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Show 108 MYTHS OF THE CHEROKEE ( BTH. ANN. 19 lack of accommodation. The superintendent reported that the children were apt to learn, willing to labor, and readily submissive to discipline, adding that the Cherokee were fast advancing toward civilized life and generally manifested an ardent desire for instruction. The Valley-towns mission, established at the instance of Currahee Dick, a prominent local mixed- blood chief, was in charge of the Reverend Evan Jones, known as the translator of the New Testament into the Cherokee language, his assistant being James D. Wafford, a mixed- blood pupil, who compiled a spelling book in the same language. Reverend S. A. Worcester, a prolific translator and the compiler of the Cherokee almanac and other works, was stationed at Brainerd, removing thence to New Echota and afterward to the Cherokee Nation in the West. 1 Since 1817 the American Board had also supported at Cornwall, Connecticut, an Indian school at which a number of young Cherokee were being educated, among them being Elias Boudinot, afterward the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix. About this time occurred an event which at once placed the Cherokee in the front rank among native tribes and was destined to have profound influence on their whole future history, viz., the invention of the alphabet. The inventor, aptly called the Cadmus of his race, was a mixed-blood known among his own people as Sikw&' yi ( Sequoya) and among the whites as George Gist, or less correctly Guest or Guess. As is usually the case in Indian biography much uncertainty exists in regard to his parentage and early life. Authorities generally agree that his father was a white man, who drifted into the Cherokee Nation some years before the Revolution and formed a temporary alliance with a Cherokee girl of mixed blood, who thus became the mother of the future teacher. A writer in the Cherokee Phoenix, in 1828, says that only his paternal grandfather was a white man. 2 McKenney and Hall say that his father was a white man named Gist. 8 Phillips asserts that his father was George Gist, an unlicensed German trader from Georgia, who came into the Cherokee Nation in 1768.4 By a Kentucky family it is claimed that Sequoya's father was Nathaniel Gist, son of the scout who accompanied Washington on his memorable excui* sion to the Ohio. As the story goes, Nathaniel Gist was captured by the Cherokee at Braddoek's defeat ( 1755) and remained a prisoner with them for six years, during which time he became the father of Sequoya. On his return to civilization he married a white woman in Virginia, by whom he had other children, and afterward ' List of missions and reports of missionaries, etc., American State Papers: Indian Affairs, n, pp. 277- 279, 459, 1834; personal information from James D. Wafford concerning Valley- towns mission. For notices of Worcester, Jones, and Wafford, see Pilling, Bibliography of the Iroquoian Languages, 1888. * G. C, in Cherokee Phoenix; reprinted in Christian Advocate and Journal, New York, September 26> 1828. 8McKenney and Hall, Indian Tribes. i, p. 35, et passim, 1858. * Phillips, Sequoyah, in Harper's Magazine, pp. 542r548, September, 1870. |
