Sequoyah In the Hall
of Fame
In 1911 the Legislature of the
new State of Oklahoma
honored itself in the passage
of an act to place in the rotunda of
the Capitol, the Hall of Fame
at Washington, D. C., a splendid
bronze statue of Sequoyah, as
a famous man from that state.
The presentation was made, and
the statue unveiled on
June 6, 1917, Honorable
Charles D. Carter, member of Congress
from the third district of
Oklahoma, himself a distinguished
descendant of the intrepid
Chickasaws, being chairman of the
meeting.
The presentation speech was
made by Senator Robert L.
Owen, of Oklahoma, he being of
Cherokee descent and a man of
distinguished ability; and
among other things he said: "
It is a strange thing that no
alphabet in all the world
reaches the dignity, the
simplicity, and the value of the Cherokee
alphabet as invented by
Sequoyah. The European alphabet
goes too far in providing
analysis of sound and permits such
large variations in spelling
that it is a task of years to learn how
to spell correctly in any of
the European languages. With the
Sequoyah alphabet a Cherokee
could learn to spell in one day. "
Thus the labor of years was
saved to the student. So
great an intellectual
accomplishment was this that Canon
Kingsley named the great red
cedars of California, which towered
as high as four hundred feet
into the air and which were twenty-
five feet through at the base,
'sequoias,' because they were
typical of the greatest native
North American Indian."
Upon the same occasion Speaker
Champ Clark said: "
When I was a boy, my father
believed in phonetics and I
believe in phonetics. Sequoyah
invented simply a large and
complete phonetic system in
which everything is spelled by
sound, which is the correct
way. If he had lived two thousand
years ago and had invented his
alphabet and had got people to
use it, one-fifth of the time
of the usual life could have been
saved. (Applause.) On the
average, we spend one-fifth of our
lives learning how to spell
and we don't know yet. (Laughter
and applause.)"
Excerpt from the
book: The Chickasaw Nation: A Short Sketch of a Noble People
By James Henry Malone
1922
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