Unknown

“ To be made a "woman" is the greatest degradation of a warrior.
Se-quo-yah first exercised his genius in making an improved kind of wooden milk-pans and skimmers for his mother. Then he built her a milk-house, with all suitable conveniences, on one of those grand springs that gurgle from the mountains of the old Cherokee Nation. As a climax, he even helped her to milk her cows; and he cleared additions to her fields, and worked on them with her. She contrived to get a petty stock of goods, and traded with her countrymen. She taught Se-quo-yah to be a good judge of furs. ”

“ Until the middle of the eighteenth century horses had not become very common among them, and the old Indian used to laugh at the white man, so lazy that he could not walk. A consuming fire was preying on the vitals of an ancient simple people. Unscrupulous traders, who boasted that they made a thousand per cent, held them in the most abject thrall. It has been carefully computed that these hunters worked, on an average, for ten cents a day. The power of their old village chiefs grow weaker. No longer the old men taught the boys their traditions, morals, or religion. ”

“ This brave Indian philosopher of ours was not the man to be stopped by obstacles. He procured some articles for the Indian trade he had learned in his boyhood, and putting these and his provisions and camping equipage in an ox-cart, he took a Cherokee boy with him as driver and companion, and started out among the wild Indians of the plain and mountain, on a philological crusade such as the world never saw. ”

“ As soon as they master the alphabet they have got rid of all the perplexing questions in orthography that puzzle the brains of our children. Is it not too much to say that a child will learn in a month, by the same effort, as thoroughly, in the language of Se-quo-yah, that which in ours consumes the time of our children for at least two years. ”

“ By the law of many Indian tribes property and the control of the family go with the mother. The husband never belongs to the same family connection, rarely to the same community or town even, and often not even to the tribe. He is a sort of barnacle, taken in on his wife's account. To the adventurer, like a trader, this adoption gave a sort of legal status or protection. Gist either understood this before he started on his enterprise, or learned it very speedily after. Of the Cherokee tongue he knew positively nothing. He had a smattering of very broken English. ”

“ Through that heroic, unaided struggle he gained the first true glimpses into the elements of language. It is a startling fact, that an uneducated man, of a race we are pleased to call barbarians, attained in a few years, without books or tutors, what was developed through several ages of Phoenician, Egyptian, and Greek wisdom.
Se-quo-yah discovered that the language possessed certain musical sounds, such as we call vowels, and dividing sounds, styled by us consonants. ”

“ As they fell back, fur traders and merchants followed them with professions of regard and extortionate prices. Articles of European manufacture—knives, hatchets, needles, bright cloths, paints, guns, powder—could only be bought with furs. The Indian mother sighed in her hut for the beautiful things brought by the Europeans. The warrior of the Southwest saw with terror the conquering Iroquois, armed with the dreaded fire-arms of the stranger. When the bow was laid aside, or handed to the boys of the tribe, the warriors became the abject slaves of traders. Guns meant gunpowder and lead. ”

“ The power by which the white man could talk on paper had been carefully noted and wondered at by many savages, and was far too important a matter to have been overlooked by such a man as Se-quo-yah. The rude hieroglyphics or pictoriographs of the Indians were essentially different from all written language. These were rude representations of events, the symbols being chiefly the totemic devices of the tribes. ”

“ He left behind him in the Cherokee Nation a woman of no common energy, who through a long life was true to him she still believed to be her husband. The deserted mother called her babe "Se-quo-yah," in the poetical language of her race. His fellow-clansmen as he grew up gave him, as an English one, the name of his father, or something sounding like it. No truer mother ever lived and cared for her child. ”

“ After he had grown to man's estate he learned to draw. His sketches, at first rude, at last acquired considerable merit. He had been taught no rules of perspective; but while his perspective differed from that of a European, he did not ignore it, like the Chinese. He had now a very comfortable hewed-log residence, well furnished with such articles as were common with the better class of white settlers at that time, many of them, however, made by himself. ”

“ On these peculiarities it is not the purpose of this article to enter, but hasten to George Gist, brooding over a written language for his people.
His first essay was natural enough. He tried to invent symbols to represent words. These he sometimes cut out of bark with his knife, but generally wrote, or rather drew. With these symbols he would carry on a conversation with a person in another apartment. As may be supposed, his symbols multiplied fearfully and wonderfully. The Indian languages are rich in their creative power. ”

“ As he grew older he showed a different temper from most Indian children. He lived alone with his mother, and had no old man to teach him the use of the bow, or indoctrinate him in the religion and morals of an ancient but perishing people. ”

“ He employed his boyish leisure in building houses in the forest. As he grew older these mechanical pursuits took a more useful shape. The average native American is taught as a question of self-respect to despise female pursuits. ”