The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary
Willard Walker, Wesleyan University, Emeritus,
and James Sarbaugh, Portland, Connecticut
Abstract. In the number and forms of its characters, the printed Cherokee syllabary
is virtually the same today as it was in i8z8. Befbre 1828 the characters underwent
dramatic changes, which have been attributed in recent decades to missionary influence; but documents written by Sequoyah himself, the testimony of a number
of his contemporaries, and the Hicks syllabary of 1825 all suggest that Cherokees
alone developed the syllabary and adapted it to the requirements of printing.
There is no evidence for native literacy in America north of Mexico prior
to 1492. But,followingthe European invasions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writing systems derived from those of Europe were developed for several North American languages, and native literacy was
promoted by Euroamericans, both Catholic and Protestant, in an effort to
spread Christianity and integrate native peoples into the expanding political and economic systems of the New World. Although native literacy
never became pervasive in North America, it was established successfully
here and there in the territories claimed by France, Spain, Russia, Great
Britain, and, later, the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
In the nineteenth century the development and dissemination of native
writing systems continued to be largely the result of missionary efforts
to assimilate native populations. In the early 1820s, however, a writing
system for Cherokee that did not conform to this pattern was invented, accepted, and rapidly disseminated. The Cherokee case is unusual in several
respects. The writing system, unlike those of Europe, is syllabic. The inventor was a monolingual speaker of Cherokee without links to Christianity
or to Euroamerican schooling. The syllabary was disseminated without
the aid of Euroamerican institutions, but seems to have had an almost
Ethnohistory 40:1 (Winter 1993). Copyright €J by the American Society for
Ethnohjsiory. c c c 0014-1801/93/S1.50.
The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary
71
immediate impact on all Cherokee-speaking communities both east and
west of the Mississippi. Perhaps the most striking feature of Cherokee
literacy in the 1820s was that it was enthusiastically embraced both by
those Cherokees who had moved west to avoid further conflict with white
frontiersmen and by those who had stayed in the east and asserted their
right to continued self-government. Most missionary groups concerned
with Cherokees adopted the syllabary by 1826. It has never been identified with assimilation, however, and has always been a key element in
the maintenance of Cherokee social boundaries and ethnic identity. In any
event, Cherokee literacy became an intemational sensation in the 1820s;
at no time since has any other Native American writing system received so
much attention.
The Problem
The record is not altogether clear on many aspects of the early development of the syllabary. And in recent decades several writers have attributed
important changes in the syllabary to Samuel A. Worcester, a missionary
to the Cherokees sponsored by the American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions (ABCFM). This may largely result from misinterpretation
or neglect of certain documents bearing on the early history of the syllabary. Our purpose is to reexamine the historical record and assemble the
evidence relating to the development and refinement of the Cherokee syllabary. To this end, we will consider the standard syllabary as it has been
learned and used since it was first cast in type in 1827; we will then proceed to certain documents that indicate the nature of the syllabary before
that time.
The Standard Version of the History of the Syllabary
The syllabary, or syllabic writing system, was invented in the early 1820s
by a monolingual and illiterate Cherokee named Sequoyah (or George
Guess, Gist, Gyst, or Guyst). He began as early as 1809 with an ideographic or pictographic system, but he later came to develop a syllabary.
By 1821, with the aid of his six-year-old daughter, Ahyokeh, he publicly
demonstrated the completed system (W. Walker 1981, 1984). This is the
earliest documented case of such an independent invention.' And no less
remarkable than the invention of the syllabary was its rapid dissemination. As early as October 1824, the Reverend William Chamberlain of the
ABCFM reported that "a great part of the Cherokees can read and write in
their own language"; and by 1825 "the majority of the Cherokees could
72
Willard Walker and James Sarhaugh
read and write," according to McLaughlin (1986:353). The Cherokee census uken by the U.S. War Department in 1835 reports 16,542 individuals, a
figure that excludes black slaves, intermarried whites, and Cherokees who
had already emigrated west of the Mississippi. Of these 16,542, only 3,914,
or about 24 percent, were "Cherokee reaiders" (McLau^lin 1984: 241).
The estimates from the 1820s are considerably higher.
Of the 2,637 Cherokee "families," or households, reported in the census, 1,331, or 50.47 percent, had at least one Cherokee reader (McLaughlin
1984: 218, 229). This, together with the fact that Cherokee literacy was
well-represented in all geographical areas covered by the census, indicates
that Cherokee literacy was widely diffused and that virtually every nonliterate Cherokee had access to Cherokee readers in his own settlement,
if not in his own household. Accounts, letters, and Christian texts were
written in the syllabary. A national press was established that published a
weekly newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix^ in both Cherokee and English.
Parts of the Bible, religious tracts, hymns, and laws passed by the Cherokee
National Council also were published by the press. The invention and acceptance of the syllabary made Sequoyah an intemational celebrity, which
is reflected in the fact that the redwood trees were given his name.
Figure I presents the syllabary as it appears in the Cherokee New
Testament^ a book that is now, and has for many decades been, a prominent feature in the great majority of Cherokee households familiar to all
Cherokee speakers and often referred to. Note that the eighty-five syllabic
characters are arranged in rows and columns, the several rows being associated with different consonants and the several columns being allocated
to different vowels.
Literate Cherokees are as familiar with this chart as they are with the
individual characters. They leam and teach the syllabary in terms of this
chart, and they recite the syllabary from left to right, beginning with the
top row and proceeding to the bottom. They have presumably done so for
generations.
Figure z shows the syllabary with the phonetic values of each of
the characters. Note that the phonetic values of the characters have no
relationship to those of similar letters of the English alphabet. Note also
that many of the characters represent two or more phonetically distinct
syllables. These are phonemically disdnct, i.e., they are heard as "different" syllables by Cherokees, except for those enclosed in square brackets,
which are heard as variant forms of the same syllable.Lindsey (1987) has pointed out that the syllabary represents features
of locus and manner of articulation of consonants and features of vowel
quality but ignores features of pitch, vowel length, aspiration, and glottal-
The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary
73
CHBBOKBB ALPHABET.
T AiiuMn win m
Da
it«
/
«•iM
b
Ti
f U
O l a M H a i l
9 aa tkaaOatkyi ao
hai
X qua
<d que T qal
• Haa
4 n
fca
da V u
» doTiiJ diJti
A dia fi tia
L tlo
C tli
ñ
A
»
€
NMML
m O^m
fO J g«
ho r ka
U M la
B gv
4r kv
4 Iv
4 M y » a
Zao
MT* qao
«ao
V lo
V ih
KM
%aa 0>av
c9 qm • qav
Tsa
8 du
^ tla
P dv
« lia
N. T. 243
AB8-1961-1M-3JM.W
Figure I. The Cherokee syllabary as it appears on thefirstpage of the Cherokee
New Testament (Anonymous 1961).
ization. Scancarelli (1990:17) has observed that the syllabary distinguishes
between syllables with aspirated, as opposed to plain, consonants when
those syllables have a high lexical frequency or an unusually high "semantic weight." Floyd Lounsbury, in an oral presentation given at Cherokee,
North Carolina, in 1978, stated that, at least as early as the 1930s, when
he did fieldwork with Oklahoma Cherokees, sequences of stop + vowel +
preaspirated resonant in slow deliberate speech alternated with sequences
of stop + aspiration + vowel + plain resonant in fast speech, and he
suggested that Sequoyah's syllabary does not mark aspiration consistently
because aspiration is so often a function of speech style rather than being
motivated by the inherent phonological shape of lexical items.
Figure 3 shows the syllabary as it was presented by the Reverend
Samuel A. Worcester in the first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix (Worcester
1828a), which appeared on 21 February 1828.^ This is Worcester's "systematic arrangement" of Sequoyah's syllabics and consists of essentially
the same eighty-five characters, grouped in the same rows and columns,
that appear in modern publications.
As for the forms of the individual characters, there is only one rather
trivial discrepancy between Worcester's 1828 syllabics and those of modern times: the character representing the syllables [do] and [to] is A 9 ^n în~
verted V, in the 1828 version, an upright V more recently. The former was
74
V
Willard Walker and James Sarhau^h
[a.?a]
8
[e,?e]
T
/sra/
g> /ka/
^
/ge.ke/
0^
•
/ha/
JP
/he/
i ^ /hi/
/la.i»/
^
/le.ie/
/ma/
M /me/
i^ /mi/
/na/
/ï
/ne.hne/
)^ /ni.hni/
/\auBL/
Q
/ n o t used/
ff
f
JP /gwi,kwi/
/s/
/sa/
• /se/ fc /si/
/da/
j ^ /de/
/ta/
TB /te/
JT /ti/
/dla
¿ /die, tie/
C /dli.tli/
J
/di/
iî /tla/
V
M
/w.hwe/
•
/wi,hwi/
/ya, hya/ i^
/ye,hye/
i^
/yi,hyi/
Figure 2. Sequoyah's syllabic characters with the phonetic valses of each. Many
characters represent two or more phonetically distinct syllables. These are phonemically distinct, i.e., they are heard as "different" by Cherokees, except those
enclosed by sqnare brackets, which are heard as variants of a single syllable.
The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary
[u,?u]
75
[o,?o]
(t
i
lv.?v]
/go.ko/
/
/gu,ku/
/ho/
/lo,io/
r
AI
/hu/
/lu,4u/
té- /hv/
9 /lv,4v/
Ç
/nu,hnu/
ÍK /nv, hnv/
3 /mo/
/no,hno/
/gvo.kvo/
f
Y
/BO/
«9 /giru,fcwu/
^
/su/
/do,to/
X /du,tu/
/dlo,tlo/
* • /dlu,tlu/
Ä
/BV/
r* /dv,tv/
P
/dlv,tlv/
9
/yv,hyv/
[jo, ¿To]
O
/«o.hvo/
Jt /wu,h«u/
/yo,hyo/
(r* /yu,hyu/
The characterfor/gwo, kwo/ is often used to represent the syllables /gwu/ and
/kwu/. The charactersforthe syllables /die, dli, dio, diu, dlv/ are used by some
Cherokees to represent syllables with /I/ plus vowd in place of the characters
representing /!/ plus vowel.
*^'i
Willard Walker jnci lames St.
The rollou'ifijiç ¡a the proposed sjstematic arrangement.
na
c ga
o ka
•» ha
Re
F ce
phe
T1
y »j
ji ni
«0
€ le
01 me
• litt ^ Ima G oali A nc
Pli
H mi
» no
«lo
«mo
II ni
XBO
'X qua
o que
«qui
B sa
4 te
B si
4r quo
• so
tv la
rnia
« da w ta
Adía ütia
o tsa
& wa
t dc % te j d i jitih Ado
L tío
«tío
otli
Ttsé
btti
JB w e
• wi
«yi
«ya
K tM
e WO
h yo
0* U
4 ffU
rhu
M lu
ym
0-BV
«i qau
rtu
a da
BIT
9 ttU
cattit
awu
^ vu
Figure 3. Samuel A. Worcester's ''proposed systematic arrangement** ot the
Cherokee syllabary, from the Cherokee Phoenix vol.i. no.i (Worcester
Courtesy, American Antiquarian S
used consistently in publications of the Cherokee National Press through
31. May 1834, when the last issue of the Cherokee Phoenix was printed at
New Echota in the Old Nation. But two years later, when the first edition
of the Cherokee Almanac was printed at Union, in the west, ¡do] ¿inci jtoi
were consistently represented hy the character in its modem orientation
(Bass 1936: 213)/
In any event, the forms of the syllabic characters were crystalli/cd hy
1828 and have not changed since, with the single exception of the inversion
of rhe character for [do] and |to|.
The Syllabary Before Printing
It is evident that the standardized version of the syllabary, established Lite
in 1827 with the casting of type face, has persisted without significant
change in the number, form, or order of presentation of the characters:
but what of the syllabary prior to the establishment of the press? Despite
many reports of widespread use of the syllabary, we have no social documents written in syllabics known to date from the time betöre type was
cast. Given the absence of such early syllabic texts, writers from the iK¿os
to the present have offered a variety of opinions regarding the nature and
number of the characters before printing. Traveller Bird, for example, has
claimed in his Tell Them They Ije ^1971: 13) that the ninety-two char
syllabary reproduced on p. 18 of that publication was used puhliciv
The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary
77
by Cherokee scribes as early as 1795 and was known to the U.S. govemment even earlier. Many of the characters in Bird's syllabary resemble
characters in Figures i, 2, and 3, e.g., the first, third, seventh, eighth, and
ninth; but many others are entirely unlike anything in Worcester's or the
modern syllabary, e.g., the second, fourth, fifth, sixth, tenth, and eleventh.
Bird states: "Seven symbols were discarded by the Rev. Samuel A. Worcester, and many others were reworked within the framework of the Roman
letters" (1971:84).
The GUcrease Manuscripts
Bird's claims are not substantiated by any standard source,^ but he does
direct our attention to two documents that are central to this issue.
He refers us to a copy of the Cherokee syllabary in the Thomas Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa "that was written by George Gist" [Sequoyah]
(Bird 1971: 117, note 2). The Gilcrease has four documents attributed to
Sequoyah, two of which are reproduced here as Figures 4 and 5.^ The one
represented by Figure 4 has with it a note written by Jack Kilpatrick in
the 1960s:
The large page contains a demonstration of the system of numerals
worked out by Sequoyah, but never adopted by the Cherokees. The
three rows of symbols at the bottom of the page do not form words,
but are merely a writing out of the syllabary, also in no particular
order. Sequoyah's signature is in the right hand bottom corner. The
pencilled note at the top of the page reads: "George Gist's Alphabet
& numerals in his own hand—written west of Arkansas year 1839—
for J. H. P." [John Howard Payne].
There are eighty-six characters over Sequoyah's signature in this
manuscript, the eighty-five of the New Testament and Worcester's Phoenix
article, plus one, the twenty-seventh character. Worcester wrote in the
Phoenix that "the number of characters is 8 5 . . . . The original number was
86, one of which has since been omitted, as being too little distinct in the
sound represented by it from [another character that resembles a lowercase, cursive b]."" The sequence of characters in this manuscript differs
completely from that of Worcester's "systematic arrangement." This sequence is the order in which Sequoyah arranged his characters, as will be
confirmed by documentary evidence to follow. Although the arrangements
of the syllabics in Figures 3 and 4 differ, the forms of the charaaers in
Figure 4, with a few exceptions, are similar to Worcester's forms (Fig. 3)
and would be recognized by modern Cherokee readers.
o
1
8
O
u
A
J
2
\<
O
•
c
S
\
A
o
u
H»
t
r
15
Hm
si
S
t
05
I"
The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary
79
Apart from no, 27, the character that is no longer used, there are only
six characters in Figure 4 that differ substantially from the modem standard: no. 34 [tli], no, 46 [ge], no. 60 [lo], no. 65 [du], no. 66 [de], and
no. 69 [nv].
The unsigned manuscript reproduced in Figure 5 was attributed to
Sequoyah by Jack Kilpatrick and may have been written for Payne in 1839.
It consists of a sequence of eighty-six panels, each containing a pair of
characters. Most of the characters on the right of each panel are identical to, or closely resemble, Worcester's forms; but the character in panel
no, 27 was deleted before type was cast, and the character in panel no. 66
differs to some extent from its modem printed form. The remaining eightyfour characters at the right of each panel might be called cursive forms of
Worcester's printed characters.
It is worth noting that these two manuscripts, attributed to Sequoyah,
both present eighty-six characters in the same order. This sequence of characters is confirmed by a third document—a broadside published by the
Cherokee National Press early in 1828 and reproduced in Bass (1932), This
broadside presents the syllabary twice: once in Worcester's "systematic arrangement'* and again "as arranged by the inventor.*^ This last arrangement
matches exactly the sequence of the two Gilcrease manuscripts.
A syllabary written in 1947 by Will West Long of Big Cove, near
Cherokee, North Carolina, appeared in Chiltoskey (1972:53) and is reproduced here as Figure 6. Long's characters are arranged in columns, like
Worcester's, but if one reads his columns from top to bottom, beginning
at the left, the resulting sequence is virtually identical to the sequence of
Sequoyah's linear syllabary as it appears in the 1828 broadside and the
two Gilcrease documents. It would seem that Worcester's "systematic" arrangement, the one feature of the syllabary that can surely be attributed
to white influence, had not been adopted by at least one Cherokee even in
the mid-twentieth century,
A comparison of the characters in Figure 4 with those on the right
of each panel in Figure 5 indicates that Sequoyah himself used different graphic representations for five syllables; no. 34 [tli], no, 46 [ge],
no. 60 [lo], no. 66 [de], and no, 69 [nv]. The unsigned Gilcrease manuscript in Figure 5 demonstrates even more flexibility on Sequoyah's part,
however, for each of the eighty-six panels contains a pair of altemative
graphic forms.
A note written by Kilpatrick referring to the unsigned manuscript in
Figure 5 andfiledwith it at the Gilcrease Museum states: "One of the small
sheets has Sequoyah's original designs side by side with those designs as
modified by the type faces of the Cherokee Phoenix in 1828," Kilpatrick
o
6
(i
i
O
1
«
U
i
.o«
V
S
1
'g
The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary
8i
s
:C
r_ u
C
Ai
T
OT- o
9
1
H
Figure 6. A syllabary written in 1947 by Will West Long of Big Cove» North
Carolina. Copyright 1972 by Mary Ulmer and G.B. Chiltoskey. Reprinted by
permission.
8z
Willard Walker and James Sarbaugh
evidently concluded that Sequoyah had invented the left-hand members of
each pair of syllabics in the unsigned manuscript, that Worcester subsequently replaced these with the characters at the right of each panel when
he sent the forms to Boston to be cast in type, and that Sequoyah reproduced both sets of characters for Payne in 1839. This would account for
the statement in Jack and Anna Gritts Kilpatrick's New Echota Letters
that "Worcester... injudiciously modified some of the original designs of
Sequoyah" (Kilpatrick and Kilpatrick 1968: 31-32, n. 11). It would also
explain the following passage in Anna and Jack Kilpatrick's "Chronicles
of Wolftown: Social Documents of the North Carolina Cherokees, 18501862":
Eastern Cherokee calligraphy of lno:li's day [1849-84] more closely
resembled the original concepts of Sequoyah than did the Western
which was patterned upon the type faces that were in all instances
simplifications, and in some cases gross distortions, of the Sequoyah
designs. (Kilpatrick and Kilpatrick 1966:8)
Though the note written by Kilpatrick and filed with the unsigned
manuscript at the Gilcrease was never published, it was seen by researchers in the 1960s and early 1970s, all of whom seem to have accepted the
assumption that rhe left-hand forms were Sequoyah's and the right-hand
forms were generated by Worcester when he wrote out the forms of the
characters to be cast as type for the printing press. This very reasonable
assumption is discernible, not only in the passages from New Echota Letters and "Chronicles of Wolftown," quoted above, and in Traveller Bird's
claim (1971:84) that "seven symbols were discarded by the Rev. Samuel A.
Worcester, and many others were reworked within the framework of the
Roman letters," but also in W. Walker (1985). After seeirig the unsigned
manuscript with the accompanying note by Kilpatrick, Walker embraced
the Kilpatrick-Bird thesis in its most extreme form and wrote (1985: 610)
that neither Sequoyah nor his daughter, Ahyokeh, "was responsible for the
Cherokee syllabic characters which have been used since the late 1820s.
These were invented by Samuel A. Worcester in 1827."
The notion that Worcester radically revised Sequoyah's syllabary in
1827 is not the only possible inference to be drawn from the unsigned
manuscript in Figure 5, however. The right-hand characters undeniably
contrast with those on the left; and it may be that those on the right
were devised later than those on the left. It is not clear, however, that the
right-hand forms can be attributed to Worcester.
The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary
83
The Testimony of Sequoyah's Contemporaries
Most of Sequoyah's contemporaries said nothing about the identity of the
inventor of the forms of the characters that were cast in type. Perhaps it
never occurred to them that anyone would doubt that these forms were
created by the native genius who had received intemational recognition for
bringing literacy to his people. But several of his contemporaries reported
that Sequoyah experimented with different forms of syllabic characters. Of
the seven people who wrote accounts of interviews with Sequoyah between
1828 and 1841, no fewer than four mentioned that he used variant forms of
characters. We have Knapp's statement that, after creating a set of syllabic
characters, "He then set to work to make these characters more comely to
the eye, and succeeded . . . " (Knapp 1829: 26). Jeremiah Evarts, who, like
Knapp, interviewed Sequoyah through interpreters in Washington in 1828,
reported that Sequoyah's original "alphabet cost him much study." But
"He afterwards made an alphabet for the pen (that is for speedy writing),
the characters of which he wrote under the corresponding characters of
the other" (Foreman 1938: 28; R. Walker 1931:235, cf. Fig. 5).
Captain John Stuart, U.S. Army, interviewed Sequoyah at his home in
Indian Territory not later than 1837. He reported that
being one day on a public road, [Sequoyah] found a piece of newspaper, which had been thrown aside by a traveler, which he took up,
and, on examining it, found characters on it that would be more easily
made than his own, and consequently picked out for that purpose the
largest of them, which happened to be the Roman letters, and adopted
in lieu of so many of his own characters—and that, too, without
knowing the English name or meaning of a single one of them. This
is to show the cause and manner of the Roman letters being adopted
(Stuart 1837: 22, note; see also Foreman 1938: 39).
John Howard Payne interviewed Sequoyah in 1841 and took down a
"brief notice of his life" (Foreman 1938: 43). He also had been present
at a meeting in 1835 when a biographical sketch of Sequoyah was read
and translated into English by a group of Cherokees that included some of
Sequoyah's associates and relatives. According to Payne,
The first characters which he invented resembled German text. Few
or none of them were reuined. At the house of Mike Waters, he was
struck with the "Bible Book" as Waters called it, of Sally Waters, his
wife. He was then studying for characters to make use of in print. He
84
Willard Walker and James Sarbaugh
copied out some of the letters and said those would do for print &
the old ones for writing (Payne Papers, Vol, 2:131, reprinted in Bass
1932: n.p,, and Payne 1977:391).
Payne's account may in fact refer to the alternate forms presented in
Figure 5, which is said to have been written for Payne by Sequoyah,
A letter written on 12 June 1827 by Samuel A, Worcester at Brainerd
Mission to Jeremiah Evarts in Boston provides irrefutable evidence that
Worcester could not possibly have altered Sequoyah's characters to any
appreciable degree when he wrote them out for the type cutters in Boston,
In this 1827 letter Worcester complained that an earlier letter from Evarts
indicated that Cherokee types had been cut on the model of characters
he had sent to Evarts in September of 1826, not from a corrected list of
characters sent later, and that they
will not at all suit Maj, Lowry, and the letter, I conclude, is of the
small pica size, which will not suit Mr, Ross; two men whom I considered it of great importance, and took the greatest pains to please
(Worcester 1827),
This passage makes clear that Worcester's concem was not to design types
to suit his own fancy but to adhere to standards set by politically powerful
Cherokees, specifically John Ross and George Lowry. Further on in this
letter Worcestertellshow he
had previously prepared, under the eye of Maj, Lowry, the copy from
which that was formed which I have since sent to you, and heard such
remarks from him, as to assure me that the copy which I sent you in
September would by no means satisfy him (Worcester 1827),
With regard to one particular character, the one representing
/gwojkwo/, Worcester told Evarts that he might think the earlier (September 1826) form better than the revised one and goes on to say that
The new [one] is not suited to my taste, but Maj, Lowry was very
particular respectif^ that one letter, and I made it perhaps a hundred
times before I could suit him (Worcester 1827).
This testimony, written by Worcester himself, is sufficient grounds to
reject the notion that Worcester, or any other white missionary, made significant changes in the forms of the characters in the process of adapting
the syllabary to the printing press.
The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary
85
In another letter (Worcester 1825), written to Rufus Anderson on
22 December, only two months after his arrival in the Cherokee Nation,
Worcester provides evidence that is even more compelling. He gives the
eighty-six characters of ^'Guyst's alphabet** in the inventor's sequence and
lists them again in his "systematic arrangement," where the twenty-seventh
character, which he omitted in 1828, appears to the right of the top character in the righthand column. The first list presents the characters in the
same sequence as that shown in Figures 4,5 and the 1828 broadside. The
forms ofthe characters are^t least as modern in appearance as those in Figures 4 and 5, and, in a few cases, they are significantly more modern, e.g.,
the last and third from last characters. This 1825 syllabary is reproduced
in Figure 7, below.
The Hicks Syllabary
There is, however, an even earlier syllabary. This was enclosed in a letter from Charles Renatus Hicks, second principal chief of the Cherokee
Nation, to Thomas L. McKenney, head of the Office of Indian Affairs
in the War Department on 14 January 1825.^ That is nine months before
Worcester arrived at Brainerd Mission, more than two years before the
construction of the printing press, and at a time when the missionaries
and federal agents were still resisting the spread of Cherokee syllabic literacy and promoting English literacy and Cherokee written with the roman
alphabet in a system adapted by Pickering and Brown.'" McKenney had an
engraver copy the syllabics and Hicks's key to pronunciation (McKenney
1825a: 432), and the document reproduced in Figure 8 was published the
following year (Barbour 1826a). The original manuscript version of the
syllabics was apparently lost, but the engraved list appeared in three publications (Barbour 1826a, 1826b, 1834) and was appended to the treaty of
1828 "between the United States and Cherokees west of the Mississippi." ' '
This engraved copy of the syllabary consists of eighty-six characters.
The number and order of presentation of characters are the same as the
number and order in the 1828 broadside, in Worcester's letter to Anderson,
and in the two Gilcrease manuscripts; and the forms, with a few minor
exceptions, are those of the other documents.'^
In regard to both form and arrangement, the Hicks syllabary and the
syllabary in Worcester's letter to Anderson both confirm the authenticity
of the Gilcrease syllabaries; the Hicks syllabary esublishes that the eightyfive forms that the Kilpatricks, Walker, and Traveller Bird attributed to
Worcester vrere already in use by January 1825.
Ú
Ö Ö
es
«S
^
il
II
it
(S
The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary
SI
87
[DM. NO.
c.
4 y^ff» U>
1. AAort
s. Ahrwd.
8.
4.
5L Nah.
8b WaA
7. WA.
8. LeA.
f. Nah.
10.
11.
IS.
18.
14.
15.
18.
fleA.
Claah.
Ah.
LA.
17. LA.
45. T a u k
48i
Ub
18. Hau.
47. Tuk
54. H«b
55.
55. 8t(alhrilaat)
54.
57. Ua (fiamh)
58. Hea.
S9L Geh.
58.. Tnh.
57. Qaedb
58¿ Nea.
19i Woh.
SOL Ckh.
SI. T A .
SS. Taha.
S5. Laah.
S8. Teh.
48. KAa.
49. WaA.
50. Eah.
51. Oah.
5S. Tah.
55. Kfldh.
85. Maeh.
88. QAa.
^ne aMHwiaip AanclHf% lAan pat tapttVf ifdl "
^ 4 %J È
Figure 8. The Hicks syllabary and phonetic key, reproduced from Barbour
(i8z6a).
88
Willard Walker and James Sarbaugh
Conclusions
From the Hicks syllabary we know that the syllabic characters existed
in their modem forms months before Worcester arrived in the Cherokee
Nation. The Worcester syllabary of 1825, the 1828 broadside, the Gilcrease
Manuscripts and the testimony of Sequoyah's contemporaries—Knapp,
the literary scholar; Evarts and Worcester of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; Stuart, an army officer; and Payne's informants, long-time associates of Sequoyah, all support the view that the
original inventor of the syllabary was responsible for the printed forms of
the syllabic characters.
Notes
An early version of this essay was read at the 15^9 annual meetings of the American
Society for Ethnohistory at Chicago in a session on "Cherokee Literacy in Historical Context/Literacy," chaired by Theda Perdue. We wish to thank the staff of
Olin Library at Wesleyan University (Connecticut), particularly Elizabeth Swaim,
and the staffs of the New York Public Library and the Sterling, Beinecke, and law
libraries of Yale University for their valuable assistance. At the National Archives,
Constance Potter, Mary Francis Morrow, and Sally Marks were extraordinarily
generous with dieir time and expertise. We are also indebted to Janine Scancarelli
for guiding us to the Worcester correspondence in the ABCFM files and to Rex
Hennessey for photography.
1 A speaker of Winnebago, a Siouan language, who was very probably illiterate and monolingual, adapted a writing system from s p e a r s of Fox, an
Algonquian language, in 1884-85; two illiterate, monolingual, Yupik speaking Eskimos invented separate arid distinct writing systems for their language
early in the twentieth century; and, in 1904, Silas John Edwards, a monolingual speaker of \Pfestem Apache, who had had some contaa with English and
English literacy as a young man, invented a writing system that has no relationship whatever to written Eng}idi or to any other writing system. Documented
cases of enduring wridng systems invented by illiterate peofde are extremely
rare, however, in North Ainerica or elsewhere. For a survey of native North
American writing systems in the United States, both independently originated
and Euroamerican influenced, see W. Walker ( 1981 ).
1 Nonphonemic variants, such as [je, 3e, ce, ¿e,], do not carry semantic distinctions, but are conditioried by phonological context (e.g., presence of aspiration
in neighboring syllables), by how fast and how carefully die speaker is talking,
and by the dialect and individual habits of the speaker.
3 Samuel A. Worcester arrived at Brainerd Mission, Cherokee Nation, in October 1825 and quickly reaUied the value of the syllabary for translatiiig religious
texts and disseminating Christianity. He was responsible for sending the syllabic forms to Bostonforcasting in type, and he became a regular contributor
to the Phoenix and an authority on the syllabary. He collaborated with Elias
Boudinot, the full-blooded editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, in translating and
The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary
4
5
6
7
8
89
printing the Gospels and other portions of the Bible and in compiling Cherokee hymns. He remained a missionary to the Cherokees until his deadi in 1859
(Bass 1936, Kilpatrick and Kilpatrick 1968, Trennert 1988),
Althoi^ Figure i shows that the character V represents the sound [to] and
Figure 3 shows that the same character inverted represents [do], there is no
evidence that separate characters were ever used to distinguish between [to]
and [do]. Separate characters are used to distinguish between [ta] and [da], [te]
and [de], and [ti] and [di], but the syllabary does not distinguish between [to]
and [do], [tu] and [du], or [tv] and [dv], (See Fig. 2.) The character for [to,
do] was probably inverted to eliminate confusion with the character for [go].
Figure 3, a full-sized reproduction of the national press type face, illustrates
the difficulty of distinguishing between them.
By "standardized version of the syllabary," we mean, of course, the printed version. There is also cursive Cherokee, which may have undergone changes since
1827, and that seems to vary somewhat with locality, with the writer's degree
of expertise, and with the degree of formality. According to Anna and Jack Kilpatrick, "^Eastem Cherokee calligraphy of lno:li's day [1849-84] more closely
resend)ied the original concepts of Sequoyah than did the Westem which was
pattemed upon the type fans" . . . (1966: 8). Eastcm texts written in this
century, however, are not necessarily less faithful to the printed standard than
texts written in Oklahoma. An alternative form of the character for X [gwa,
kwa] which was sometimes used in Delaware County, Oklahoma, in the 1960s
was X « 3 departure from the written standard that probably has no parallel in
North Carolina. And some of the features that distinguish eastem manuscripts
from printed texts can be found in Oklahoma. Thus, a syllabary written by
Will West Long of Big Cove, North Carolina, in 1947, and reproduced here
as Figure 7 from Chiltoskey (1972), includes a very standard X ^^ P- 53«
but two deviant forms, ^ and J ] , in the fragment of a dictionary on p. 51.
These variant forms also occur in texts from Oklahoma now in our possession. Variation in cursive Cherokee, however, whether regional, temporal, or
contextual, should not be overemphasized. Extensive research on the varieties
of written Cherokee has yet to be done; but it seems clear that it differs from
the printed standard only superficially, and far less than cursive English differs
from printed English.
Commenting on John White's assertion that Tell Them They Lie is an "elaborate fabrication," Raymond D. Fogelson has said that "certainly the book must
be adjudged so by orthodox canons of historiography" ( 1974:109). Bird's hook
is based, not on conventional scholarship, but on an oral tradition that is demonstrahly unreliable in many respects; but it deserves our attention precisely
because the oral tradition from which it derives has persisted independently
of the academic tradition. Like the oral testimony of a "native informant," it
should be taken seriously, but not necessarily at face value.
The manuscript with Sequoyah's signature reproduced in Figure 4 was reproduced earlier in W. Walker (1969: 157). Alexander (1971) reproduced three
of the four documents attributed to Sequoyah, irrcluding the two reproduced
here as Figures 4 and 5. Clearly, the Kilpatricks and Bird also knew of these
documents; but no one, to our knowledge, has ever discussed them in print.
Worcester later expanded on this explanation: "The sound of £r is more open
than G . This distinction has been regarded as of so little consequence, par-
9O
Willard Walker and James Sarbaugh
ticularly by Maj. Lowerey, who has been the oracle on this subjea, that the
character has been omitted. . ."(1828b). But Worcester's assertion that ''the
original number was 86" should not be taken literally. He may have meant
merely that it consisted of eighty-six characters befbre it was reduced to eightyfive. Other early nineteenth-century sources indicate that the inventory of characters both expanded and contracted before it came to rest at eighty-five. A
passage in the Missionary Herald for February 1826, cited hy Pilling, reported
that Sequoyah at one time used only eighty-two characters, but that either he
"himself or some other person has discovered four other syllables, making all
the known syllables of the Cherokee language eighty-six** (Pilling 1888: 7 2 73). According to Samuel Lorenzo Knapp, who interviewed Sequoyah through
interpreters in 1828, Sequoyah*s ''signs" were "at first... very numerous; and
when he got so far as io think his inveniion was nearly accomplished, he had
about two hundred characters in his Alphabet. By the aid of his daughter, who
seemed to enter in the genius of his labours, he reduced them, at last, to eightysix, the number he now uses. . .*' (Knapp 1829:26). A more detailed account
than either of these, however, is that of Albert Gallatin (1836: 92—93]. His
reasoning and calculations served as the basis for Mooneyes statement that "the
complete syllabary, as first elaborated, would have required some one hundred
and fifteen characters'* (Mooney 1900: Z19).
9 Both Pilling (1888: 137) and Mooney (1900: i i i ) have credited David Brown
with sending this early version of the syllabary to McKenney. Our search of
the National Archives produced no evidence that Brown ever sent such a document. Brown wrote the editor of the family Visitor (1825b) describing the
invention and acceptance of the syllabary. This letter was quoted by McKenney
(i8z5b) in his report to Secretary of War James Barbour. McKenney attached
to his report a copy of the syllabic characters with a key to pronunciation, both
of which had heen sent to him by Charles Hicks (i8z$). The key to pronunciation sent by Hicks is still filed with his letter and matches exactly the key
published by Barbour (i8z6a, i8z6b). The relevant portion of Hicks*s cover
letter is as follows:
ihe improving state of this nation is a circumstance that has excited considerable inierest by the invention of Eighty six alphabetical characters
of letters by which numbers of our people writes correctly in our own
language by these letters these alphabetical characters has being invented
by one George Guess native cherokee with out any education what ever
and scarcely understands the English language, and by his inventions has
caused considerable stimulus for learning among the young adult cherokees. which they can learn this sound in the course few days, the knowledge of which is Exdending through the nadon by which numbers of our
[people] communicates with one another by the means of these letters I
enclose you a list of these letters as a sample of the forms the alphabedcal
character which were made out by Captain Spirit [known also as John
Huss after his conversion in 18Z5 (McLaughlin 1984: 131,131 n. 14,133,
Z34, 306, 339)] who came here with his men after some money by order
of the committee and council then siting at newtown in Nov[emhe]r last,
and in delivery of the money he give me scirpt. and wrote his name in
Cherokee by the above letters, hut I am quite a Ignorant to the sounds of
all these letters (Hicks T8Z5).
The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary
91
10 The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions planned to use
the system of "uniform orthography" developed in 1819 by John Pickering,
a noted philologist. In 1823, David Brown, a young Cherokee attending the
Andover Theological Seminary, assisted Pickering in adapting the alphabet to
Cherokee and in analyzing Cherokee grammar (Tracy 1840:148; Bass 1936:34;
Pickering 1887: 281,29i,33i-33).Thefirstpagesof this grammar were printed
in 1825; but the work was never completed because of the adoption of the
syllabary by the ABCFM (Pickering 1887: 337). In a letter dated 27 April 1825,
Brown wrote: ' i write according to the plan proposed by the Hon. J. Pickering of New England, which plan is not without some defects. In this way 1
intend to translate the Testament, and on its completion to transcribe it into a
Cherokee syllabic system for the press. That mode of writing lately invented by
Mr. Guess, the self tutored Cherokee philosopher, has been universally adopted
in the nation" (Brown 1825a).
Five months later, on 29 September 1825, Brown wrote to Jeremiah Evarts
from Willstown, "I shall endeavor", he said, **to review my translation of the
New Testament, correct and improve it as soon as convenient. In the meantime
br. Huss will be transcribing it on the plan of G. Guess, that it may be open to
the inspection of our people" (Brown 1825c).
11 Our photographic analysis of Barbour ( 1826a, 1826b) and the "Treaty of i8z8
between the United States and Cherokees West of the Mississippi" (RG 11,
M-668, roll 6, frames 152-53) shows that rhe copies of the syllabary in all three
were almost certainly made from the same engraving. This engraved copy of
the syllabary has not been reproduced since its original printing. However, the
1834 publication of the syllabic characters was made from a different engraving and has been noted by Pilling (1888: 65, 137) and reproduced by Foster
(1885: 112, 1899: 36) and by Davis (1930: 157). Being taken from a source
that was published more than six years after the syllabary first appeared in
print, its authenticity was open to question; but an examination of the 1826
publications, which apparently were never seen by Pilling, Foster, or Davis,
confirms the authenticity of the 1834 publication. The characters in the 1834
publication, though arranged differently on the page, are the same in number
and sequence as those in the 1826 publications and the 1828 treaty. With one
minor exception, the 1834 characters match those of the 1826 publications and
the 1828 treaty with regard to form as well. The exception is the forty-seventh
character, which is the mirror image of the corresponding character in the
1826 publications, the 1828 treaty, the 182.8 broadside, and the two Gilcrease
manuscripts.
12 In the Hicks syllabary, no. 70 is identical to no. 47 [da]. This is undoubtedly
an error in copying. It should have been the character representing [te], which
is very similar in appearance, as it is in both Gilcrease manuscripts and in
Worcester's letter to Anderson of 1815. Nos. zo, 53, and 84 are slightly distorted versions of the forms shown in Worcester (1825, 1828a) and in both
Gilcrease manuscripts. As mentioned, the twenty-seventh character was subsequently deleted. The remaining eighty-one charaaers in the Hicks syllabary
would probably all be recognized, if not casually accepted, by modern literate
Cherokees.
9Z
Willard Walker and James Sarbaugh
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Anonymous
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