Se quo yah
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From Harper\'s New Monthly, V. 41, 1870 >> Se quo yah
This etext was produced by Robert Rowe, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
SE-QUO-YAH.
In the year 1768 a German peddler, named George Gist, left the
settlement of Ebenezer, on the lower Savannah, and entered the
Cherokee Nation by the northern mountains of Georgia. He had two
pack-horses laden with the petty merchandise known to the Indian
trade. At that time Captain Stewart was the British Superintendent
of the Indians in that region. Besides his other duties, he
claimed the right to regulate and license such traffic. It was an
old bone of contention. A few years before, the Governor and
Council of the colony of Georgia claimed the sole power of such
privilege and jurisdiction. Still earlier, the colonial
authorities of South Carolina assumed it. Traders from Virginia,
even, found it necessary to go round by Carolina and Georgia, and
to procure licenses. Augusta was the great centre of this
commerce, which in those days was more extensive than would be now
believed. Flatboats, barges, and pirogues floated the bales of
pelts to tide-water. Above Augusta, trains of pack-horses,
sometimes numbering one hundred, gathered in the furs, and carried
goods to and from remote regions. The trader immediately in
connection with the Indian hunter expected to make one thousand
per cent. The wholesale dealer made several hundred. The
governors, councilors, and superintendents made all they could. It
could scarcely be called legitimate commerce. It was a grab game.
Our Dutch friend Gist was, correctly speaking, a contrabandist. He
had too little influence or money to procure a license, and too
much enterprise to refrain because he lacked it. He belonged to a
class more numerous than respectable, although it would be a good
deal to say that there was any virtue in yielding to these petty
exactions. It was a mere question of confiscation, or robbery,
without redress, by the Indians. He risked it. With traders, at
that time, it was customary to take an Indian wife. She was
expected to furnish the eatables, as well as cook them. 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. Somehow or other he
managed to induce a Cherokee girl to become his wife.
This woman belonged to a family long respectable in the Cherokee
Nation. It is customary for those ignorant of the Indian social
polity to speak of all prominent Indians as "chiefs." Her family
had no pretension to chieftaincy, but was prominent and
influential; some of her brothers were afterward members of the
Council. She could not speak English; but, in common with many
Cherokees of even that early date, had a small proportion of
English blood in her veins. The Cherokee woman, married or single,
owns her property, consisting chiefly of cattle, in her own right.
A wealthy Cherokee or Creek, when a son or daughter is born to
him, marks so many young cattle in a new brand, and these become,
with their increase, the child's property. Whether her cattle
constituted any portion of the temptation, I can not say. At any
rate, the girl, who had much of the beauty of her race, became the
wife of the German peddler.
Of George Gist's married life we have little recorded. It was of
very short duration. He converted his merchandise into furs, and
did not make more than one or two trips. With him it had merely
been cheap protection and board. We might denounce him as a low
adventurer if we did not remember that he was the father of one of
the most remarkable men who ever appeared on the continent. Long
before that son was born he gathered together his effects, went
the way of all peddlers, and never was heard of more.
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. She reared him with the most watchful tenderness.
With her own hands she cleared a little field and cultivated it,
and carried her babe while she drove up her cows and milked them.
His early boyhood was laid in the troublous times of the war of
the Revolution, yet its havoc cast no deeper shadows in the
widow's cabin.
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 would wander
alone in the forest, and showed an early mechanical genius in
carving with his knife many objects from pieces of wood. 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. 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. He
would go on expeditions with the hunters, and would select such
skins as he wanted for his mother before they returned. In his
boyish days the buffalo still lingered in the valleys of the Ohio
and Tennessee. On the one side the French sought them. On the
other were the English and Spaniards. These he visited with small
pack-horse trains for his mother.
For the first hundred years the European colonies were of traders
rather than agriculturists. Besides the fur trade, rearing horses
and cattle occupied their attention. The Indians east of the
Mississippi, and lying between the Appallachian Mountains and the
Gulf, had been agriculturists and fishermen. Buccaneers, pirates,
and even the regular navies or merchant ships of Europe, drove the
natives from the haunted coast. 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. These could only
come from the white man. His avarice guarded the steps alike to
bear-meat and beaver-skins. Thus the Indian became a wandering
hunter, helpless and dependent. These hunters traveled great
distances, sometimes with a pack on their backs weighing from
thirty to fifty pounds. 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. They had ceased to be pagans, without
becoming Christians.
The wearied hunter had fire-water given him as an excitement to
drown the cares common to white and red. Slowly the polity,
customs, industries, morals, religion, and character of the red
race were consumed in this terrible furnace of avarice. The
foundations of our early aristocracies were laid. Byrd, in his
"History of the Dividing Line," tells us that a school of seventy-
seven Indian children existed in 1720, and that they could all
read and write English; but adds, that the jealousy of traders and
land speculators, who feared it would interfere with their
business, caused it to be closed. Alas! this people had
encountered the iron nerve of Christianity, without reaping the
fruit of its intelligence or mercy.
Silver, although occasionally found among the North American
Indians, was very rare previous to the European conquest.
Afterward, among the commodities offered, were the broad silver
pieces of the Spaniards, and the old French and English silver
coins. With the most mobile spirit the Indian at once took them.
He used them as he used his shell-beads, for money and ornament.
Native artificers were common in all the tribes. The silver was
beaten into rings, and broad ornamented silver bands for the head.
Handsome breast-plates were made of it; necklaces, bells for the
ankles, and rings for the toes.
It is not wonderful that Se-quo-yah's mechanical genius led him
into the highest branch of art known to his people, and that he
became their greatest silversmith. His articles of silverware
excelled all similar manufactures among his countrymen.
He next conceived the idea of becoming a blacksmith. He visited
the shops of white men from time to time. He never asked to be
taught the trade. He had eyes in his head, and hands; and when he
bought the necessary material and went to work, it is
characteristic that his first performance was to make his bellows
and his tools; and those who afterward saw them told me they were
very well made.
Se-quo-yah was now in comparatively easy circumstances. Besides
his cattle, his store, and his farm, he was a blacksmith and a
silversmith. In spite of all that has been alleged about Indian
stupidity and barbarity, his countrymen were proud of him. He was
in danger of shipwrecking on that fatal sunken reef to American
character, popularity. Hospitality is the ornament, and has been
the ruin, of the aborigine. His home, his store, or his shop,
became the resort of his countrymen; there they smoked and talked,
and learned to drink together. Among the Cherokees those who have
are expected to be liberal to those who have not; and whatever
weaknesses he might possess, niggardliness or meanness was not
among them.
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.
Before he reached his thirty-fifth year he became addicted to
convivial habits to an extent that injured his business, and began
to cripple his resources. Unlike most of his race, however, he did
not become wildly excited when under the influence of liquor.
Se-quo-yah, who never saw his father, and never could utter a word
of the German tongue, still carried, deep in his nature, an odd
compound of Indian and German transcendentalism; essentially
Indian in opinion and prejudice, but German in instinct and
thought. A little liquor only mellowed him--it thawed away the
last remnant of Indian reticence. He talked with his associates
upon all the knotty questions of law, art, and religion. Indian
Theism and Pantheism were measured against the Gospel as taught by
the land-seeking, fur-buying adventurers. A good class of
missionaries had, indeed, entered the Cherokee Nation; but the
shrewd Se-quo-yah, and the disciples this stoic taught among his
mountains, had just sense enough to weigh the good and the bad
together, and strike an impartial balance as the footing up for
this new proselyting race.
It has been erroneously alleged that Se-quo-yah was a believer in,
or practiced, the old Indian religious rites. Christianity had,
indeed, done little more for him than to unsettle the pagan idea,
but it had done that.
It was some years after Se-quo-yah had learned to present the
bottle to his friends before he degenerated into a toper. His
natural industry shielded him, and would have saved him altogether
but for the vicious hospitality by which he was surrounded. With
the acuteness that came of his foreign stock, he learned to buy
his liquor by the keg. This species of economy is as dangerous to
the red as to the white race. The auditors who flocked to see and
hear him were not likely to diminish while the philosopher
furnished both the dogmas and the whisky. Long and deep debauches
were often the consequence. Still it was not in the nature of
George Gist to be a wild, shouting drunkard. His mild, philosophic
face was kindled to deeper thought and warmer enthusiasm as they
talked about the problem of their race. All the great social
questions were closely analyzed by men who were fast becoming
insensible to them. When he was too far gone to play the mild,
sedate philosopher, he began that monotonous singing whose music
carried him back to the days when the shadow of the white man
never darkened the forests, and the Indian canoe alone rippled the
tranquil waters.
Should this man be thus lost? He was aroused to his danger by the
relative to whom he owed so much. His temper was eminently
philosophic. He was, as he proved, capable of great effort and
great endurance. By an effort which few red or white men can or do
make, he shook off the habit, and his old nerve and old prosperity
came back to him. It was during the first few years of this
century that he applied to Charles Hicks, a half-breed, afterward
principal chief of the nation, to write his English name. Hicks,
although educated after a fashion, made a mistake in a very
natural way. The real name of Se-quo-yah's father was George Gist.
It is now written by the family as it has long been pronounced in
the tribe when his English name is used--"Guest." Hicks,
remembering a word that sounded like it, wrote it--George Guess.
It was a "rough guess," but answered the purpose. The silversmith
was as ignorant of English as he was of any written language.
Being a fine workman, he made a steel die, a facsimile of the
name written by Hicks. With this he put his "trade mark" on his
silver-ware, and it is borne to this day on many of these ancient
pieces in the Cherokee nation.
Between 1809 and 1821, which latter was his fifty-second year, the
great work of his life was accomplished. The die, which was cut
before the former date, probably turned his active mind in the
proper direction. Schools and missions were being established. 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. A few general signs for war, death,
travel, or other common incidents, and strokes for numerals,
represented days or events as they were perpendicular or
horizontal. Even the wampum belts were little more than helps to
memory, for while they undoubtedly tied up the knots for years,
like the ancient inhabitants of China and Japan, still the meagre
record could only be read by the initiated, for the Indians only
intrusted their history and religion to their best and ablest men.
The general theory with many Indians was, that the written speech
of the white man was one of the mysterious gifts of the Great
Spirit. Se-quo-yah boldly avowed it to be a mere ingenious
contrivance that the red man could master, if he would try.
Repeated discussion on this point at length fully turned his
thoughts in this new channel. He seems to have disdained the
acquirement of the English language. Perhaps he suspected first
what he was bound to know before he completed his task, that the
Cherokee language has certain necessities and peculiarities of its
own. It is almost impossible to write Indian words and names
correctly in English. The English alphabet has not capacity for
its expression. If ten white men sat down to write the word an
Indian uttered, the probabilities are that one half of them would
write them differently from the other half. It is this which has
led to such endless confusion in Indian dictionaries. For
instance, we write the word for the tribe Cherokee, and the letter
R, or its sound, is scarcely used in their language. Today a
Cherokee always pronounces it Chalaque, the pronunciation being
between that and Shalakke. 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. By using pieces of well-known words that contain the
prominent idea, double or compound words are freely made. This has
been called by writers treating this subject, the polysynthetic.
It is, in fact, a jumbling of sentences into words, by
abbreviation, the omitted parts of words being implied or
understood. There is one important fact which I will merely note
here that is generally overlooked. These compounded words, to a
large extent, represent the intrusive or European idea. The names
the Indians gave many of the European things were mere
DEFINITIONS. Such as "Big Knives," etc. Occasionally they made a
dash at the French or English sounds, as in the word "Yengees" for
English, which has finally been corrupted in our language to
Yankees.
Of course an attempt at fixed symbols for words was an unhappy
experiment in a language one prominent element of which is, the
facility of making words out of pieces of words, or compounded
words. Besides this difficulty, no language can be taught
successfully by means of a dictionary, until the human memory
acquires more power. Three years of hopeless struggle with the
mighty debris of his symbols left him, although in the main
reticent, a mighty man of words. But his labors were not lost.
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. In determining his vowels he varied during the
progress of his discoveries, but finally settled on the six--A, E,
I, O, U, and a guttural vowel sounding like U in UNG.
These had long and short sounds, with the exception of the
guttural. He next considered his consonant, or dividing sounds,
and estimated the number of combinations of these that would give
all the sounds required to make words in their language. He first
adopted fifteen for the dividing sounds, but settled on twelve
primary, the G and K being one, and sounding more like K than G,
and D like T. These may be represented in English as G, H, L, M,
N, QU, T, DL or TL, TS, W, Y, Z.
It will be seen that if these twelve be multiplied by the six
vowels, the number of possible combinations or syllables would be
seventy-two, and by adding the vowel sounds, which maybe
syllables, the number would be seventy-eight. However, the
guttural V, or sound of U in UNG, does not appear as among the
combinations, which make seventy-seven.
Still his work was not complete. The hissing sound of S entered
into the ramifications of so many sounds, as in STA, STU, SPA,
SPE, that it would have required a large addition to his alphabet
to meet this demand. This he simplified by using a distinct
character for the S (OO), to be used in such combinations. To
provide for the varying sound G, K, he added a symbol which has
been written in English KA. As the syllable NA is liable to be
aspirated, he added symbols written NAH, and KNA. To have distinct
representatives for the combinations rising out of the different
sounds of D and T, he added symbols for TA, TE, TI, and another
for DLA, thus TLA. These completed the eighty-five characters of
his alphabet, which was thus an alphabet of syllables, and not of
letters.
It was a subject of astonishment to scientific men that a language
so copious only embraced eighty-five syllables. This is chiefly
accounted for by the fact that every Cherokee syllable ends in a
vocal or nasal sound, and that there are no double consonants but
those provided for the TL or DL, and TS, and combinations of the
hissing S, with a few consonants.
The fact is, that many of our combinations of consonants in the
English written language are artificial, and worse than worthless.
To indicate by a familiar illustration the syllabic character of
the alphabet of Se-quo-yah, I will take the name of William H.
Seward, which was appended to the Emancipation Proclamation of Mr.
Lincoln, printed in Cherokee. It was written thus: "O [wi] P[li] 4
[se] G [wa] 6 [te]," and might be anglicized Will Sewate. As has
been observed, there is no R in the Cherokee language, written or
spoken, and as for the middle initial of Mr. Seward's name, H.,
there being, of course, no initial in a syllabic alphabet, the
translator, who probably did not know what it stood for, was
compelled to omit it. It was in the year 1821 that the American
Cadmus completed his alphabet.
As will be observed by examining the alphabet, which is on the
table in the engraving, he used many of the letters of the English
alphabet, also numerals. The fact was, that he came across an old
English spelling-book during his labors, and borrowed a great many
of the symbols. Some he reversed, or placed upside down; others he
modified, or added to. He had no idea of either their meaning or
sound, in English, which is abundantly evident from the use he
made of them. As was eminently fitting, the first scholar taught
in the language was the daughter of Se-quo-yah. She, like all the
other Cherokees who tried it, learned it immediately. Having
completed it without the white man's hints or aid, he visited the
agent, Colonel Lowry, a gentleman of some intelligence, who only
lived three miles from him, and informed that gentleman of his
invention. It is not wonderful that the agent was skeptical, and
suggested that the whole was a mere act of memory, and that the
symbols bore no relation to the language, or its necessities. Like
all other benefactors of the race, he had to encounter a little of
the ridicule of those who, being too ignorant to comprehend,
maintain their credit by sneering. The rapid progress of the
language among the people settled the matter, however. The
astonishing rapidity with which it is acquired has always been a
wonder, and was the first thing about it that struck the writer of
this article. In my own observation, Indian children will take one
or two, at times several, years to master the English printed and
written language, but in a few days can read and write in
Cherokee. They do the latter, in fact, as soon as they learn to
shape letters. 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.
There has been a great clamor for a universal language. We once
had it, in our learned world, in the Latin, in which books were
locked up for the scholars and dead to the world. Language is the
handmaiden of thought, and to be useful must be obedient to its
changes as well as its elemental characteristics. For the English
of three hundred years ago we need a glossary, and to carry down
his immortal thoughts in their pristine vigor, must have, every
two hundred years, a Johnson to modernize a Shakspeare. To probe
the causes of the change of language, to ascertain why even a
WRITTEN language is mutable, to pick up this garment of thought
and run its threads back through all their vagaries to their
origin and points of divergence, is one of the grand tasks for the
intellectual historian. He, indeed, must give us the history of
ideas, of which all art, including language, is but the
fructification. To say, therefore, that the alphabet of Se-quo-yah
is better adapted for his language than our alphabet is for the
English, would be to pay it a very wretched compliment.