WorkJames Adair
The History of the American Indians (1775), Inferred
James Adair (c. 1709–c. 1783) · 1775
ExcerptedAnalyzedQuotedReadMentioned
Documented 1843
Books • Journals
Read while writing Summer on the Lakes
Named among the books Fuller consulted for her western journey, and discussed in Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. The Harvard College Library ledger dates the loan to the winter after the journey, while the book was being written.
Harvard College Library loan
Charged out of Gore Hall on the card of Richard Frederick Fuller, Margaret's brother and then a Harvard senior; women could not borrow in their own name. The loan falls after the western journey, while Summer on the Lakes was being written. Household access, not proof of her reading — not counted toward engagements. The full ledger →
Selected engagements, in chronological order.
Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →
“Old Adair, who lived forty years among the Indians; not these tribes, indeed, but the southern Indians; does great justice to their religious aspiration.”
Inferred Fuller names 'Old Adair' explicitly and quotes him extensively across multiple pages, including the legend of the carbuncle, his views on Indian religious aspiration, two detailed torture narrative excerpts, and his assessment of Indian stoicism. She also invokes 'Adair's Red Shoes' as an exemplary Indian chief.
“I am inclined to recommend Adair to the patient reader, if such may be found in these United States, with the assurance that, if he will have tolerance for its intolerable prolixity and dryness, he will find, on rising from the book, that he has partaken of an infusion of real Indian bitters, such as may not be drawn from any of the more attractive memoirs on the same subject.”
Fuller, Margaret. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1844.
Undated
Pieces with no legible date. They are part of the record but cannot be placed on the lifeline.
“See sketch of Red Shoes / in Adair [...] Then consider old Adair. / His Jewish tendencies made / him equal to appreciate / the Italian.”
Fuller, Margaret. "Journal 1837–1843." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086; Box 5.