ld Tassel expressed great reluctance to the proposed boundaries, and asked the commissioners to write a letter to General Washington by Colonel Gist23; and later in the conference Colonel Christian proposed that some of the Cherokee young men accompany Colonel Gist to Congress and to the army of General Washington,24 which seventeen of them did.25
Now Colonel Gist was living with the Cherokees on terms of intimate friendship, of which they have given the highest proofs, at the time Sequoya was born, about the year 1760. The family tradition that Sequoya was his son becomes almost a certainty when we consider that it was a general, almost a universal practice for white men living, even temporarily, in the nation, to take Indian wives; not, generally, “until death us do part,” but during the residence of the husband in the nation; after the manner of the Japanese marriage custom celebrated in Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthome. Many soldiers of the garrison of Fort Loudon had Indian wives who, during the siege, furnished them provisions at the risk of their lives; John Watts, father of the distinguished chief of the same name, married a sister of the Old Tassel, and the trader John Benge, progenitor of a less noted warrior, married his niece; General Joseph Martin, while temporarily residing at Echota as Indian agent, married Betsy, daughter of the celebrated Nancy Ward, though he had a wife of his own race back in the settlements; Leonard P. Shaw, memorable as the first United States ethnologist, but not otherwise, married a daughter of an influential warrior called Halfbreed; and Major Robert King, while employed by the government in the nation, lived with a daughter of Scollacutta, and only escaped being killed by jumping through a window, when Captain Beard’s party attacked his town. Return J. Meigs, writing in 1816, after fif-
teen years intercourse with the Indians, expressed the opinion that almost one-half of the Cherokee nation are of mixed blood by intermarriage with the white people.26
I have already stated that we are not constrained to believe Sequoya was the son of a “low adventurer.” If Nathaniel Gist shall be accepted as his father, then he will have a sire worthy of his distinguished son. He was a man of character and talents, and belonged to a family that claimed kinship with the great Protector of England. Ibis father has been mentioned in connection with the Ohio Company, and the French and Indian war. His brother, Richard, was in the battle of King’s Mountain and fell within twenty-five or thirty steps of the British lines.27 A grandson of his brother, William, was Governor of South Carolina and signed the ordinance of secession in 1860. His own descendants are allied with the foremost families of Kentucky; his widow married Governor Charles Scott, and a granddaughter was the wife of Governor Luke P. Blackburn; a daughter married United States Senator Jesse Bledsoe, and was the grandmother of Governor B. Gratz Brown, of Missouri, Democratic candidate for Vice President in 1872; another daughter married Captain Nat Hart, brother of Mrs. Henry Clay; and still another daughter was the mother of Francis P. Blair, Democratic candidate for Vice President in 1868, and of Montgomery Blair, Postmaster General under President Lincoln.28