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Show 166 BASIS OP AMERICAN HISTORY [ 1600 means so far advanced as the systems in use in Mexico and Central America, tjie Algonquian pictography had reached a symbolic stage; and the records of the Ojibwa and Delaware on birch bark and wood are most valuable as exhibiting the process of development from picture to alphabetic writing. 1 Returning to the mountains of the Carolinas, Tennessee, northern Georgia, and Alabama, we encounter another great branch of the Iroquoian family in the powerful tribe of the Cherokee. Their linguistic relationship with the Iroquois of New York was not very close, and they were not on friendly terms with their cousins of the league and hedged them in on the south. From 1540, when they first came into notice, until 1838; when they were removed to Indian Territory, the Cherokee were * always a conspicuous element in the history of North America. They were probably the largest single tribe in the eastern United States, and from the ethnological point of view are interesting chiefly from the rapidity and success with which they have adopted the life and government of civilized nations. In 1820 they even went so far as formally to organize themselves with a definite constitution, under the name of the Cherokee Nation; but various troubles with the government of Georgia led to their removal, and since that time their tribal indepen- 1 Hoffman, The Beginnings of Writing; Mallery, " Picture Writing of the American Indians" ( Bureau of Ethnology, Tenth Annual Report). |