author
James Adair
d. 1783
Best known for a vivid 1775 account of Native life in the American Southeast, this Irish-born trader spent decades living and working among Native communities. His writing remains a notable early source on the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Catawba peoples, even as modern readers approach it with care because of its colonial-era perspective.
1 Audiobook
Adair's History of the American Indians
by James Adair
About the author
Born in County Antrim, Ireland, around 1709, James Adair later traveled to North America and became a trader in the Southeast. He spent many years among Native communities, especially the Chickasaw, and his long firsthand experience shaped the book he is remembered for, The History of the American Indians, published in London in 1775.
Adair wrote about the customs, politics, trade, and daily life of several Southeastern peoples, including the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Catawba. Because he lived in the region for decades, historians have often found his work valuable as an early eyewitness account of colonial-era Native America.
At the same time, Adair was writing as an eighteenth-century British trader, and his views reflect the assumptions and biases of that world. His work is still important today not because it is the final word, but because it offers a detailed, on-the-ground glimpse of a complicated borderland society during a period of major change.