His voluminous work discloses a man not only of wide mental outlook but a practical man with a sense of commercial values.

Yet, instead of making a career for himself among his own caste, he made his home for over thirty years in the Chickasaw towns; and it is plain that, with the exception of some of his older brother traders, he preferred the Chickasaw to any other society.
The complete explanation of such men as Adair we need not expect to find stated anywhere--not even in and between the lines of his book.
The conventionalist would seek it in moral obliquity; the radical, in a temperament that is irked by the superficialities that comprise so large a part of conventional standards.

The reason for his being what he was is almost the only thing Adair did not analyze in his book.

Perhaps, to him, it was self evident.

We may let it be so to us, and see it most clearly presented in a picture composed from some of his brief sketches: A land of grass and green shade inset with bright waters, where deer and domestic cattle herded together along the banks; a circling group of houses, their white-clayed walls sparkling under the sun's rays, and, within and without, the movement of "a friendly and sagacious people," who "kindly treated and watchfully guarded" their white brother in peace and war, and who conversed daily with him in the Old Beloved Speech learned first of Nature.