week of 2/20/02
 
 
 

A 1775 view of the Cherokee people
By George Ellison
One of my favorite books about the Cherokees was published in 1775 by the Indian trader and historian James Robert Adair. The title page for this volume is worthy of full citation: “The HISTORY of the AMERICAN INDIANS, Particularly Those Nations Adjoining to the Mississippi, East and West Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina. Containing an Account of Their Origin, Language, Manners, Religious and Civil Customs, Laws, Form of Government, Punishments, Conduct in War and Domestic Life, Their Habits, Diet, Agriculture, Manufactures, Diseases and Method of Cure, and Other Particulars, Sufficient to Render it A COMPLETE INDIAN SYSTEM, with Observations on Former Historians, the Conduct of Our Colony, Governors, Superintendents, Missionaries, & C. Also AN APPENDIX Containing a Description of the Floridas and the Mississippi Lands, with Their Productions; the Benefits of Colonizing Georgiana and Civilizing the Indians; and the Way to Make All the Colonies More Valuable to the Mother Country. With a New Map of the Country Referred to in the History. By James Adair, Esquire, a Trader with the Indians, and Resident in Their Country for Forty Years. London: Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly, in the Poultry. MDCCLXXV.”

Seems to me that authors, editors, and publishers just aren’t coming up with eye-catching titles like that these days. There have been several reissues of Adair’s book. The reissue I own, mundanely titled Adair’s History of the American Indians (N.Y.: Argonaut Press, 1966) is perhaps the best of the reissues since it has an introduction, annotations, and an index prepared by Samuel Cole Williams. I paid about $15 for it 30 years ago, which seemed like a lot back then.

Last week I got it in my head that I’d enjoy owning a copy of the 1775 first edition, if I could locate one. So, I went to www.bookfinder.com on the Internet and punched in Adair’s name. Sure enough, there were three copies of the first edition available from various antiquarian booksellers in the country: the copy in the best condition is selling for $6,000; another copy for $4,000; and the bargain basement price for the third copy is a mere $3,500. These figures immediately upgraded my opinion of the $15 reissue already in my own library. The prospects for adding a first edition to my library are slim and none.

Adair’s book is a wonderful first-hand account of Indian life in the Southeastern region by a close observer who was intimate with the various tribes for decades. Not all of his opinions are accepted by present-day anthropologists; nevertheless, his detailed descriptions of lifestyles and customs are indispensable.

The first thing that you have to get around when reading Adair is his thesis that the Indians were the lost tribe of Israel. Once you deal with that, it’s smooth, enjoyable, and informative sailing.

The handiest summaries of Adair’s life are the sketch by Maud Thomas Smith in the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, volume 1 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979) and Williams’ introduction, “James Adair, the Man,” to the reissue cited above.

Briefly, Adair was born in County Antrim, Ireland, about 1709. He was known familiarly as “Robin.” With his father and brothers, he settled in Pennsylvania in 1730. By 1735 he was in Charleston, S.C., as a partner to the Indian trader George Galphin. His first dealings were with the Catawbas and Cherokees. Later he also conducted trade with the Choctaws and Chickasaws, and had knowledge of many other tribes. Because of Adair’s influence with the Choctaws, he was taken prisoner by the French in the mid-1740s and barely escaped being hanged.

In 1750 Adair settled with his first wife at Fairfields, a plantation in present-day Greene County in eastern North Carolina. In 1770 he moved with his second wife to a larger plantation named Patcherly in present day Robeson County, N.C., near the state line with South Carolina. It is reputed that he served as physician with Francis Marion during the American Revolution. He died about 1787. One of his descendents is William Penn Adair Rogers, better known as Will Rogers. In the event that you don’t choose to purchase a first edition of The History of the American Indians, you can either locate a reissue for sale on the Internet or check out a library copy (perhaps through the inter-library loan system). You will be rewarded with some good reading. To whet your appetite, here are some excerpts taken at random from the chapter titled “Account of the Cheerake Nation:”

° “Their national name is derived from ‘Chee-ra,’ fire, which is their reputed lower heaven, and hence they call their magi, ‘Cheera-tahge,’ or ‘men possessed of the divine fire.’”

° “The eastern, or lower parts of their country, are sharp and cold to a Carolinian in winter, and yet agreeable: but those towns that lie among the Apalahche mountains, are very pinching to such who are unaccustomed to a savage life ... (The Cherokees) are almost as impenetrable to cold, as a bar of steel, and the severest cold is no detriment to their hunting.”

° “They are also strongly attached to rivers, — all retaining the opinion of the ancients, that rivers are necessary to constitute a paradise.”

° “From the head of the southern branch of Savannah-river, it does not exceed half a mile to head spring of the Mississippi-water ... called ‘Herbert’s spring’: and it was natural for strangers to drink thereof, to quench thirst, gratify their curiosity, and have it to say they had drank of the French waters. Some of our people, who went only with the view of staying a short time, but by some allurement or other, exceeded the time appointed, at their return, reported either through merriment or superstition, that the spring had such a natural bewitching quality, that whosoever drank of it, could not possibly quit the nation, during the tedious space of seven years.” (Note: the spring was named after Maj. John Herbert, an early commissioner of Indian affairs who made a map of the Cherokee Country in 1715.)

° “I do not remember to have seen or heard of an Indian dying by the bite of a snake, when at war, or a hunting; although they are often bitten by the most dangerous snakes — everyone carries in his shot pouch, a piece of the best snake-root, such as ‘Seneeka,’ or fern-snake-root, — or the wild hore-hound, wild plantain, St. Andrew’s cross, and a variety of other herbs and roots, which are plenty, and well known to those who range the American woods, and are exposed to such dangers, and will effect a thorough and speedy cure if timely applied.”

° Let’s close with Adair’s account of the Uktenas, the fearsome serpents of Cherokee lore that inhabited such dark corners of the universe as the Nantahala Gorge. “Among the mountains, are many labyrinths, and some of a great length, with many branches, and various windings ... Between the heads of the northern branch of the lower Cheerake river, and the heads of that of Tuckasehchee, winding round in a long course by the late Fort-Loudon, and afterwards into the Mississippi, there is, both in the nature and circumstances, a great phenomenon — Between two high mountains, nearly covered with old mossy rocks, lofty cedars and pines, in the valleys of which the beams of the sun reflect a powerful heat, there are, as the natives affirm, some bright old inhabitants, or rattle snakes, of a more enormous size than is mentioned in history. They are so large and unwieldy, that they take a circle, almost as wide as their length, to crawl round in their shortest orbit: but bountiful nature compensates the heavy motion of their bodies, for as they say, no living creature moves within the reach of their sight, but they can draw it to them ... The description the Indians give us of their colour, is as various as what we are told of the camelion, that seems to the spectator to change its colour, by every different position he may view it in; which proceeds from the piercing rays of light that blaze from their foreheads, so as to dazzle the eyes, from whatever quarter they post themselves — for in each of their heads, there is a large carbuncle (a quartz crystal), which not only repels, but they affirm, sullies the meridian beams of the sun. They reckon it so dangerous to disturb these creatures, that no temptation can induce them to betray the secret recess of the profane. They call them and all of the rattle-snake kind, kings, or chieftans of the snakes ...”

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com