When was sequoyah born

Beginning in , he experimented with pictographs but found them too daunting. He eventually arrived at a method of assigning one character or symbol to each syllable of sound in the Cherokee language.

Although he could not speak, read, or write English, Sequoyah adapted some symbols from the English alphabet and assigned Cherokee syllables to them. For other syllables, he assigned symbols of his own creation. Sequoyah enlisted as a private in the Mounted and Foot Cherokees under Capt. James McLemore in Col. Gideon Morgan's Cherokee Regiment. He mustered into service at Turkeytown the present-day town of Centre , Cherokee County on October 7, , for three months. On January 6, , he reenlisted for a second tour of duty and was involved in a number of military actions.

Fifteen days after their victory at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend , Sequoyah received an honorable discharge. In , Sequoyah married Sally Benge and diligently continued to toil on his invention, leaving the farm work to his Cherokee wife.

She became angry and burned his writings. Nevertheless, the determined Sequoyah completed the syllabary in after voluntarily removing west to Indian Territory in Arkansas. He then proceeded to teach it to his young daughter and his brother-in-law. When the Cherokee National Council met at Sauta in present-day Jackson County , Sequoyah demonstrated the accuracy of the character syllabary as an effective means of communicating the Cherokee language in written form.

The Cherokee leadership approved its dissemination, and within a matter of months the Cherokee Nation became mostly literate. By , the tribe established The Cherokee Phoenix , a newspaper printed in both Cherokee and English.

Missionaries quickly used the syllabary to translate parts of the Bible and hymns into the Cherokee language. Eventually he came up with eighty-six sounds later reduced to eighty-five. He used his daughter, Ahyokah, to prove his system before the Cherokee Council in In the Cherokee National Council awarded Sequoyah a medal "as a token of respect and admiration for.

That same year he left Alabama for Arkansas. Four years later, when the federal government determined they could not secure the Arkansas land on which the Cherokees had settled, Sequoyah was one of the Old Settler delegates to Washington, D.

Sequoyah moved from Arkansas to the Indian Territory in and settled near present Sallisaw. Sequoyah's cabin still stands; it is owned by the Cherokee Nation and is open to the public. He signed the Act of Union and a new Cherokee constitution in In he went in search of Cherokees who had migrated to Mexico. In Sequoyah went to Arkansas to teach his syllabary to the Cherokee who already had migrated westward, and he moved with them to Oklahoma in He became somewhat active in tribal politics and was a Cherokee delegate to Washington, D.

With his syllabary a success, Sequoyah devoted much of his time to studying other tribal languages in a search for common elements. Early in Sequoyah became interested in a tribal tradition that said that part of the Cherokee nation had migrated west of the Mississippi River prior to the American Revolution. He set out to find this group, a trek that led him westward and southward, and he died in August , possibly in the state of Tamaulipas in Mexico. Sequoyah is commemorated by the state of Oklahoma, which placed a statue of him in the nation's capital.

Also, a redwood tree, the Sequoia, was named in his honor, as was the Sequoia National Park.