settlers had already rendered the condition of the Overhill towns intolerable, and many of Watts’ friends followed him to the south. Sequoya, among others, emigrated to Willstown, probably at this time (1792).
In 1809, after he had passed the meridian of life, Sequoya conceived the idea of devising a written language for the Cherokee people. It was a bold conception. It would have been a rash undertaking for the most learned philologist of his time; but Sequoya, reared as he had been in an Indian village on the Little Tennessee River, spoke no language but his own, and
had never acquired so much as a rudimentary knowledge of letters. His scheme was independent of all other written languages. For twelve years he labored patiently and unremittingly on its development, unaided even by the sympathy of his fellows, who ridiculed his dogged persistence, as he recovered from one failure after another, until his system was finally completed in 1821.
Among all the schemes of symbolic thought representation, from the simple pictograph of primitative man to the finished alphabet of civilized nations, Sequoya’s syllabary of the Cherokee language stands second only to the Cadmean alphabet3; and if we might begin anew and devise a system for our own exclusive use, it would be the most philosophical of them all.4 Sequoya ascertained the number of syllables in the Cherokee tongue, and formed a distinct character for each syllable. There is no spelling under his system, which eliminates all the perplexing questions of orthography that continually arise under our system. As soon as the eighty-five characters of the syllabary are mastered, which may be done in a few weeks, the whole written language is acquired. We are assured that in a single month the Cherokee child reaches a proficiency in reading and writing that takes our children at least two years to attain.
The mother of Sequoya was an Indian woman of good family; who his father was has not been satisfactorily determined. Phillips and those who follow him assert that he was 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 tr