Sequoyah's Marks: The Cherokee Syllabary and the Writing of a Nation

At a trading post on the Coosa, a white trader takes a paper from his coat, glances at it, and knows exactly how many deerskins he bought last fall, from whom, and for how much. The Cherokee silversmith watching him turns down the offer to learn his letters. Sequoyah wants the trick itself: the way a few marks can hold spoken words so still that they never drift in the retelling.

He could not read English, and a leg lamed since boyhood had left him more time than most men to sit and watch. Around 1809, at his forge in Wills Valley, in what is now northern Alabama, he set out to write his own language. It took twelve years. In 1821 he brought eighty-six characters to Willstown, each one a syllable of spoken Cherokee, and his young daughter Ayoka helped him prove to doubtful headmen that they worked. Within a few years the syllabary had spread across the Nation.

By 1828 a press at New Echota was printing the Cherokee Phoenix in English and Cherokee. Georgia's paper war against the Nation followed, and the Treaty of New Echota, and the removal the Cherokee remember as the trail where they cried. The characters went west with the people, through the bloodshed and new presses of Indian Territory, and on into Unicode, where the syllabary is typed and taught today. Sequoyah never did learn the trader's letters. He never needed them.