Sequoyah — Storied No. 033

Somewhere in the 1790s, a young Cherokee man watched white soldiers stare at a folded sheet of paper and speak aloud what it said. His companions thought the talking leaf was a gift from the Great Spirit — a magic given to one people and withheld from another. He disagreed. He argued, stubbornly, that it was a thing a man had made, and therefore a thing a man could make again.

Then a swelling in his knee crippled him for life and shut him in his cabin through long winters, and he had nothing to do but prove it. Sequoyah spoke no English and could read no script of any kind. Over roughly twelve years he taught himself, from nothing, what linguists would take another century to formalise: that a language is a finite set of sounds, and that if you can catch them all, you can hold speech still on a page. He caught eighty-six of them. Within a few years his people were printing a newspaper.

From the Little Tennessee to Mexico

The lifeline

c.1770

Born at Tuskegee, an Overhill Cherokee town on the Little Tennessee River

c.1809

Lamed by a diseased knee, he begins hunting every sound in Cherokee

1821

Finishes 86 characters; his young daughter reads his writing aloud to the council

1825

The Cherokee Nation adopts the syllabary officially

1828

The Cherokee Phoenix goes to press at New Echota, set in his letters

1843

Dies in northern Mexico at about 73, searching for a lost band of Cherokee

By the numbers

The measure of him

Characters in the finished syllabary — one per syllable of spoken Cherokee

~12

Years of work, from first attempts around 1809 to completion in 1821

Scripts he could read when he started. He never spoke or wrote English

<2,000

Fluent first-language Cherokee speakers left today, most of them over 70

What he made from nothing

The work

c.1809–19

The false start, and the leap. He first tried a sign for every word — pictures of birds and beasts — and reached some two hundred characters before abandoning the whole approach. Then he broke the language into syllables instead, and the count collapsed to something a person could learn in weeks.

1821

The public test. Suspected of witchcraft by neighbours who had begun avoiding his cabin, he demanded a trial. His daughter Ayokeh, roughly six years old, was sent out of earshot; the elders dictated sentences; she came back and read them. Then she wrote, and he read. The council selected several young men to be taught, watched them for months, and tested them apart. All of them passed.

1824

A silver medal, struck by the Cherokee General Council for "his ingenuity in the invention of the Cherokee Alphabet." He wears it in every portrait made of him.

1825

Official adoption by the Cherokee Nation — a written language legislated into existence one generation after it was imagined.

1828

The Cherokee Phoenix, first issue 21 February at New Echota, Georgia: the first newspaper published in a Native American language, its columns running Cherokee beside English.

1839

The Act of Union. After the Trail of Tears drove the eastern Cherokee west, he signed for the Western Cherokee, helping stitch a fractured nation back into one.

1999

Unicode. His characters entered the international standard, and Cherokee became a language that types, texts and renders on a screen — 178 years after he cut the first ones into bark with a knife.

Suspected, then honoured

Recognition

In his lifetime

Neighbours passed his cabin without entering, muttering that he was working improper spells
Crippled by disease and unable to read or speak a word of English
Had to prove his own invention under adversarial examination before the council would believe it
Lived to see his nation's press seized and its people marched west on the Trail of Tears
Died far from home in Mexico; his grave has never been located with certainty

Today

The only person known to have invented a complete writing system while unable to read any script at all
Oklahoma's first statue in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall, placed 1917 — the first Native American honoured there
The proposed State of Sequoyah (1905) and Oklahoma's Sequoyah County carry his name
The giant redwood genus Sequoia, named in 1847, is by long tradition held to honour him
The Cherokee Phoenix publishes still; Cherokee immersion schools teach children his letters

The place that made him

Tuskegee, on the Little Tennessee

He was born in one of the Overhill Cherokee towns strung along the Little Tennessee River, in the shadow of a British fort raised there in 1756 — a valley where two worlds ground against each other daily, and where a boy could watch strangers make paper speak. The valley is gone. In 1979 the Tellico Dam closed and the river rose over the old town sites. The man who saved a language was born in a place now underwater.

1756

Fort Loudoun raised beside the town — the British frontier at his doorstep

c.1770

His birth year, approximate: he told an interviewer in 1828 he was "about sixty-five"

1979

Tellico Dam closes; the Overhill town sites vanish beneath the reservoir

"The question arose among them, whether this mysterious power of the talking leaf was the gift of the Great Spirit to the white man, or a discovery of the white man himself. Most of his companions were of the former opinion, while he as strenuously maintained the latter." — Samuel L. Knapp, Lectures on American Literature, 1829,
from his interview with Sequoyah through two interpreters