 the son of George Gist, an unlicensed German peddler from Georgia, who came into the Cherokee nation in 1768, married an Indian girl for the purpose of obtaining cheap protection and board, and departed long before his son was born. “We might denounce him,” he adds, “as a low adventurer if we did not remember that he was the father of one of the most remarkable men who ever appeared on the continent.”5
Aside from the improbability that a man of the character and genius of Sequoya should be the son of a low adventurer, which we are not constrained to believe in this instance, I have already shown the physical impossibility of Phillips’ assertion, insomuch as Sequoya was born some eight years before the
German peddler’s advent into the nation—probably in the year 1760. We, may, therefore, dismiss the claim of George Gist as unquestionably fictitious.
Only one other man—Nathaniel Gist—has ever been suggested as the father of Sequoya, and his claim has not received serious consideration on account of the manner in which it was presented. The story as told by John Mason Brown is that Nathaniel Gist was captured by the Cherokees at Braddock’s defeat in 1755, and remained a prisoner with them for six years, during which time he became the father of Sequoya. On his return to civilization he married a white woman in Virginia by whom he had other children, and afterwards removed to Kentucky, where Sequoya, then a Baptist preacher, frequently visited him, and was always recognized by the family as his son.6 In reply to this claim Mooney points out that the Cherokees were allies of the British during the war in which Braddock’s defeat occurred; and that Sequoya, so far from being a Baptist preacher, was not even a Christian. For these positive errors, and some other improbabilities in Brown’s story, he classes it as one of those genealogical myths built on a chance similarity of name.7
Notwithstanding its manifest errors, there is a sub-stratum of truth back of Brown’s story that lends credence to the essential fact of a tradition that has clung to the family after its historical setting has been forgotten. Nathaniel Gist was a soldier in the French and Indian war; for his services he received a tract of several thousand acres of land in Bourbon County, Kentucky, on which he built the famous old homestead called Canewood, long remembered for the hospitality it dispensed.8 Probably in Braddock’s campaign, but certainly in that of General Forbes, he was closely associated with the Cherokees; and after the fall of Fort Duquesne in 1758, he spent much of his time in their nation up to the beginning of the Revolutionary War.
In the year 1753 George Washington was dispatched by Governor Dinwiddie on an important mission to the French on the Ohio. He was then only twenty-one years old—an age at
6Manuscript letters of John Mason Brown, January 17, 18, 22, and February 4, 1889, in archives of the Bureau of American Ethnology, cited in Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee, p. 109.
which fast friendships are readily formed. At Will’s Creek he met with Christopher Gist, father of Nathaniel Gist, and engaged him as guide in his expedition. Christopher Gist was one of the earliest and most intelligent explorers of the country west of the Alleghanies. Three years before, he had been employed by the Ohio Company to explore their immense grant lying between the Monongahela and Kentucky Rivers. Originally from Maryland, he was at that time living on a farm near the home of Daniel Boone on the Yadkin River. On his return from his first expedition it was his fortune to stand on a mountain and view the magnificent country of Kentucky, long before it was beheld by his neighbor Boone.9 The tradition that Gist saved Washington’s life while crossing the Alleghany River may not be literally true,10 but they suffered terrible hardships and dangers together, and a warm friendship grew up between them. When hostilities broke out Gist, who had formed a settlement near Fort Necessity, attached himself to Washington, and continued with him until operations in the West 