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The colonial Government seems, on this occasion, to have listened to the traders and to have realized that Priber was a danger, for soldiers were sent to take him prisoner.
Priber was "a gentleman of curious and speculative temper" sent by the French in 1786 to Great Telliko to win the Cherokees to their interest. At this time Adair was trading with the Cherokees. He relates that Priber,
Priber cemented the Cherokee empire "by slow but sure degrees to the very great danger of our southern colonies." His position was that of Secretary of State and as such, with a studiedly provocative arrogance, he carried on correspondence with the British authorities.
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!
There is too much of "my usual good fortune" in Adair's narrative; such luck as his argues for extraordinary resources in the man. Sometimes we discover only through one phrase on a page that he must himself have been the hero of an event he relates in the third person. This seems to be the case in the affair of Priber, which was the worst of those "damages" Adair did to the French.
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