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]]
SOME THINGS THE INDIANS KNEW BEFORE WHITE MEN CAME
The Indians made and still make excellent canoes of bark or of logs and even of skins. The birch-bark canoe is light and very swift, and white hunters are proud of their skill in its use, but the skin boat has only strength as its merit.
The Siwash Indian of Puget Sound hollows out from a single log a fine canoe with decorated prow. He makes it secretly in the dark forest, and white men have tried for years to solve the problem of its swiftness.
The bows of strong wood bent by sinew cords and the stone-headed arrows with feather tips were excellent weapons in the Indians’ former methods of warfare and hunting, and a good arrowhead maker was famous throughout a nation.