oodpasture of a Life of Jefferson Dillard Goodpasture.
He is at present a member of the Tennessee History Committee, and was formerly a Secretary of the Tennessee Historical Society, and Editor of the American Historical Magazine when that periodical became the organ of the Historical Society.
capital of the Cherokee Nation; while Echota, with its namesake, New Echota, were its capitals from the time of Oconostota until the western emigration. Mialaquo was the early home of the able, but irreconcilable chief, Dragging Canoe, who split off from the old tribe, and founded the celebrated Chickamauga towns; and Tuskegee, its sister village, lying under the walls of Fort Loudon, about five miles from Echota, was the birth-place of the great Cherokee syllabist, Sequoya, who is also called George Guess, or Guest, or, more correctly, Gist, presumably after his father. Sequoya is believed to have been born about the time the famous fortress of Fort Loudon was taken by the Cherokees, in 1760. This approximate date seems to be fairly established by Sequoya himself. An Iroquois peace delegation visited the Cherokees at Echota about the year 1770.2 Sequoya, then a small boy living with his mother at Tuskegee, was present at this treaty, and was old enough to remember some of its incidents, which he detailed to his cousin, James Wafford. He must, therefore, have been something near ten years of age at the time, which would fix the date of his birth at about the year 1760.
Sequoya continued to reside at Tuskegee until he was, probably, thirty-two years of age. Dragging Canoe, formerly of Mialaquo, died in his bed at Running Water, about the first of March, 1792, and Colonel John Watts, of Echota, was invited to take his place as principal chief of the Chickamaugas. Watts accepted the position, but did not settle at Running Water, nor, indeed, at any of the five original Chickamauga towns. He chose to fix the seat of his government at Willstown, on the Coosa River, in the present State of Alabama. The encroachments of the white 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