Sequoyah was an authentic Indian genius who gave his people their greatest gift - communication.
Without books, letters, or newspapers, he invented the Cherokee alphabet while living in the deep woods surrounded by Indians and whites, most of whom were as illiterate as himself.

Sequoyah, or George Guess, as he was commonly called on the frontier, was the son of an itinerant white farmer named Gist and a half-breed mother.

McKenney, who knew Sequoyah, described him as a dreamer, a moody boy who disliked the favorite game of all Indian youths-war. Instead, he took long walks in the woods and built ingenious toy houses of sticks and mud.

[...]

Charles Hicks, a Moravian and part Cherokee who years later would become an influential chief, scrawled "George Guess" on a scrap of paper, and Sequoyah laboriously copied his name on a die, then stamped it on all his silverwork. It was probably the first Indian trademark.

Art came next. He sketched from early morning to late at night by the fireplace, in between plowing a field, rounding up the cows, breaking horses, or designing a new piece of silverwork. Up to his time he had never seen an engraving or painting.

In 1820, Sequoyah visited some relatives in a Cherokee village on the Tennessee River. During the afternoon the subject of the white man's skill of writing was discussed. One brave insisted that only the Great Spirit could have given them the magical gift that enabled one man to put down his thoughts on paper so they could be read by another man many miles away. There was a general shaking of heads over the ingenuity of the white man. Guess startled everyone by scoffing at the idea that it was a gift of God. Rather he said, it was an art, and he was sure that he could invent some kind of a written tongue so the Cherokee could express their thoughts and wishes on paper for one another, even though they were separated by great distances.

The next day Sequoyah begged some scraps of paper, which he fashioned into a book and began making "characters." As McKenney described the method:
"His reflections on the subject had led him to the conclusion that the letters used in writing represented certain words or ideas, and being uniform, would always convey to the reader the same idea intended by the writer-provided the system of characters which had been taught to each was the same."

He polished his work in 1821. That same year he began teaching the alphabet to others. After the Cherokee language could be read and written he toured Arkansas teaching his alphabet to the Cherokee who had been removed to that territory.

In 1823, he left Alabama with the Cherokee who had accepted the government's offer to move them west of the Mississippi. He carried with him a silver medal presented by his people. The inscription read:

"Presented to George Gist, by the General Council of the Cherokee nation, for his ingenuity in the invention of the Cherokee alphabet." One side was in English, the other in Cherokee.

Sequoyah spent his last years investigating the possibility of inventing a general alphabet for all Indian nations and searching for a legendary tribe of Cherokee "living somewhere toward the western mountains." He died in 1843 near the village of San Fernando. Sequoyah district of the Cherokee nation was named in his honor along with the great trees of California, the Sequoia gigantea. Had the Indian territory been admitted into the Union as a state indipendent of Oklahoma, there is little doubt that it would have borne Sequoyah's name.