This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Sequoyah could not read or write in any language when he set out, sometime after 1809, to give the Cherokee language a written form of its own. That fact makes what he did over the following decade unusual among the world's writing systems, most of which developed gradually across generations of use or were adapted from a script someone already knew. Sequoyah's first attempt tried to assign a separate symbol to every Cherokee word, an approach he abandoned as unworkable once the list ran into the thousands. He then changed method entirely, listening instead for the repeating syllable sounds that made up Cherokee speech, and by around 1821 had isolated roughly eighty five distinct syllables, each given its own character, borrowing some letterforms from an English spelling book and inventing others outright. His neighbors, unsettled by a man alone with strange marks on paper, tried Sequoyah for practicing witchcraft. To answer the charge, tribal elders separated Sequoyah from his young daughter Ayoka, the person he had taught the system to, and had each of them write down what the other dictated in a different room; when the papers were exchanged and each read the other's words aloud correctly, suspicion gave way to astonishment. What followed was among the fastest literacy campaigns on record: within about six months, roughly a quarter of the Cherokee Nation could read and write using the syllabary, and within a generation Cherokee literacy rates were reported to exceed those of the surrounding non native population. By 1828 the Cherokee Phoenix, printed partly in Sequoyah's characters, had become the first newspaper published by any Native American nation.