he French in 1786 to Great Telliko to
win the Cherokees to their interest. At this time Adair was trading with
the Cherokees. He relates that Priber,

"more effectually to answer the design of his commission... ate, drank,
slept, danced, dressed, and painted himself with the Indians, so that it
was not easy to distinguish him from the natives,--he married also with
them, and being endued with a strong understanding and retentive memory
he 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 American scale of power.... Having thus infected them... he easily
formed them into a nominal republican government--crowned their old
Archimagus emperor after a pleasing new savage form, and invented a
variety of high-sounding titles for all the members of his imperial
majesty's red court."

Priber cemented the Cherokee empire "by slow but sure degrees to the
very great danger of our southern colonies." His position was that of
Secretary of State and as such, with a studiedly provocative arrogance,
he carried on correspondence with the British authorities. The colonial
Government seems, on this occasion, to have listened 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 great hurt of English prestige. The Cherokee
empire had now endured for five years and was about to rise "into a far
greater state of puissance by the acquisition of the Muskohge, Chocktaw
and the Western Mississippi Indians," when fortunately for the history
of British colonization in America, "an accident befell the Secretary."

It is in connection with this "accident" that the reader suspects the
modest but resourceful Adair of conniving with Fate. Since the military
had failed and the Government dared not again employ force, other means
must be found; 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