ations of the Old.

Adair undertook, at the solicitation of Governor Glen of South Carolina,
the dangerous task of opening up trade with the Choctaws; a tribe
mustering upwards of five thousand warriors who were wholly in
the French interest. Their country lay in what is now the State of
Mississippi along the great river, some seven hundred miles west and
southwest of Charleston. After passing the friendly 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 Red Shoe's favorite wife. Adair thus created a
large proEnglish faction among the Choctaws, and his success seriously
impaired French prestige with all the southwestern tribes. Several times
French Choctaws bribed to murder him, waylaid Adair on the
trail--twice when he was alone--only to be baffled by the imperturbable
self-possession and alert wit which never failed him in emergencies.

Winning a Choctaw trade cost Adair, besides attacks on his life, 2200
pounds, for which he was never reimbursed, notwithstanding Governor
Glen's agreement with him. And, on his return to Charleston, 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 Chickasaw trade and gather in "the expected
great crop of deerskins and beaver... before I could possibly return to
the Chikkasah Country." Nothing daunted, however, the hardy trader set
out alone.

"In the severity of winter, frost, snow, hail and heavy rains succeed
each other in these climes, so that I partly rode and partly swam to the
Chikkasah country; for not expecting to stay long below [in Charleston]
I took no 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 the former and the great fallen trees floating in
the latter.... Being forced to wade deep through cane swamps or woody
thickets, it proved very troublesome to keep my firearms dry on which,
as a second means, my life depended."

Nevertheless Ad