Untitled - the Digital Library of Georgia

600 GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS
lectual, moral, or physical worth as a probable result of this devotion
to their native weed, the chief of narcotics.
"But Sequoya won at last. In 1821 the Cherokee council adopted
the new syllabary, and the nation, with great .enthusiasm, set about to.
learn it. In a few months thousands of them could read and write
Sequoyan with facility. The Cherokee boy made no mistakes in his
spelling.' His written language had no silent letters, no ambiguous
sounds, to deal with. Sequoya was now in high feather among the
people who had once derided him.
"In 1822 he went to those Cherokees who had already settled be
yond the Mississippi to teach these also the new system,- and the next
year he established his permanent home with these western tribesmen.
The practicability of the new system was soon put to the proof, for in
1824 parts of the Bible were published in Sequoyan Cherokee, and in
1828 the first North American Indian periodical—the Cherokee
Phoenix—began to be published at New Echota, the Cherokee capital,
near the present Rome in North Georgia. The Phoenix—published
partly in English and partly in Sequoyan—ran until October, 1835,.
when the general forced migration of the tribe to the trans-Mississippi
brought about its suspension. Elias Boudinot was its editor.
'' Several other periodicals at irregular intervals—The Cherokee
Messenger, in 1844, published at the Baptist mission, Park Hill, I. T.f
•and entirely in Cherokee; The Cherokee Advocate, in 1844, a weekly,,
partly in English and partly in Cherokee; The Cherokee Almanac, an
annual now of many years' standing, and various other current or per
manent publications have since appeared.
" Sequoya's worth was now appreciated by his people. In 1828 the-
western Cherokees sent him to Washington to negotiate in their behalf
with the government, and when the eastern and western Cherokees were
united in their new home, he became a powerful factor in the organiza
tion of the tribal government.
"But he was still a dreamer and an idealist. The conception of a.
common Indian language with a common grammar and a common sylla
bary, took possession of his mind, and he visited many tribes searching-
for these common linguistic elements for aboriginal uniformity. He
probably never realized the need, as preliminary to his generalization,
for individual and native investigators to do for their respective tongues,
what he himself had done for Cherokee, viz.: to first reduce these dia
lects to syllabaries with character representatives, out of which a large-
system of common phonetics might be produced, though we fail to see
how a common written language could have been the outcome..
"In China twenty totally different vernaculars have a common
literary language; but this is due to a common system of word, or idea,
representation, e. g., the ideographs for horse, cow, dog, etc., may be-
universally recognized while the words severally expressing these
ideas in the various dialects may be -widely different and mutually-
unintelligible.