“Presented to George Gist, by the General Council of the Cherokee Nation, for his ingenuity in the invention of the Cherokee alphabet.”

John Ross, acting as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, sent it West to Se-quo-yah, together with an elaborate address, the latter being at that time in the new nation.

In 1828 Gist went to Washington city as a delegate from the Western Cherokees.  He was then in his fifty-ninth year.  At that time the portrait was taken, an engraving from which we present to our readers.  He is represented with a table containing his alphabet.  The missionaries were not slow to employ it.  It was arranged with the Cherokee, and English sounds and definitions.  Rev. S.A.  Worcester endeavored to get the outlines of its grammar, and both he and Mr. Boudinot prepared vocabularies of it, as did many others.  In this way, by having more and better observers, we know more of this language than many others, and affinities have been traced between it and some others, supposed to be radically different, which would have appeared in the case of some others, had they been as fully or correctly written.

Besides the Scriptures, a very considerable number of books were printed in it, and parts of several different newspapers existing from time to time; also almanacs, songs, and psalms.

During the closing portion of his life, the home of Se-quo-yah was near Brainerd, a mission station in the new nation.  Like his countrymen, he was driven an exile from his old home, from his fields, work-shops, and orchards by the clear streams flowing from the mountains of Georgia.  Is it wonderful if such treatment should throw a sadder tinge on a disposition otherwise mild, hopeful, and philosophic?

One of his sons is a very fair artist, using promiscuously pencil, pen, chalk, or charcoal.  He served, as a private soldier, in the Union army in the late war, and there, in his quarters, made many sketches.  His power of caricaturing was very considerable.  If a humorous picture of some officer who had rendered himself obnoxious was found, chalked in unmistakable but grotesque lineaments, on the commissary door, it was said, “It must have been by the son of Se-quo-yah.”

In his mature years, at Brainerd, although approaching seventy, the nerve or fire of the old man was not dead.  Some narrow-minded ecclesiastics, because Gist would not go through the routine of a Christian profession after the fashion they prescribed, have not scrupled to intimate that he was a pagan, and grieved that the Bible was printed in the language he gave.  This arose simply from not comprehending him.  They persisted in considering him an ignorant savage, while he comprehended himself and measured them.

In his old days a new and deeper ambition seized him.  He was not in the habit of asking advice or assistance in his projects.  In his journey to the West, as well as to Washington, he had an opportunity of examining different languages, of which, as far as lay in his power, he carefully availed himself.  His health had been somewhat affected by rheumatism, one of the few inheritances he got from the old fur peddler of Ebenezer; but the strong spirit was slow to break.