Sequoyah and the Vital Nature of the Written Word

On a December evening in 1840, the writer John Howard Payne—known to Americans today, if at all, for his song “Home, Sweet Home”—was invited to a meeting in Park Hill, Oklahoma, about seventy miles southeast of Tulsa. Payne was excited. The meeting was to be held at a cabin owned by John Ross, chief of the Cherokee tribe, and he would have the honor of meeting the tribe’s most distinguished citizen, perhaps the most celebrated Native American in history: the linguist and diplomat, Sequoyah.¹

The fifty-year-old dignitary did not disappoint. Wearing a long, dark blue robe and the traditional Cherokee turban, he seated himself by the fire and lit a pipe. “His air was altogether what we picture to ourselves of an old Greek philosopher,” Payne thought.² Sequoyah was asked to recite some Cherokee legends, and Payne waited, quill in hand, to preserve his words for posterity. But the older man began speaking in his native language—he either did not know, or refused to speak, English—and Ross and a young interpreter present were so enraptured by his words that they failed to translate. “He talked and gesticulated very gracefully,” the author recalled afterward. “His voice alternately swelling,—and then sinking to a whisper,—and his eye firing up and then its wild flashes subsiding.” But Payne understood nothing. The next morning, when he asked Sequoyah to repeat the story so he could write it down, the older man refused—and his words have been forever lost.

The irony is that this anecdote so perfectly illustrates the fleeting nature of oral communication—and the degree to which Sequoyah’s invention, the Cherokee syllabary, revolutionized his tribe’s culture. In the 1820s, he became the only person to invent a form of writing without already knowing another one, or so it is believed.

***

The skill of language is so precious that philosophers since Aristotle have seen it as the dividing line between humans and animals. But valuable as it is, language evaporates the moment it is uttered—unless it can be preserved in written form. Countless civilizations have risen and fallen with only spoken languages, leaving few clues about their cultures. The Inca deserted Machu Picchu, for example, only a few decades after building it—but due to the lack of written language, no one knows why. The Sinagua peoples of ancient Arizona left behind the ruins of whole towns, but virtually nothing is known of them, or about what archaeologists call The Mississippi Culture, which thrived in an immense territory stretching from the Great Lakes to Florida as recently as the year 1500. Knowledge of these and other societies has been obliterated by time because they left no written record.

Cultures that rely on oral tradition sometimes fashion customs, such as chanting or other mnemonic devices, to pass on information, but these are relatively weak defenses against the mortality of information. The Polynesian explorers who ventured across the Pacific in seafaring canoes were remarkably skilled at rote learning—yet by the time Captain Cook reached Hawaii in 1778, their Tahitian cousins had forgotten about them, and vice versa.

By contrast, in 1776 the historian Edward Gibbon argued that the advent of printing meant that the Dark Ages could never return to Europe. If “victorious Barbarians,” he wrote, ever “carr[ied] slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic,” Americans would shelter “the remains of civilised society” in the form of written records.³ Writing enables collaboration across long distances. Charles Darwin, for example, worked for decades with his friend Asa Gray entirely by correspondence without the two ever meeting. And it facilitates communication across the ages, as with philosophers who still use arguments first written down in ancient Greece. Today we can read, say, the four-thousand-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh or the 12th-century Tale of Genji almost as if they were written yesterday. In 2012, scholars in New Hampshire brewed beer from a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian recipe.

In an oral tradition, a single break in the chain of information conveyance can erase centuries of knowledge. But the ability to preserve and convey meaning through writing is limited only by the perishability of the medium and the skill of readers. Writing is, by a wide margin, the most valuable thing humans have ever created.⁴ And it was created. Language evolved over the millennia like other “spontaneous orders,” but writing was invented relatively recently, by people who knew what they were doing.

The oldest writing system is believed to be Sumerian cuneiform, which combined alphabetic writing, in which letters stand for sounds, with logographic writing, in which symbols stand for whole words. Of the many writing systems, the alphabet and its cousin, the syllabary, in which symbols represent spoken syllables, have the advantage of requiring less memorization. They can be learned rapidly and are flexible enough to allow greater creativity.

Our own alphabet has its roots in the Phoenician script adapted by the Greeks sometime in the 8th century B.C. In Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet, classicist Barry Powell argues that Greek writing was fashioned specifically for the purpose of preserving the classic Trojan War poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, and that it is “beyond doubt” that this was done “by a single man at a single time.”⁵ The Greeks certainly thought so. They ascribed the alphabet to Cadmus, the founding king of Thebes.

Whatever the truth of this, it is not uncommon for alphabets to be invented by individuals. Missionaries, in particular, have often crafted writing systems to communicate with the natives whom they sought to convert. But there is no story quite like that of Sequoyah, who almost single-handedly invented a written form for the language of the largest tribe in America.

***

Born around 1770, Sequoyah was the son of a Virginia military officer named Nathaniel Gist, who lived briefly among the Cherokees in Tennessee before returning east prior to his son’s birth. It’s unlikely that Gist knew he’d had a son; he later served under George Washington in the American Revolutionary War. Sequoyah was given the English name George Gist, sometimes spelled Guess or Guyst, by relatives who had known his father. Some believe his first name was chosen in Washington’s honor.⁶

The family lived near Tuskegee, Tennessee, which was then tribal land. Due partly to the fact that the Cherokees fought for the British in the Revolution, many Americans treated them with hostility once the war ended. In 1791, after a series of bloody battles, the Americans and the Cherokees signed a treaty under which Americans constructed a fort across the river from Sequoyah’s home. A self-reliant young man, Sequoyah took up the trade of silversmithing and proved unusually skilled.

The business was successful enough that it became a neighborhood gathering place, and Sequoyah began to drink excessively in the company of friends. His drinking became a serious problem, and friends began to regard him as a drunk. But he realized in time the danger this was leading him into and quit; according to some sources, he even persuaded the tribal council in 1824 to ban liquor. Having turned his life around, he expanded his business into a blacksmith shop and soon gained renown for his high-quality spurs and bridles.⁷

The first decades of the 19th century were extraordinarily tense for the Cherokee tribe. In 1807, Sequoyah’s uncle—a chief named Doublehead—was assassinated by a rival tribesman who believed that he had accepted bribes from the U.S. government for surrendering tribal land. In response to his brother’s murder, another of Sequoyah’s uncles moved his followers from Tennessee toward Arkansas. However, like many other Cherokees, Sequoyah chose not to move.

A few years later, when war broke out again between the United States and Britain, Sequoyah joined an American militia in Alabama. The opposing Red Stick band of Creek Indians, armed by the British, sent a force of perhaps one thousand warriors to Fort Mims on the Alabama River, where, on August 30, 1813, they killed or captured nearly the whole garrison. In retaliation, General Andrew Jackson mustered local soldiers, including Sequoyah, to capture the Red Stick village of Turkeytown, and, the following March, put an end to the Creek war at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. No one knows precisely what role Sequoyah played, but his unit was celebrated for its bravery; it was said to have lost a larger percentage of men in the battle than any other. And it’s possible that Sequoyah suffered a wound to his leg, which left him with a limp for the rest of his life (although some sources say his weakened leg was a birth defect).

In any event, he left the military in 1814; a year later, he married a half-Cherokee woman named Sally Waters. Months later, Sequoyah and a group of other Cherokees were essentially forced by General Jackson to sign a treaty surrendering thirty-five hundred acres of Alabama land in exchange for $11,000. Sequoyah signed with his English name, “George Guess”—the earliest known sample of his handwriting. That treaty, and another signed shortly afterward, required the Cherokees to move to Arkansas, but Sequoyah’s family stopped on the way in Willstown (now Fort Payne), Alabama, and established a farm. There he lived for five years before moving to Arkansas in 1824 and Oklahoma in 1829.

It seems likely that by the time he moved to Willstown, Sequoyah was already contemplating what would be his greatest achievement: the Cherokee syllabary. Various stories are told about how he was inspired, but the most detailed version holds that he was visiting his brother-in-law in 1820 when he overheard some young men debating how it was that white men could preserve speech on paper. After a while, he spoke up: “You are all fools,” he said. “The thing is very easy. I can do it myself.”⁸ He picked up a rock and began scratching symbols on it with a pin. Each, he said, represented a word. But the men just laughed. Anyone could make drawings on a rock. That was obviously not what the white men were doing. They were somehow able to communicate through a medium so that recipients understood messages without prior knowledge or elaborate memorization.

The problem preoccupied Sequoyah after that. “[I] had observed that many things were found out by men, and known in the world, but that this language escaped and was lost, for want of some way to preserve it,” he told one interviewer.⁹ Charlie Rhodarmer, director of the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum in Vonore, Tennessee, speculates that Sequoyah may have been inspired to devise a system of notation to maintain accounts for his blacksmith business. Beginning with drawings of customers’ faces and symbols to represent how much they owed him, he later expanded the system to encompass the sounds of the language.¹⁰ Sequoyah himself gave a different account to scholar Samuel Knapp in 1828. He had first seen writing used by white men during his military service, he said, when he witnessed the interrogation of a prisoner who was captured while carrying a letter. The prisoner “wrongly read” it to the Indian soldiers—evidently trying to deceive them about its contents¹¹—and the Cherokee troops discussed afterward “this mysterious power of the talking leaf.” Some contended it was a gift from God to the white man. But Sequoyah disagreed; it was certainly a human invention, and there was no reason the Cherokees could not devise their own system.

One way or another, it is clear that between 1815 and 1820, the idea struck him to fashion symbols for each sound in the

Original Cherokee Syllabary

Cherokee language. It would not do to scratch out symbols for every word; that would result in an unwieldy collection of symbols that everyone would have to memorize. Instead, he would listen to spoken Cherokee, identify all of its phonemes—the smallest particles of vocal expression that carry meaning—and sort them into a collection of manageable size to which symbols could be attached. This was tough, because, as Sequoyah told Knapp, “his own ear was not remarkably discriminating.” He therefore recruited his wife and five-year-old daughter, Ahyokah, who had “more acute ears” to help. According to Knapp, Sequoyah’s first effort resulted in a set of symbols that was “very numerous”—as many as two hundred separate characters. But with his family’s assistance, he managed to cull the number to eighty-six. (One was later discarded, so that the system today consists of eighty-five.)

A syllabary worked well, because Cherokee consists of regular consonant-vowel combinations (such as “lo” or “mi”). It would not work well for a language such as English, with its wider variety of syllable sounds, each of which would require its own symbol. It is possible to imagine how complicated an English syllabary would be by noting the shorthand style sometimes used in personalized license plates or text messages—such as “RUOK” for “are you okay,” or “EZ” for “easy.” Reducing English to such symbols would likely be impossible, or it would result in a set of symbols so large as to be useless.¹²

Yet the Sequoyan system does not merely represent sounds. Because many Cherokee words are one syllable long, symbols can sometimes stand for an entire word. Thus, the system operates simultaneously at a syllabic and a pictographic level. For example, the Cherokee word for good-bye, ᏙᎾᏓᎪᎲᎢ (which transliterates as donadogohvi)¹³ is a sentence that means “until you and I meet again.”¹⁴ The word for lawyer, ᏗᏘᏲᎯᎯ (dityohihi), is a sentence that means “he argues repeatedly with purpose.”¹⁵ As Ellen Cushman writes, Sequoyan is therefore “polysynthetic,”¹⁶ which makes Sequoyah’s system, in some ways, more efficient than English. In later years, newspapers that published translated documents in parallel columns often had blank space left over on the Cherokee side, because English required more room. The system has flaws—most notably, it cannot represent aspiration or inflection, which are important aspects of the language, and some symbols look so alike—for instance, Ꮧ (di) and Ꮨ (ti), or Ꮐ (nah), Ᏻ (yu), Ꮆ (lo), and Ꮹ (wa)—that it can be confusing. But the Cherokees themselves found the system intuitive.

Writers often have claimed that Sequoyah based his symbols on the Latin characters of our own alphabet, but more recent scholarship holds that this is not the case. Cushman points to a document at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa that may be in Sequoyah’s own handwriting; it represents the syllabary in its original form. The figures bear no resemblance to Latin letters; instead, they are delicately drawn curlicues, spirals, and verticals, some of which vaguely resemble Greek letters or musical notation. Yet, there appears to be no relation to the Latin alphabet. It was only later, when the tribe established its own newspaper, that it created a typographic font with new symbols resembling Latin characters.

It is hard to picture now how hard it must have been to sort spoken Cherokee into a written system. As Barry Powell writes, “It is difficult to think about writing because writing is a form of thinking, and it is difficult to think about thinking.”¹⁷ It is simple to divide the words one hears into syllables after a system of written notation already exists. But to start from scratch—half a century before audio recording became possible—required an astonishing degree of imaginative insight and discipline. Certainly the realization that Cherokee speakers consistently distinguished between, say, Ꮊ (me), Ꮋ (mi), Ꮑ (ne), and Ꮒ (ni), or between Ꮎ (na), Ꮏ (hna), and Ꮐ (nah)—without already having symbols to represent these distinctions—required extraordinary attention to detail. All told, the task occupied twelve years.

In fact, the work took so much of Sequoyah’s time and attention away from his farm work that it appears to have caused tension with his family. One story tells that his wife angrily burned all of his papers, forcing him to start over.¹⁸ Worse still were the suspicions of his fellow Cherokees, some of whom regarded his work as a form of sorcery. The author Samuel George Morton reported that fearful neighbors lured him from his house and then burned it down.¹⁹ Morton had no direct evidence for this story, and it may be a corruption of the tale about Sequoyah’s wife, or fabricated altogether. But it is true that Sequoyah was suspected of practicing black magic, and neighbors and family members sought to dissuade him from what they viewed as a time-wasting project. A soldier who knew Sequoyah well reported:

He was laughed at by all who knew him, and was earnestly besought by every member of his own family to abandon a project which was occupying and diverting so much of his time from the important and essential duties which he owed his family. . . . But no argument or solicitation could induce him to change his determination. And although he was under the necessity of working much at night, by lights made from burning pine, he persisted.²⁰

When one friend pressured him to give up, Sequoyah had a ready answer: “What I have done I have done from myself. If our people think I am making a fool of myself, you may tell them that what I am doing will not make fools of them. They did not cause me to begin, and they shall not cause me to give up.”²¹

In 1821, he finally finished. Then, reports Knapp, “he summoned some of the most distinguished [men] of his nation, in order to make his communication to them—and after giving them the best explanation of his discovery that he could, stripping it of all supernatural influence, he proceeded to demonstrate to them, in good earnest, that he had made a discovery.”²² When one person objected that he was simply using the symbols as mnemonic devices, Sequoyah corrected him: “When I write anything, I lay it by; I think of it no more; I do not remember what I have written: but any time afterwards when I take up the paper, all I have written is brought back to my recollection by the reading on the paper.”²³ To prove it, he sent his daughter Ahyokah out of the room. Then, he asked someone to say a word, which he wrote down, and he handed it to Ahyokah when she returned. When she read the word aloud, “the Indians were wonder struck.”²⁴ Additional demonstrations convinced tribal leaders that Sequoyah’s invention was not witchcraft, but a tool with the potential to revolutionize their society. In 1824, the tribal council awarded Sequoyah a silver medal in thanks.²⁵ Later in life, he often proudly relayed how the Texas hero—and adopted Cherokee—Sam Houston told him that his invention was more valuable than if he had given every tribesman two handfuls of gold.

The tribe caught on rapidly. “A few hours of instruction are sufficient for a Cherokee to learn to read,” wrote missionary Samuel Worcester in 1826.²⁶ They taught each other this new skill, and Sequoyah himself traveled to deliver letters to far-flung members of the tribe and instruct them. “The simplicity of this method of writing, and the eagerness to obtain a knowledge of it,” wrote the Cherokee politician and editor Elias Boudinot,

are evinced by the astonishing rapidity with which it is acquired, and by the number who do so. It is about two years since its introduction, and already there are a great many who can read it. In the neighborhood in which I live, I do not recollect a male Cherokee, between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, who is ignorant of this mode of writing.²⁷

An 1835 federal government survey found that the literacy rate among Cherokees was three times that of English literacy among American citizens.²⁸

***

The advent of written Cherokee gave the tribe a special degree of political independence. In Washington, D.C., and in southern states, white political leaders already were ramping up their efforts to acquire Cherokee land—by force if necessary. Among the most common rationalizations offered for seizing territory was that the Indians were savages who let their land sit idle. But the reality was that the Cherokee, in particular, enjoyed the trappings of Western civilization. They were often bilingual, served in the U.S. military, attended Western schools, and practiced agriculture and industry. One chief, James Vann, even owned a steamboat to service his wealthy cotton plantation.

In 1819, tribal leaders selected a site in Georgia to serve as their capital, naming it New Echota. Eight years later, they published a tribal constitution in both English and the syllabary, and established a newspaper, the Phoenix, to print materials in both languages. “Judicious friends to the civilization of the Aborigines of America,” wrote Boudinot, believed “that a paper published exclusively for their benefit and under their direction, would add great force to the charitable means employed by the public for their melioration.”²⁹ But Boudinot—who had been educated at a missionary school and thought Cherokees should embrace Western ways—also hoped the paper would help resolve conflicts between Cherokees and whites and among the Cherokees themselves.

Sequoyah himself seems to have resisted some aspects of Western culture, notably  English and Christianity. Most biographers believe he could not read or write in English, and his contemporaries thought the same. Ellen Cushman, however, suspects that he could. The Gilcrease Museum’s handwritten copy of the syllabary is signed in Sequoyah’s name, yet the accompanying note is written in English. Addressed to John Howard Payne, it reads:

We have met and see one another as friends and brothers. I am extremely glad to see you friends and brothers, and I am glad for what you have seen. . . . It has only been fourteen years since we [who] are called Cherokees have learned to read. I am thankful that the people have slowly understood how much labor it has cost me.³⁰

If this was written by Sequoyah, as Cushman believes, it would prove that he did understand written English after all, but he chose not to use it except on rare occasions.

Even stronger evidence exists that he brushed aside the religious efforts of missionaries who, in about 1800, began converting Cherokees. The most famous missionary was Samuel Worcester, who lived with the tribe from August 1825 until his death in 1859. Worcester was friendly with Sequoyah but could never convert him. “Don’t know about white man’s religion,” he told Worcester at one point. “My mother good woman—better than my father. She always tell me to do good—no bad. I like my mother, I believe like my mother, I live like my mother, die like my mother, and go to same place as my mother—good enough for me.”³¹

Yet Sequoyah’s syllabary gave missionaries a powerful tool for preaching to Cherokees. Between 1826, when Boudinot began organizing the Phoenix, and 1828 when it was ready for publication, Worcester and Boudinot worked together to obtain a set of Cherokee type from manufacturers back east. Historians long thought that Worcester led this effort, but it now appears that Sequoyah played an important role as well. He and other Cherokees had created shorthand versions of the original symbols already, and it was from this that the typeface was adapted.³² They also changed the syllabary’s order, designing a chart that organized the system like a printer’s type case. The symbols were placed in columns by vowel and in rows by consonant, and the chart could be laid flat so that type could be sorted into the boxes of a drawer.³³

Still, Worcester was instrumental in staving off an effort by a scholar named John Pickering to alter Sequoyah’s system. A Harvard-trained lawyer and linguist of worldwide prominence, Pickering became one of the first Westerners to devote serious attention to Native American languages. In 1819, he fashioned a system for writing Cherokee in the Latin alphabet—called an orthography—in which sixteen Latin characters, plus a few new symbols, represented sounds in a manner more accessible to readers whose first language was English. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, for whom Worcester worked, favored this system, and recommended it to the Cherokee governing council. But the council rejected it, and so did Worcester. “I am not insensible,” he wrote, “of the advantages [of] Mr. Pickering’s alphabet. . . . But in point of simplicity, [Sequoyah’s] has still the pre-eminence, and . . . [i]f books are printed in [Sequoyah’s] character, they will be read; if any other, they will lie useless.” It would be “a vain attempt” to try to pressure the Cherokees into abandoning the syllabary, he wrote. “Their enthusiasm is kindled: great numbers have learned to read. . . . Tell them now of printing in another character, and you throw water upon the fire which you are wishing to kindle.”³⁴ Heeding his advice, the Board rejected Pickering’s system and stuck with Sequoyah’s.

The Phoenix thrived under Boudinot’s leadership. He was a prolific writer, whose book Poor Sarah was the first novel published in Cherokee.³⁵ In 1832, he printed a long article about Sequoyah, “who, by his inventive powers, has raised [the tribe] to an elevation unattained by any other Indian nation, and made them a reading and intellectual people.”³⁶ It was said that half of the male members of the tribe had become literate within six years of the syllabary’s invention, and he wrote, “I am convinced there is nothing exaggerated in this.”³⁷

Thanks to Sequoyah’s syllabary and the resultant literacy, Boudinot’s editorials reached a mass audience. He opposed the efforts of state and federal politicians to force the Cherokees to move west. But he insisted that the tribe “must either become civilized and happy, or sharing the fate of many kindred nations, become extinct.”³⁸ Ultimately, the Phoenix served to demonstrate to white politicians that the tribe was as culturally sophisticated as they were.

At first, Boudinot’s efforts appeared successful. In December 1827, the tribe sent a delegation, including Sequoyah, to Washington, D.C., to complain about whites trespassing on a tract of land called Lovely’s Purchase, to which the Cherokees were entitled under an 1817 treaty. The delegation was feted and shown the wonders of the city. Sequoyah had his portrait painted by Charles Bird King, the primary artistic chronicler of Native American life.³⁹ But it gradually became clear that the government was delaying the talks as a negotiating tactic. When, in late March 1828, the delegates expressed their desire to go home, federal officials demanded that they agree first to exchange their Arkansas land for protection of Lovely’s Purchase. It was a bad deal—the Cherokees were entitled to the Purchase, and the tribal government had not authorized the delegates to surrender the Arkansas property—so they refused. But the government detained them in Washington for another month. At last, the homesick natives gave in. When, that autumn, the tribal council demanded a meeting to discuss their unauthorized act, only Sequoyah and one other delegate were willing to attend; the rest feared for their lives. Yet the council realized that the tribe lacked the wherewithal to refuse compliance, and the following year, Sequoyah and his countrymen moved west, to what is now Sallisaw, Oklahoma.

***

The Lovely’s Purchase dispute was just one episode in a growing conflict. Beginning in 1826, the Georgia legislature passed a series of laws proclaiming that the Cherokees “are tenants [of the land] at [the state’s] will” and announcing “that [the state] may at any time she pleases, [terminate] that tenancy.”⁴⁰ The Cherokees decided to challenge the constitutionality of that act. However, when the case reached the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall, though sympathetic to the tribe, ruled that Georgia was immune from such lawsuits.

When the state passed another law, this time forbidding whites from living on Cherokee land without a license, Worcester volunteered to bring a follow-up case. Having already settled on Cherokee land, he refused to get a license and was arrested. Again, the tribe argued that the state’s law intruded on its authority. This time, it won. “The Cherokee Nation,” wrote Marshall, “is a distinct community occupying its own territory . . . in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves, or in conformity with treaties and with the acts of Congress.”⁴¹ Georgia could not legislate over Cherokee land, and therefore Worcester must be freed. Moreover, the federal government had the authority and obligation to protect Cherokee territory against the state’s incursions.

It seemed a resounding victory, but it soon proved hollow. President Andrew Jackson, a volatile racist who favored the forcible removal of the Cherokees, refused to honor the ruling and moved forward with plans to force the tribe to relocate west of the Mississippi River. Realizing that their triumph had been for naught, Boudinot and several collaborators abandoned efforts to prevent the tribe’s removal.⁴² Concluding that the tribe’s only realistic option was to move west, Boudinot and his friends signed the Treaty of New Echota on December 29, 1835, relinquishing tribal lands and agreeing to resettlement in Oklahoma. In time, it proved to be their death sentence.

The treaty’s opponents, known as the Ross Party after their leader, Chief John Ross, pushed for a better deal. But the Jackson administration refused to discuss it, and the Senate approved the Treaty of New Echota the following summer. The Georgia government quickly seized the Phoenix press and began using it to print materials in Cherokee, which urged the tribe to leave. Within months, federal troops began overseeing what came to be known as the Trail of Tears. Worcester went with the tribe.

Sequoyah, however, had already gone. He had relocated in 1829 along with other Cherokees seeking to avoid conflict with whites. This group came to be known as the Old Settlers, and they had already organized their own tribal government by the time the new influx of thirteen thousand Cherokees—which greatly outnumbered the Old Settlers—arrived. When the newcomers, sometimes called the Late Immigrants, called for the creation of a new government, the Old Settlers refused. This and residual bitterness over the New Echota treaty led conflicting Cherokee factions to violence. On the evening of June 22, 1839, Boudinot and other prominent signers of the treaty were stabbed to death and tomahawked by members of the Ross Party. No one was ever charged with the crime, but retaliations followed, and one of Sequoyah’s sons was killed in the internecine violence.

That July, Sequoyah and Ross called for a convention to end the bloodshed. Thousands of tribal members attended, and on September 6, 1839, the factions signed the Act of Union, reconnecting the tribe and authorizing a new constitution, which was distributed in both English and the syllabary.⁴³

But that was not the end of Sequoyah’s work as a diplomat. In July 1839, he worked to aid Cherokees fleeing from the Republic of Texas—which was then prosecuting a merciless war against all Indians. Three years later, he set out on a mission to find what was believed to be a lost band of Cherokees in Mexico and urge them to join the main body of the tribe. Along with seven others—one of whom was Sequoyah’s son Tessee—they headed southwest for two weeks until Sequoyah began feeling ill. He recovered, but after a few more weeks, grew sick again and sent everyone home except Tessee and another companion named The Worm. Recovering once more, he led the party south again. Near San Antonio, their horses were stolen, but they pressed on. At last they met a small band of Cherokees about a hundred miles south of the Rio Grande. Not long afterward, however, Sequoyah’s illness returned, and he died near San Fernando, Mexico, in August 1843.

***

His invention, however, lived on. The Cherokee Advocate, successor to the Phoenix, began publication in the tribe’s new capital of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in 1844, printing hymns and government documents in the syllabary. When the Civil War broke out, the tribe held a convention in Tahlequah to decide whether to ally itself with the Confederacy, and the Advocate published the debates in Sequoyan. The tribe ultimately joined the Confederate side, and military leaders issued written orders in the syllabary. The 1866 treaty formally ending the Cherokee involvement in the war, extensive revisions of the tribe’s legal code, and even the Emancipation Proclamation were published in the syllabary, as were almanacs, hymnals, and bibles. In the 1880s, when James Mooney began compiling his book Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees he found a plethora of documents “written by the shamans of the tribe, for their own use, in the Cherokee characters”—proof that “the opposing forces of Christianity and shamanism alike profited by the genius of [Sequoyah].”⁴⁴

More revealingly, ordinary Cherokees continued to use the syllabary for quotidian writings for more than a century after Sequoyah’s death. In 1965, anthropologists Jack and Anna Kilpatrick published a collection of such documents to show how pervasive the syllabary was. It included letters, menus, hymns, shopping lists, and minutes from meetings. One 1939 letter reads simply, “I’m glad that I saw you, and you must send me my shoes, size 6, and also hose. I will be looking for them Monday.”⁴⁵ The fact that such commonplace documents would be written in the syllabary shows how ubiquitous it was.

Today, Sequoyah is the most celebrated Native American in history. In 1847, the German botanist Stephen Endlicher named the world’s largest species of tree, California’s giant Sequoia, in tribute to him.⁴⁶ In the early 20th century, when the federal government attempted to terminate tribal governments, members of five tribes proposed that their lands be united into a new state, to be named Sequoyah. In August 1905, they drafted a constitution, which was approved by voters. (The proposal died in Congress, and two years later, the territory instead became Oklahoma.) In 2017, the U.S. Mint featured Sequoyah on a dollar coin.

The Creek poet Alexander Posey predicted in 1899 that Sequoyah’s invention would be immortal:

The people’s language cannot perish—nay,
When from the face of this great continent
Inevitable doom hath swept away
The last memorial—the last fragment
Of tribes,—some scholar learned shall pore
Upon thy letters, seeking ancient lore.⁴⁷

Yet Posey’s confidence may have been misplaced. The latter half of the 20th century threatened the Cherokee language with extinction. In the early 1960s, when the Kilpatricks sought documents for their book, they found that fewer and fewer Cherokees spoke the language, and those who did usually wrote by transliterating the language into the Latin alphabet. “Thirty years or so ago one might have obtained manuscripts in the syllabary by the truckload,” they wrote. “Today the average Cherokee cabin is likely to be as devoid of a single scrap of Sequoyan as it is of a copy of [the Roman poet] Catullus.”⁴⁸

That trend continued. A 2001 census found only ten thousand Cherokee speakers, and not a single person under the age of forty who used the language daily. Today’s Phoenix—resurrected as a monthly newsletter run by the tribal government—still sometimes publishes articles in the syllabary. But when sociologist Margaret Bender spent three years studying the use of the syllabary, she found it was more often used as an artifact of tourism, or for self-consciously religious purposes, than for ordinary communication. Most Cherokees learned it as adults, and for the most part only cultural or religious experts could read it.⁴⁹

Today, few new texts are produced in the syllabary, and virtually no fiction or poetry. In the 20th century, Cherokee writers such as the humorist Will Rogers and the playwright Lynn Riggs—whose play Green Grow the Lilacs became the musical Oklahoma!—attained fame, but neither wrote in the syllabary. It appears that the last poet to use it was Robert Conley, the prize-winning novelist who died in 2014 and whose 1984 poetry collection The Rattlesnake Band contained some poems in the syllabary. In one stanza, he wrote,

ᏄᏍᏛ ᎦᎧᏂᎯᏍᏗ ᎣᎲ ᎦᎸᏉᏗ ᎢᎩ
ᎤᏁᏔᏅᎯ ᏂᏓᏳᎵᏍᎪᎸᏔᏅᎯ
ᎠᎴ ᎾᏍᎩ (ᏄᏍᏛ ᎦᎧᏂᎯᏍᏗ ᎣᎲ) ᎠᏐᏢᏍᏙᏗ ᎨᎡ ᎠᏍᎦᏂ ᎢᎩ

Cherokee historian Durbin Feeling translates this as:

Language is sacred;
A gift from God;
And its misuse is sinful.⁵⁰

Still, work is underway to ensure that the language—and with it, Sequoyah’s invention—is preserved. The Cherokee government has sponsored the creation of Sequoyan fonts for word processors and mobile devices, and two decades ago, initiated a language-immersion program in tribal schools. The first group of immersion students graduated this summer. One, seventeen-year-old Lauren Hummingbird, told the Phoenix that she plans to pursue linguistics in college to help keep the language alive.⁵¹ Meanwhile, archives still hold countless documents—including diaries and letters—that have never been translated. Hope remains that they will not become unreadable within a generation.

In 1832, the educational reformer William Channing Woodbridge wrote:

The man who invents a valuable machine to diminish labor is deemed worthy of public honors. . . . But a Cadmus is so rarely seen, and the invention of a written language is an effort of genius and perseverance so unlike any combination of wheels and levers . . . that we have no standard by which to estimate at once the value. . . . Let us, however, imagine every book in our language to be blotted out, let us suppose ourselves unable to communicate our thoughts to the absent or to keep a record of the past, or to preserve our knowledge for the future . . . and we may approximate the value which should be placed upon the labors of Sequoyah.⁵²

In the 2014 documentary First Language, about the effort to keep spoken and written Cherokee alive, language teacher Shirley Oswalt put it more simply. Holding up a poster with a photo of Einstein and a few lines written in Sequoyan, she explained, “It says ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’ Sequoyah had that imagination. He had that vision. To me he’s an Einstein.”

About Timothy Sandefur

Timothy Sandefur holds the Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government at the Goldwater Institute and is a contributing editor of The Objective Standard.

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