beyond the high hills; for he built, in the center of the Indian towns, the first white man's cabin-with its larger annex, the trading house-and dwelt there during the greater part of the year. He was America's first magnate of international commerce. His furs-for which h

in various ways: Fin

of his adoption, he fought in the intertribal wars. His was the first educative and civilizing influence in the Indian towns. He endeavored to cure the Indians of their favorite midsummer madness, war, by inducing them to raise stock and poultry

e attempt of French and Spanish agents to weld the tribes into a confederacy for the annihilation of the English settlements. The English trader did his share to p

tery is solved when we discover, almost by accident, a few printed lines which record that, in 1700, the hostile natives on the Cape Fear were subdued to the English and brought into friendly alliance with them by Colonel William Bull, a trader. We read further and learn that the Spaniards in Florida had long endeavored to unite the tribes in Spanish and French territory against the English and that the influence of traders prevented the consummation. The Spaniards, in 1702, had prepared to invade Englis

intellectual development can meet in understanding-namely, the truth of the spoken word. He recognized honor as the bond of trade and the warp and woof of human intercourse. The uncorrupted savage also had his

ork. In South Carolina dwelt the Yamasi tribe of about three thousand warriors, their chief towns only sixty or eighty miles distant from the Spanish town of St. Augustine. On the west, about the same distance northeast of New Orleans, in what is now Alabama and Georgia, lay the Creek nation. There French garrisons held Mobile and Fort Alabama. The Creeks at this time numbered over four thousand warriors. The lands of the Choctaws, a tribe of even larger fighting strength, began two hundred miles north of New Orleans and extended along the Mississippi. A hundred and sixty miles northeast

awanoes, the Delawares, the Choctaws, and a strong faction of the Creeks; and they finally won over the Cherokees after courting them for more than twenty years. But the Creeks in part, the powerful Chickasaws, and the Iroquois Confederacy, or Six Nations, remained loyal to the English. In both North and South it was the inf

terror was raging, is typical. News came that four thousand Creek warriors, reinforced by French Choctaws, were about to fall on the southern settlements. At the risk of their lives, McGillivray and another trader named Galphin hurried from Charleston to their trading house on the Georgia frontier. Thither they invited several hundred Creek warriors, feasted and housed them for several days, and finally won

ent 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 mile

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 posses

al 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 de

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

y Creek towns the trail led on for 150 miles through what was practically the enemy's country. Adair, owing to what he likes to term his "usual good fortune," reached the Choctaw country safely and by his adroitness and substantial presents won the friendship of the influential chief, Red Shoe, whom he found in a receptive mood, owing to a French agent's breach of hospitality involving

n, while the Governor was detaining him "on one pretext or another," he found that a new expedition, which the Governor was favoring for reasons of his own, had set out to capture his Chicka

leathern canoe. Many of the broad, deep creeks... had now overflowed their banks, ran at a rapid rate and were unpassable to any but desperate people:... the rivers and swamps were dreadful by rafts of timber driving down th

y in the Charleston press and sent in a statement of his claims to the Assembly, with frank observations on

a paragraph to an exploit of courage and endurance such as that ride and swim for the Indian trade. We have to read between the lines to f

some way or other. They appointed double centries over me for some days before I was to be sent down in the French King's large boat. They were strongly charged against laying down their weapons or suffering any hostile thing to be in the place where I was kept, as they deemed me capable of any mischief.... About an

unt of this escape from "double centries" and a fortified garrison, and the plunge through the tangled

imself have been the hero of an event he relates in the third person. This seems to be the case in the affair of Priber, which was the worst of those "damages" Adair did to the French. Priber was "a ge

soon learned their dialect, and by gradual advances impressed them with a very ill opinion of the English, representing them as fraudulent, avaritious and encroaching people; he at the same time inflated the artless savages with a prodigious high opinion of their own importance in the Am

tened to the traders and to have realized that Priber was a danger, for soldiers were sent to take him prisoner. The Cherokees, however, had so 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 g

nd; 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

ers 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

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

... [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 offs-courings of our climes... by inebriating the

an chiefs to various officials to stop the importation of liquor into their country, alleging the debauchment of their young

gna Charta Americana"; but he thought the threatened division of the English-speaking peoples the greatest evil that could befall civilization. His voluminous work discloses a man not only of wide mental outlook but a practical man with a sense of commercial v

oup of houses, their white-clayed walls sparkling under the sun's rays, and, within and without, the movement of "a friendly and sagacious people," who "kindly treated and watchfully guarded" their white brother in peace and war, and who conversed daily with him in the Old Beloved Speech learned first of Nature. "Like towers in cities beyond the common size of those of the Indians" rose the winter and summer houses and the huge trading house which the tribe had built for their best beloved friend in the town's center, because there he would be safest from attack. On the rafters hung the smoked and barbecued delicacies taken in the hunt and prepared for him by his red servants, who were also h

n print-raise for him a dense cloud of enmity that dropped oblivion on his memory? Perhaps. But, in truth, his own book is all the history of him we need. It is the record of a