1 Twelve years of solitary invention Sequoyah worked alone through the 1810s, testing and refining 85 distinct characters entirely by hand.
2 An entire nation reads within a decade By 1825, Cherokee literacy rates had surpassed those of surrounding Anglo-American frontier settlements.
3 Sovereign type, cast in Boston The Cherokee Phoenix commissioned its own syllabary metal type from a Massachusetts foundry in 1827.
4 A script that refuses the past tense Still taught in immersion schools and encoded in Unicode, the syllabary remains a living system today.