Even in view of the red man's hideous methods of battle and inhuman treatment of captives, we cannot ponder unmoved Adair's description of his preparations for war--the fasting, the abstention from all family intercourse, and the purification rites and prayers for three days in the house set apart, while the women, who might not come close to their men in this fateful hour, stood throughout the night till dawn chanting before the door.

Another poetic touch the author gives us, from the Cherokee--or Cheerake as he spells it--explaining that the root, chee-ra, means fire.

A Cherokee never extinguished fire save on the occasion of a death, when he thrust a burning torch into the water and said, Neetah intahah--"the days appointed him were finished." The warrior slain in battle was held to have been balanced by death and it was said of him that "he was weighed on the path and made light." Adair writes that the Cherokees, until corrupted by French agents and by the later class of traders who poured rum among them like water, were honest, industrious, and friendly.

They were ready to meet the white man with their customary phrase of good will "I shall firmly shake hands with your speech." He was intimately associated with this tribe from 1735 to 1744, when he diverted his activities to the Chickasaws.
It was from the Cherokees' chief town, Great Telliko, in the Appalachians, that Adair explored the mountains.

He describes the pass through the chain which was used by the Indians and which, from his outline of it, was probably the Cumberland Gap.