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 of the Choctaw towns were the Chickasaws, the bravest and most successful warriors of all the tribes south of the Iroquois. The Cherokees, in part seated within the Carolinas, on the upper courses of the Savannah River, mustered over six thousand men at arms. East of them were the Catawba towns. North of them were the Shawanoes and Delawares, in easy communication with the tribes of Canada. Still farther north, along the Mohawk and other rivers joining with the Hudson and Lake Ontario stood the "long houses" of the fiercest and most warlike of all the savages, the Iroquois or Six Nations.
The Indians along the English borders outnumbered the colonists perhaps ten to one. If the Spanish and the French had succeeded in the conspiracy to unite on their side all the tribes, a red billow of tomahawk wielders would have engulfed and extinguished the English settlements. The French, it is true, made allies of the Shawanoes, 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 influence of the traders that kept these red tribes on the English side. The Iroquois were held loyal by Sir William Johnson and his deputy, George Croghan, the "King of Traders."
The Chickasaws followed their "best-beloved" trader, James Adair; and among the Creeks another trader, Lachlan McGillivray, wielded a potent influence.
Lachlan McGillivray was a Highlander. He landed in Charleston in 1735 at the age of sixteen and presently joined a trader's caravan as packhorse boy. A few years later he married a woman of the Creeks. On many occasions he defeated French and Spanish plots with the Creeks for the extermination of the colonists in Georgia and South Carolina. His action in the final war with the French (1760), when the Indian 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 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!"
