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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Sequoyah Biography SEQUOYA, sē-kwoi’yá, or George Guess (c.1760–1843). A Cherokee mixed blood, famous as the inventor of the Cherokee syllabary. He was born about the year 1760 and lived as a boy with his mother at the Cherokee town of Tuskegee, close to old Fort Loudon, in east Tennessee. As he grew up he became a hunter and fur trader, but also developed mechanical ingenuity, especially in the making of silver ornaments. He was led by a chance conversation in 1809 to reflect upon the ability of the whites to communicate thought by writing, with the result that he set about devising a similar system for his own people. For this purpose he used a number of characters which he found in an old spelling book, taking capitals, lower case, italics, and figures, and placing them right side up or inverted, without any idea of their sound or significance in English use. Having thus utilized about 35 ready-made characters, he obtained a dozen or more by modifying some of these originals, and then invented others to make a complete syllabary of 85 characters, capable of expressing every sound in the Cherokee language. By this invention any one speaking the language can learn to read and write it in a few days. Since then the same principle has been utilized by missionaries for other Indian languages, notably the Cree and Chippewaian. After years of patient labor in the face of ridicule, discouragement, and repeated failure, he finally perfected his invention and in 1821 submitted it to a public test by the leading men of the Cherokee nation. Its great value was at once recognized, and within a few months thousands of hitherto illiterate Cherokee were able to read and write their own language. In the next year he visited the West to introduce his system among those of the tribe who had removed to Arkansas. On a second visit in 1823 he took up his permanent résidence with the Western band. In 1839 Sequoya was instrumental in bringing about a union of feeling between the "Old Settlers," as the Arkansas band was then known, and the body of the nation, which had just then removed from their original territory in the East. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol XX (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 716. |