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 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.