lands without the consent of the national council. A similar
law was enacted by the ( reeks at about the same time. It was for violating these laws
that Mcintosh and Ridge suffered death in their respective tribes. The principal
parts of the Cherokee law, as reenacted by the united Nation in the West in 1s4l'.
appear as follows in the compilation authorized in 1800:
"An act against sale of land, etc.: Whereas, The peace and prosperity of
Indian nations are frequently sacrificed or placed in jeopardy by the unrestrained
cupidity of their own individual citizens; and whereas, we ourselves are liable to suffer
from the same cause, and be subjected to future removal and disturbances: There-
fore, . . .
"Be it further rnitrt.nl, That any person or persons who shall, contrary to the will
and consent ofat the head of the list, the result of three thousand years of development by
Egyptian, Phoenician, and Greek. Sequoya's syllabary, the unaided work of an
uneducated Indian reared amid semisavage surroundings, stands second.
Twelve years of his life are said to have been given to his great work. Being entirely
without instruction and ha\ ing no knowledge of the philosophy of language, being not
evi ii acquainted with English, his first attempts were naturally enough in the direc-
tion of the crude Indian pictograph. He set out to devise a symbol for each word of
the language, and after several years oi experiment, finding this an utterly hopeless
task, he threw aside the thousands of characters which he hail carved or scratched
uiion pieces of bark, and started in anew to study the constructii f the