Sequoyah and the Vital Nature of the Written Word

By Timothy Sandefur

On a December evening in 1840, the writer John Howard Payne—known to Americans today, if at all, for his song “Home, Sweet Home”—was invited to a meeting in Park Hill, Oklahoma, about seventy miles southeast of Tulsa. Payne was excited. The meeting was to be held at a cabin owned by John Ross, chief of the Cherokee tribe, and he would have the honor of …