"I am an Indian!" shouted the boy.

"Not all Indian," his grandfather reminded him.

"But I don't want to be a white man just because my father was white!" The boy stood with his fists clenched. "I can talk like an Indian and live like an Indian. I will be a Cherokee all my days."

The boy was Sequoyah, who later became spokesman for the Cherokees and one of the most famous men in America. Today his statue stands in the United States Capitol. And he is honored by the giant trees that bear his name, the stately sequoias of California.

In Sequoyah: Leader of the Cherokees, Alice Marriott tells of the Indian boy who fought in the War of 1812 and there had his first chance to observe the ways of white men. The thing that fascinated him was their way of sending messages by means of queer signs and symbols on sheets of paper.

If white men could do it for their language, why couldn't he do it for his? With bits of charcoal and sheets of bark, he set to work. For years Sequoyah continued his task and finally became the only man in the world to perfect, single-handed, a system of writing and reading a language.

From the dust jacket