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.

Se-quo-yah first exercised his genius in making an improved kind of
wooden milk-pans and skimmers for his mother. Then he built her a
milk-house, with all suitable conveniences, on one of those grand
springs that gurgle from the mountains of the old Cherokee Nation. As a
climax, he even helped her to milk her cows; and he cleared additions
to her fields, and worked on them with her. She contrived to get a
petty stock of goods, and traded with her countrymen. She taught
Se-quo-yah to be a good judge of furs. He would go on expeditions with
the hunters, and would select such skins as he wanted for his mother
before they returned. In his boyish days the buffalo still lingered in
the valleys of the Ohio and Tennessee. On the one side the French
sought them. On the other were the English and Spaniards. These he
visited with small pack-horse trains for his mother.

For the first hundred years the European colonies were of traders
rather than agriculturists. Besides the fur trade, rearing horses and
cattle occupied their attention. The Indians east of the Mississippi,
and lying between the Ap