LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
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Part I
SKETCHES OF VARIOUS TRIBES OF NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS
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WIGWAM STORIES
BOOKS IN THE INDIAN LANGUAGE
ohn Eliot, of Massachusetts, published the first Indian Bible. This and other Bibles and books in the Indian languages may be seen in the larger city libraries.
The Indians had no printed languages with letters before the white man came; their painted or carved picture-writing meant much to them. Their teepees were covered with histories of the battles their owners had fought, but they had no books of “talking leaves.”
Se-quoyah, a Georgia Indian half-breed, was a modern Cadmus to his people. He invented a perfect alphabet of over eighty letters for his native Cherokee language, and by his own zeal inspired his nation with a love for written words. His paper was birch bark; his ink the juices of berries and weeds. [[4]]
He hated the white people, for his white father had basely deserted his mother when Se-quoyah was a helpless babe. His mother’s father was a proud chief, and the grandson seems to have inherited his spirit.
Se-quoyah never learned to read or to write a word or a letter of English, and his anger was aroused when he saw one of his tribe reading a book made by the hated white people; Se-quoyah then declared he would make as good a one for the Cherokees, and he did.
He listened for sounds while his people talked. He became a silent student and lost or forgot his old warlike spirit. He sat beside his doorway and marked upon bark. His people pitied him, for he did not fight. At last he called a council; he wrote on bark and gave the writing to his little daughter, who had been taught by him to read. She read it and did as the writing commanded; the test was tried many times.
This caused great excitement; young men came in scores to learn of him; they forgot hunting and war for letter-writing. The white missionaries adopted his letters and made a Bible which was read by all these Indian students. The nation became civilized in a short time, and the first printing press sent to an Indian tribe was that sent about 1820 by the United States government to the Cherokees. The type was cast in Cherokee characters, the same that Se-quoyah had invented. [[5]]
A marble bust of Se-quoyah adorns the council house in Tahlequah, the capital of Indian Territory, where this tribe was sent after gold was found on their reservation in Georgia. They knew the value of these mines, but the white man’s power was stronger than theirs, and they had to leave homes and wealth for a strange new land.
Sequoia, the botanical name of the big trees of California, is the only memorial the white man has given this truly American genius.
Adapted from Smithsonian Report. [[6]]
