This woman belonged to a family long respectable in the Cherokee Nation.  It is customary for those ignorant of the Indian social polity to speak of all prominent Indians as “chiefs.”  Her family had no pretension to chieftaincy, but was prominent and influential; some of her brothers were afterward members of the Council.  She could not speak English; but, in common with many Cherokees of even that early date, had a small proportion of English blood in her veins.  The Cherokee woman, married or single, owns her property, consisting chiefly of cattle, in her own right.  A wealthy Cherokee or Creek, when a son or daughter is born to him, marks so many young cattle in a new brand, and these become, with their increase, the child’s property.  Whether her cattle constituted any portion of the temptation, I can not say.  At any rate, the girl, who had much of the beauty of her race, became the wife of the German peddler.

Of George Gist’s married life we have little recorded.  It was of very short duration.  He converted his merchandise into furs, and did not make more than one or two trips.  With him it had merely been cheap protection and board.  We might denounce him as a low adventurer if we did not remember that he was the father of one of the most remarkable men who ever appeared on the continent.  Long before that son was born he gathered together his effects, went the way of all peddlers, and never was heard of more.

He left behind him in the Cherokee Nation a woman of no common energy, who through a long life was true to him she still believed to be her husband.  The deserted mother called her babe “Se-quo-yah,” in the poetical language of her race.  His fellow-clansmen as he grew up gave him, as an English one, the name of his father, or something sounding like it.  No truer mother ever lived and cared for her child.  She reared him with the most watchful tenderness.  With her own hands she cleared a little field and cultivated it, and carried her babe while she drove up her cows and milked them.

His early boyhood was laid in the troublous times of the war of the Revolution, yet its havoc cast no deeper shadows in the widow’s cabin.

As he grew older he showed a different temper from most Indian children.  He lived alone with his mother, and had no old man to teach him the use of the bow, or indoctrinate him in the religion and morals of an ancient but perishing people.  He would wander alone in the forest, and showed an early mechanical genius in carving with his knife many objects from pieces of wood.  He employed his boyish leisure in building houses in the forest.  As he grew older these mechanical pursuits took a more useful shape.  The average native American is taught as a question of self-respect to despise female pursuits.  To be made a “woman” is the greatest degradation of a warrior.