Note 262 — II—HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE CHEROKEE

The inventor, aptly called the Cadmus of his race, was a mixed-blood known among his own people as Sikwâ′yĭ (Sequoya) and among the whites as George Gist, or less correctly Guest or Guess. As is usually the case in Indian biography much uncertainty exists in regard to his parentage and early life. Authorities generally agree that his father was a white man, who drifted into the Cherokee Nation some years before the Revolution and formed a temporary alliance with a Cherokee girl of mixed blood, who thus became the mother of the future teacher. A writer in the Cherokee Phœnix, in 1828, says that only his paternal grandfather was a white man.262 McKenney and Hall say that his father was a white man named Gist.263 Phillips asserts that his father was George Gist, an unlicensed German trader from Georgia, who came into the Cherokee Nation in 1768.264 By a Kentucky family it is claimed that Sequoya’s father was Nathaniel Gist, son of the scout who accompanied Washington on his memorable excursion to the Ohio. As the story goes, Nathaniel Gist was captured by the Cherokee at Braddock’s defeat (1755) and remained a prisoner with them for six years, during which time he became the father of Sequoya. On his return to civilization he married a white woman in Virginia, by whom he had other children, and afterward removed to Kentucky, where Sequoya, then a Baptist preacher, frequently visited him and was always recognized by the family as his son.265