Smithsonian Institution
Sequoyah displays the Cherokee alphabet he developed.
The first painstaking process he tried called for attaching a mark to each Cherokee word. These marks soon mounted into the thousands. As he sensed the futility of this one-for-one relationship, he examined English letters in an old newspaper. His own mind linked symbols of this sort with basic sounds of the Cherokee tongue. After months of work, he sorted out these sounds and assigned them symbols based, to a large extent, upon the ones he had seen in the newspaper. When he introduced his invention to his fellow Cherokees, it was as if he had loosed a floodgate. Within the space of a few weeks, elders and children alike began to read and write. The change was incredible.
Sequoyah himself vaulted into a position of great respect inside the Nation. One of his many awestruck visitors, John Howard Payne, described him with the finest detail and noted that Sequoyah wore
“... a turban of roses and posies upon a white ground girding his venerable grey hairs, a long dark blue robe, bordered around the lower edge and the cuffs, with black; a blue and white minutely checked calico tunic under it, confined with an Indian beaded belt, which sustained a large wooden handled knife, in a rough leathern sheath; the tunic open on the breast and its collar apart, with a twisted handkerchief flung around his neck and gathered within the bosom of the tunic. He wore plain buckskin leggings; and one of a deeper chocolate hue than the other. His moccasins were unornamented buckskin. He had a long dusky white bag of sumac with him, and a long Indian pipe, and smoked incessantly, replenishing his pipe from his bag. His air was altogether what we picture to ourselves of an old Greek philosopher. He talked and gesticulated very gracefully; his voice alternately swelling, and then sinking to a whisper, and his eye firing up and then its wild flashes subsiding into a gentle and most benignant smile.”
During the 1820s, Sequoyah moved west to Arkansas. Preoccupied with the legend of a lost band of Cherokees somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, he initiated several attempts to discover the group. But age caught up with him. He died alone in northern Mexico in the summer of 1843. He had brought his Nation a long way. His name would be immortalized in the great redwood tree of the Far West, the giant sequoia. And in a sense his spirit lived on in the first Cherokee newspaper—the Cherokee Phoenix—which was established in 1828 at New Echota, with Elias Boudinot as its editor and Samuel Worcester as its business manager.
Smithsonian Institution
Students stand before the original school building at Dwight Mission, the first Cherokee mission west of the Mississippi River. The one-room log schoolhouse is very much like those the white settlers built and used for years in the Smokies.
The Cherokees also made remarkable changes in government. In 1808, they adopted a written legal code; a dozen years later, they divided the Nation into judicial districts and designated judges. The first Supreme Court of the Cherokees was established in 1822, and by 1827 the Nation had drawn up an American-based Constitution. The president of the constitutional convention was a 37-year-old leader named John Ross. A year later, he began a 40-year term as principal chief of his people.