He had already fasted and otherwise prepared himself for the ordeal. The
old man, after muttering charms and incantations, drew the scratcher four
times the length of the young man’s body, burying the points each time
deeply in the flesh. Each time the instrument made seven scratches. One
set of these ran from the base of the left thumb, up the arm, diagonally
across the chest, down the right leg to the right great toe; another, from
the base of the right thumb to the left great toe; another, from the base
of the left little finger, up the back of the arm, across the back, down
the right leg to the base of the little toe; the other, from the base of
the right little finger, to the left little toe. The young man then
plunged, with all these bleeding gashes, into a cold running brook. He was
then ready for the morrow’s ball play, for, had he not been scratched
twenty-eight times with the bones of swift running creatures, and been
prayed over by a great medicine man?
Every one should know of Sequoyah or George Guess or Guest, as he was
called in English. He was a Cherokee who loved to work at machinery and
invent handy devices. He determined to invent a system of writing his
language. He saw that the writing of the white men consisted in the use of
characters to represent sounds. At first he thought of using one character
for each word; this was not convenient because there are so many words. He
finally concluded that there were eighty-six syllables in Cherokee, and he
formed a series of eighty-six characters to represent them. Some of these
characters were borrowed from the white man’s alphabet; the rest were
specially invented. It took some little time for the Cherokees to accept
Sequoyah’s great invention, but by 1827 it was in use throughout the
nation. Types were made, and soon books and papers were printed in the
Cherokee language in Sequoyah’s characters. These are still in use, and
to-day in the Indian Territory, a newspaper is regularly printed by the
Cherokee Nation, part of which is in English, part in the Cherokee
character. This newspaper is, by the way, supplied free to each family by
the Cherokee government.
[Illustration.]
Examples of Sequoyah’s Characters.
HELEN HUNT JACKSON.—Writer. Her _nom de plume_ was “H. H.” Wrote
two books about Indians, _A Century of Dishonor_ and _Ramona_.
Every American boy should read the former.