took him into custody, along with his bundle of
manuscripts presumably intended for the French commandant at Fort
Alabama, and handed him over to the Governor of Georgia, who imprisoned
him and kept him out of mischief till he died.

As a Briton, Adair contributed to Priber's fate; and as such he approves
it. As a scholar with philosophical and ethnological leanings, however,
he deplores it, and hopes that Priber's valuable manuscripts may "escape
the despoiling hands of military power." Priber had spent his leisure in
compiling a Cherokee dictionary; Adair's occupation, while domiciled
in his winter house in Great Telliko, was the writing of his Indian
Appendix to the Pentateuch. As became brothers 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 part Adair admits that his object in this
correspondence was to trap the Secretary into something more serious
than literary errata. That is, he admits it by implication; he says the
Secretary "feared" it. During the years of their duel, Adair apparently
knew that the scholarly compiler of the Cherokee dictionary was
secretly inciting members of this particular Lost Tribe to tomahawk the
discoverer of their biblical origin; and Priber, it would seem, knew
that he knew!

Adair shows, inferentially, that land encroachment was not the sole
cause of those Indian wars with which we shall deal in a later chapter.
The earliest causes 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 merely stupid, sometimes dishonest,
officials; the worst of these, Adair considered, was the cheapening of
the trade through the granting of general licenses.

"Formerly each trader had a license for two [Indian] towns.... At my
first setting out among them, a number of traders... journeyed through
our various nations in different companies and were generally men of
worth; of course they would have a living price for their goods, which
they carried on horseback to the remote Indian co