TTHN Ep 5a - The Talking Leaves - Bonus Material: Interview with Charlie Rhodarmer

Director, Sequoyah Birthplace Museum
 

In this companion interview to Episode 5, The Talking Leaves, we go beyond the narrative and into the details with Charlie Rhodarmer, director of the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum in Vonore, Tennessee.

Drawing on his experience and deep familiarity with the site and its history, Charlie provides valuable context, clarifications, and corrections that help sharpen our understanding of Sequoyah’s life and legacy. From the complexities of reconstructing Sequoyah’s story to the challenges of interpreting a life preserved through both oral tradition and limited documentation, this conversation adds depth that can’t be captured in a single episode.

This is the kind of perspective you only get by being there—by standing near the place where the story begins and speaking with those who help preserve it.

🎯 What You’ll Hear in This Interview

• Clarifications and corrections related to Sequoyah’s life and timeline
• The challenges of interpreting historical figures rooted in oral tradition
• Insights from the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum’s research and exhibits
• Discussion of common misconceptions about Sequoyah
• The importance of place-based history in understanding the past
• Behind-the-scenes perspective from the museum itself

🧠 Why This Matters

Sequoyah’s story is one of the most remarkable in American history—but it is also one of the most complex. This interview highlights the importance of careful interpretation, source awareness, and humility when approaching historical narratives that come to us through multiple and sometimes conflicting accounts.

📍 About the Location

This interview is connected to the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum, located near the site traditionally associated with Sequoyah’s birthplace along the Little Tennessee River (now part of Tellico Lake).

Credits:

Hosted by Big John Summers

Guest: Charlie Rhodarmer

Produced by Summers Media Enterprises

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Transcript

0:00

Okay, so today uh have a really, really uh neat interview lined up. I'm here with Charlie Rodarmer at the Sequoia Birthplace Museum. He is the director here, and this of course ties right in with episode five, The Talking Leaves, uh, where we're going to be looking at the life of Sequoia in that episode. But wanted to be able to get into more detail, get into uh, you know, kind of do a little bit of a deeper dive. And Mr. Rodarmor has very graciously agreed to do this interview with us today. Welcome to the show. Thank you for allowing us to use your facility here. Charlie, I really appreciate you you doing this, and thank you for being here. My pleasure. Thank you. Okay, so how is it that you um, you know, one of the things when we were when I met back in back in January with you that you talked about very briefly, you know, I asked, are you Cherokee? And you told me No. But um I was uh uh made a honorary member back about I think four years ago. Okay. You want to talk about that a little bit or well, just it was a they were trying to keep it a secret, and I'm I'm glad a former employee that that saw the agenda for the council meeting actually called and told me that and I didn't believe it. But uh because if if they had if if it had happened and I didn't know it, I'd busted out into tears. It was just such an honor to be made a member of the Eastern Band. And how long have you been director here? Since 2000, so so starting 26 years. Okay, so you've been doing this quite a while, and and and so I would presume that that that service has an awful lot to do with with with the the honor of doing of making you an honorary member. Yes, sir. Okay. All right. Well it's it's that's a really um, you know, it's a it's a neat story, and and that's the reason I wanted to lead off with that. And I I um like I said, I didn't really have a a a planned agenda for the for the interview. That just kind of came to me as we were starting here. And and one of the things I think that a lot of people may not really realize, I mean, you know, people people growing up, as I did in Tennessee, of course, we knew about Cherokee, North Carolina, and you know, I remember going over there when I was a uh a kid, and the kind of it's kind of funny they had the like the Plains Indians headdresses, you know, you know, it everybody thinks that you know all the Indians wear that um kind of thing. But the the there are actually two groups now of Cherokee. You've got the Eastern Band here in this part of the country, and then the Western Band, which are in Oklahoma. Well, you actually have three. Okay. Um you have the Cherokee Nation, which the Cherokee Nation is what's slowly seeds the land here, and then uh you have some of them are actually going west early, and those are known as the old settlers. Sequoia is one of the old settlers. He goes out early. Then when you know it becomes the Indian territory, the first the forced removal happens, the Trail of Tears, that's the nation that's out in Oklahoma. Okay. What becomes Oklahoma. And then you have in the 1940s the United Band of the uh Gadoa, and from what has been explained to me, they were kind of like traditional, and every time they signed something, something bad happens. And so they kind of hid out, they didn't s go on the dolls roll, and so they were not considered part of the Cherokee Nation. A lot of the the Gadoah were speakers, reader-writers of the Cherokee language. Some say they they were more traditional with the old ways, and so they petitioned um the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and I think it was 1949, they were recognized as the United Band of Gadoah. And then here in the East, you had some Cherokees that didn't have to actually go on the trail because of their service in the War of 1812. For a period, families could actually petition to stay behind because grandma is nine years old, she can't travel, and they could actually get these permissions to stay. Uh Scott, General Scott, when he took command, it was three different commanders. Uh, when Scott took over, he put an end to those permissions to stay, but he did recognize the ones that had been issued. So there were some that didn't have to go. And then, of course, you have a lot of Cherokee that beat feet up into the mountains and hide out, and then you actually have some Cherokee that go on the trail and then along the trail peel off and go come back home. And you even have some that go all the way to the Indian territory, and then like, I'm not staying here, and they actually come back. So you that those those groups of people end up creating what will be the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, and they firstly kind of incorporated themselves as like a business when they first became the Eastern Band. Okay. All right, and that's really kind of who we're associated with when you talk about the Sequoia Birthplace Museum. It's that group. It goes back to the creation of the Telco Lake. The Cherokee, both the nation and the Eastern Band are fighting trying to stop this lake. Uh they don't want it covering up their ancestral homeland, sacred sites. Uh there were still uh Amanita Sequoia, who was a descendant of Sequoia, he and his brother would come over here and collect medicine. And they Amanita filed two lawsuits against TVA to try to stop the lake in Maryville, and both of the cases were thrown out, but it caused delays. And so if you go back, TVA had planned to build this lake like in the 40s, and then World War II broke out, so everything was put on the shelf. After the war, late 40s, early 50s, TVA dug those plans out and started to started to work on it again. Originally, um my former chairman, Max uh Maxwell D. Ramsey, said they called it Project Blue. It was kind of like top secret. And when word did get out, that's when the the local folks here and the Cherokees started fighting, trying to stop the lake. Well, by this time it's early 1960s, and they created preservation laws. So TVA had to hire, or they hired the United uh University of Tennessee Anthropology Department to come in and do the archaeology because you can't cover this up with the lake without knowing what was here, what was, you know, what are you covering up. And so the the anthropology department comes down and they started working on digs all up and down the Little Tennessee. My my former vice chairman, Dr. Jeff Chapman, uh Jefferson Chapman, he was on the he over the head of the project, and I've heard him tell stories where they didn't expect to be here maybe a year or two before it was done. And so, as I mentioned, you have these lawsuits happening, delays, and then in the mid-1960s, you have the environmental laws come on the books. You can't cause a species to go extinct. Well, some of the environmentalists came up with the snail darter. If you build this lake, it's going to cause the snail darter to go extinct. So you can't do the lake. So that case goes all the way to the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. And the Supreme Court says, no, you can't build this lake. And so everybody thinks, oh, it's done. Well, then President Carter, there's the politicians are involved, and they attach a little addition to a bill that says basically you'll finish the dam, close the floodgates, and be done with this project and forget all federal laws. And they attach this to the bill, and a lot of the local folks that I've talked with, they actually thought President Carter was going to veto it. Well, they got up the next morning and he had signed it into law, and so that's when the Cherokee and the locals saw there's no stopping it. And so the Cherokee went to the Tennessee Valley Authority and said, How are you going to help us commemorate and remember the Cherokee people? Well, they hired a company up in Washington, D.C. that came up with 38 concepts. And I personally kind of think they were sitting in a bar writing these ideas down on cocktail napkins. But uh the uh there were some really hairballed ideas, but the very first two suggestions were to return the remains of the Cherokee that could be identified as 18th century Cherokee. And so um there was 192 Cherokees that were identified as 18th century Cherokee, and they were returned back to the Eastern Band. They were re-interred elsewhere, I presume. There was the memorial mound that's down in the field below the museum shortly after the museum opened. Uh 191 were buried there. I see. And uh reinterred there. And so this kind of set a precedent. This has all happened in the late 70s and into the 80s. Anthropologists and archaeologists don't give artifacts back. They don't give remains back. We've got new technology coming, more things we can learn. These, you know, to the archaeologists, these are things to study. Whereas the Cherokee, these are our ancestors, these are our grandparents, these are human beings. And so I think from what I can tell, this set the precedent for NAGPRA, the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, that is passed in 1990. And that gave all federally recognized tribes and nations the right to get their ancestors back from museums, universities, government institutions. And so since then, uh we have over 300 ancestors that have come back and are reburied in this area. So very good. And so, you know, but to just to to kind of set the the the um to give the our listeners a little bit of a uh uh of context, um this this museum is near where Tuskegee would have been. We're about a mile from where Tuskegee. And and that that was the actual birthplace of of Sequoia, correct? Well, there's different arguments. I tend to say he's born in or near the village of Tuskegee. Some say by the time he's born, the village had been raided or burned, and so some say he was not actually born in that village, but he's born in the area. Dr. Dwayne King, who basically was life research, which is this museum, he had found a a period for a primary source that said Sequoia lived a mile and a quarter from where Nine Mile Creek ran into the Tennessee. Now now we call it the Little Tennessee, but then it was the Tennessee and Nine Mile Creek. That intersection of the creek and the river was where they built the Telico Blockhouse, okay, which is a very important site to the Cherokee. A lot of people don't realize it. A lot of important things happened there. Okay. And so he's a mile and a quarter from Nine Mile Creek. Okay. And that's basically the Tuckesee, the Tuskegee area. Okay. And so the where the Teleco Blockhouse replica is now, how close is that to the original site? It's dead on it. Dead on it. Okay. So that's so they took to so somebody comes to Von Or, they they they go there, they are on the site of where that happened then. Yes. It's a footprint. It's not really, they've got one blockhouse rebuilt, and we do uh uh garrison, telco blockhouse garrison, uh in September uh of this year's when it's planned. I'll have to would have to look the dates up. Okay. And then also in this area, of course, it's almost across the the road from here, just about a quarter mile down the road, and on the other side of it is where the replica of Fort Loudoun is. Of course, if I'm not mistaken, the original Fort Loudoun site is under the lake. No. And this is something I just learned yesterday because for years we have said we are on the exact site of the fort. The reconstruction, apparently, what they did is they measured the two high points, and so the fort is the original fort was cantered 10, 15 degrees more, and it went over the hill. And so when they built the reconstruction, they built the back wall kind of on top of the hill. So it's basically, if you look at it, it's on the original site, but it's a little turned. Okay. So but it's the same shape. Okay. Just a little bit. Okay. I misunderstood incorrectly on that then. I understood that it was actually farther down the hill. It was actually covered by the lake now. What happened is the story, they originally, the engineers planned or the plan was to build a coffer dam so that the fort would not be flooded at the bottom. And fortunately, one of the engineers at TVA said, uh, we've got all this limestone and cracks. It's going to backfill underneath the coffer dam. And so that's when they did the riprap and backfilled, and they raised the bottom 18 feet high, and the top was raised about four feet high and turned a little bit. And uh a friend of mine, Jeff Jeff Wells, who was uh the park manager at Fort Loudoun, was out weeding one afternoon. A TVA truck pulled in, and two guys get out, they put hard hats on, they pull out a bunch of papers and start walking up the trail. And Jeff went over and said, Excuse me, can I help you? Said, we're here to inspect the dam. And Jeff said, There's no dam. And he's like, Oh, yes, there is. Jeff's like, No, they're not. So they walk on down to the fort, they're there for about 15 minutes, and then they come walking back, said, nope, there's not a dam there. So they actually permitted to build this coffer dam, and it's in the books in TVA. It never got built. It never got built, no. Okay. So but thought that was funny. It is funny. So and and and and interesting thing with TVA, I mean, I was just recently uh at the side of the Hells Bar Dam, which predated TVA. It was one of the old TEPCO Dams. It was the first dam on the Tennessee River, it was built in the early 1900s. Uh it it it was built on karst type formation, and it leaked like a sieve underneath. They had they actually had a crew they called the rag team or rag crew that would go out and stuff rags in the holes where the water was coming through and then try to seal over it. So, yeah, that's that that what you described there is it, you know, it's it's not unusual in this part of the country. So it's kind of one of the things that the the TVA guys, when they were building dams, had to make sure that they were aware of what's what's down underneath. Right. So uh and then just 10 or 12 miles from here to the east of here, it would be where the Tanasi and Chota sites, am I remembering that correctly? Yeah, there's Chota and Tanasse. Tanasse was the first capital of the Cherokee. Kind of what happens, the British wanted one person to talk to. Uh, they were having to travel kind of town to town to get support to fight, you know, other tribes or nations to trade with, you know, and so what they want they lobbied or lobbied the Cherokee to pick a leader. And Moy Toy was the first emperor of the Cherokee. He was chosen, he lived in uh Telekaw, which is Telico Plains, and uh now, uh, but and he moves down and sets up his capital in Tanassie. And Tanasse's uh a small town down on the river, and I think he personally I've not read this anywhere, but I think he picks Tanassie because it's on the river. You can travel back to North Carolina, you can travel down to the Gulf, you know, from from that site, and so it would be easier to communicate, you know, with the British and so forth. So he sets up uh in the in the early eight uh 1720s. The from the archaeology, there's not really anybody there in what will become Choda in the 1720s. As time goes by, Choda kind of pops up as a suburb to Tanasi. And by I think it's the 1730s, Moy Toy's son, Moy Toy's son ends up um moving the capital from Tanasi uh up over to Choda. And if you look at the the ground, the area, Tana uh Choda is much higher and is a little bit set back from the river. And there again, it's my personal thought is they moved it because of flooding and so moved it to Choda. And so Choda becomes the peace town, it becomes a white town, it's a sacred town, and the capital I can't remember the dates, up through the eighteenth, uh near the end of the eighteenth century. So Okay, and then it ends up moving with uh some of the removal uh some of the treaties that happen around here, especially after the the revolution and the the Cherokee had aligned with the British and then lost a lot of their their lands end up um down in New Echota. It it it ends up near a river down there for a couple of years, and then uh then they actually planned out New Echota. So it was a planned out town, and they've got some really uh really great uh Georgia State Park. They've got the uh building that uh Phoenix, the newspaper was printed in. There's the tavern, there's uh Reverend Samuel Wooster's house kind of up on a hill, uh the court buildings. So it's a it's a really cool little site uh to go visit. Okay. And then going back to Tanassie and uh Choda, now you can go over there, there's a there's a memorial marker for Tanassie. I drove back when I was here in in January, and it's just kind of like a little loop in the back there. I didn't find anything else back there. Is there something that I missed back there? Well, Tanassie's 11 miles. You can get a map, ask at the front desk, and our my staff or I can explain. But Tanassie is actually completely covered by the rivers or the lake now. And um, there's the memorial there that explains about Tanassie. Right. And then if you that's 11 miles from here, and then if you drive another mile up 12 miles from here, there's that cul-de-sac thing. You park and you walk down the causeway. There's a a gate and you walk out, uh, it's about a quarter of a mile, short walk, uh flat walk. There's the there's a footprint of the townhouse at Choda, and it shows you see pillars, and that's where the supports were that held the roof up, and uh it has the different clans on the pillars, and it has the doorway, but apparently somebody when they were building the footprint must have looked at a photograph backwards because the doorway is backwards, it's on the wrong side. Okay, and so and then there's if you remember if somebody caught it, I said 191 Cherokee were re reinterred here at the museum. There was 192 that were given back. That one was Oconestoda. O'Conestoda was the only Cherokee identified. He was buried back where he was found. He wanted to be buried in the doorway of the townhouse at Choda. And so his grave is up there, so you can see his a headstone and uh for O'Conestoda. I'm gonna have to make the trip back over there now because I didn't know. I mean, when I pulled in, I didn't see a gateway or anything there. It's just a like a little, like you said, a little cold as hack. And it was like, yeah, this is interesting. As there's a loop here, there's parking places here, there's probably something here, I just can't see what it is. Yeah. Uh, I mean, it was and and the I don't know what it was. I I will share this. This is very interesting. When I pulled in at the Tanassie site, there was a single square-toed cowboy boot sitting pointing toward the memorial. It was on the on the on the sidewalk there. It was just sitting there. I left it. I thought, you know, if somebody came in and set that down, it was, you know, somebody from Oklahoma came in, you know, pointing back to their origin or something. I'm not going to mess with that. But it was very bizarre that one square-toed cowboy boot sitting there. No, I never saw it. This was back in January when I was here. So Sequoia then going um, you know, he was here. Uh his father was English from Virginia, if I remember correctly, uh Nathaniel Guist. Nathaniel Guest. Sequoia had the English name of George Gist. You see it sometimes as George Guess uh occasionally, but I think Guist is now what's commonly accepted. But he was raised as Cherokee, identified completely as Cherokee. Werte was his mother, but he was kind of raised by uncles or taught it would have been his his mother's brother or first cousins would have been his uncle, his teacher, the the mentor. Right. To kind of back up a little bit, there's there's things that we know about Sequoia that's carved in concrete, that we know, you know, he was at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. We know we know his wife burned his work, but to what degree was it? She just grabbed it off the table and threw it in a fireplace, or on stories he built his little cabin office out in the woods, and he would go work on his writing system there. And one day when he wasn't there, his wife and some of the neighbors went and burned it to the ground and destroyed it. Work. So we know that you know there's certain levels, and you kind of have to figure it out for yourself to what degree. And then there's actually complete fabrications about Sequoia. There was a book that was created back in the 70s. I think tell them they lied by a Traveler Bird. Dr. King, who was involved in his research here, he passed right when we started installing the exhibit. So Dr. King actually contacted the publisher of the book asking, you know. Sourcing. Yeah, wanting to see these primary sources that Traveler Bird had. He kept sending letters to the publisher, and the publisher actually, we are forwarding these on to the author. It's their choice whether they answer you or not. The author never answered him. When I got here, I actually had a student intern one summer, and that was our goal was to research and try to find some of these primary sources that was in the book. And we were trying to find, it was a Knoxville Gazette that had a description of Sequoia, that his ears were cut off, that he was branded on his forehead. They had done the same thing to his wife. It was by supposedly uh Major Ridge to the Knoxville Gazette. And we started searching at UT and Special Collections. We went to the public library in Knoxville. They had copies, but that copy that it did not exist that we could find. We then contacted the National Um Archives in Washington, down in Georgia. We went one of the archivists suggested contacting New York City Public Library that had copies. We contacted them. We even found a collector of the Knoxville Gazettes, I think out towards Crossville or so. We get in touch with him, and he's like, Well, the Knoxville Gazette, it was never published like weekly or monthly. It was they would publish it when they had enough news stories and they had enough advertising to publish it. So even though it might say volume one, number six, it may have been, you know, six weeks away, you know, it they would have been random uh published. So he said this paper could exist and nobody has it, but it also could be something fabricated. And and that what what I would say, you know, just logically thinking about it, if I were seeking to fabricate something like that, finding um um a publication with an irregular publication schedule is the perfect one to do that with, because then it's much more difficult to prove. Right. Well, when I first read I'm not saying they did that, I'm saying that that's that logically would but make sense. When I first read the the book, it starts off the the foyer talks about uh this traveler bird going and spending the summers with his grandparents on the reservation. And from that, uh I grew up in Haywood County, which is just county over from where the Cherokee boundary is. And all my life, I mean, we went to Cherokee Camp, we went to Unto These Hills, we went to the Museum of the Cherokee. When family came in, that's what you did. You went over there. Uh I had several Cherokee friends that I've known for years. Um I interned with the United States Marshall's office when I was in uh Western Carolina University. We spent most of our time on the boundary. It was always uh I had always heard koala boundary or the boundary. I had worked here maybe five years before I ever heard an enrolled member say the res or the reservation. Everybody always had called it the boundary. And so to me, Traveler Bird did not spend any time on the boundary by calling it a reservation. Even though there's great big signs as you come on, said welcome to the Cherokee Reservation. The Cherokee did not use that term until the 2000s. Okay. And and so let me play devil's advocate here. So someone writing for a non-Cherokee audience, would they have just used that term rather than having to explain? Well, here's the term we use is the boundary. I don't think so. Okay. Because I I mean, like I say, it's culturally Cherokee for years, boundary. Okay. Or koala. Okay. All right. No, no, I just, you know. But um so so what what kinds of things, aside from the the branding and the ears and that kind of thing, were in the uh book, in that particular book that could not be corroborated otherwise, otherwise and elsewhere. There was other supposedly primary sources that this person had that nobody on the planet, like I say, uh Dr. Dwayne King back in the 70s had been ri trying to research, trying to find it as well, and none of it existed in the public. It was all the one person in the world that had it was Traveler Bird. Okay. So and uh when I first downloaded it to my computer, uh uh the computer crashed, it had a virus. So that was another reside. So Okay. So um Sequoia fairly early, if I'm remembering correctly, left here. He ended up in what is now Alabama, down in what I think is now Fort Payne, that area. Right, Willstown. So just kind of a little bit of an overview. So you have, you know, there's different stories about Sequoia's father, but like Dwayne, Dr. Dwayne King and myself and others, you know, kind of believe, or it's Nathaniel Gist. Uh-huh. He had been a fur trader coming in here to the overhill in the 1750s and the uh 1760s. He's really good friends with a guy named George Washington. And what's about to happen circa 1776. So Washington asks Nathaniel to come down and talk to the Cherokees. He comes down in 1775, 1776, and possibly again in 1777. So it's one of those three years that Sequoia is born. Now, his mother is Werta, and the Cherokee are a matriarchal society, so you get your identity through your mother. And so Werta is of the Paint clan, so therefore Sequoia's of the Paint clan. Uh Werta gives him a very traditional upbringing, but he gives him the English name, George Gist. And the reason I I worked at the Scottish Tartans Museum back in the early 90s, and I found a letter from this Highlander, and he actually spells his own name three different ways. So spelling, you know, it's when Webster comes along and creates the dictionary, and we're not going to write and speak like those English people, and that's when we end up having to spell it this way every time. Yes. And so And that was the 1820s. Right. So we're talking, you know, 17, circa 1776. Right. And so um, so that's how you end up with gist, guest, and gist. Um and so, and that leads to the different stories of different fathers. But I think it's Nathaniel Gist. And um so um Werta gives him this very traditional upbringing, but uh they call him Saquoya for a period of time in his life. And it's kind of like sequoya, so it's like a double S kind of thing. So Sequoia actually translates into English to mean pig's foot. Pig's foot. Right. And why we call him pig's foot is if you look at how pig walks, kind of stiff-legged, kind of waddles. Uh-huh. So Sequoia had a physical challenge. And in my research, I found 26 different reasons for my goodness. The the most common one is he was wounded as a boy in a hunting accident, almost dies, but he gets better and he walks with a limp for the rest of his life. That's the most common one, but you do come across rheumatory arthritis, uh pigs foot uh clubfoot, deformed foot, um, wounded at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Um the last one I came across is probably my favorite, is that he had his kneecap crushed in a stickball match. So if you've ever seen Cherokee stickball, it's the Cherokee word for stickball is uh little brother of war. Right. And it's to teach young the Cherokee to be warriors, to be fighters. And in one stick ball match that I saw over in Cherokee, um, I saw a gentleman knocked out and smelling salts wouldn't wake him up. And he finally came to about after 15 minutes, 10, 15 minutes, started coming around. And within that 10, 15 minutes, another player was hit and broke his leg. And they carry, and what happens is you pick him up, you carry him off the field, and then you start playing again. So they actually had uh, you know, I was telling you I was at the horseshoe bend, they had a stick mall match, didn't they? And and they actually had in the museum it little brother of war is there in it, but but interestingly it was being more from the Creek Muskogee standpoint. So evidently that was something that went, you know, wasn't just a Cherokee thing, it was uh other tribes played. Other tribes, yes. Um so so um and it was actually, if I remember correctly, when he's in Alabama when the work is really primarily done on the uh celibary. Well, he starts here, and see that's when I mentioned earlier the telco blockhouse. He's living a mile and a quarter from the blockhouse. And there's stories as he's growing up, just a little more background, um, that he would actually uh build these little model houses just like a real house and put details in it. People were amazed at the detail. Um he started drawing pictures, and you could actually look at one of his drawings and recognize the person that he had drawn. So he's very, very artistic, very good with his hands. Um he uh eventually teaches himself to silversmith, and so he's making gorgettes and armlets, earrings, nose rings out of silver, and then he learns to blacksmith. That's part of the Americanization program that's happening at the Telico Blockhouse. The Americanization program was something that George Washington talked about it, Jefferson uh Thomas Jefferson um, I think is the one that implemented it. Uh the theory was to teach all the natives to be like little European settlers. You put them on 50-acre farms, they grow their own food, they sell their surplus, you teach them industrial arts so that they can generate money. And the interesting thing, the bottom line is to get them in debt. And once you get them in debt, they're generating their own money, then you turn them into these little European settlers that are, and you don't have the Cherokee Nation needing eight states to go deer hunting anymore to feed their families and to take care of themselves. Plus, they've been over hunting their deer because of the fur trade. And so that kind of pushes, forces the Cherokee kind of down this Americanization road. And um uh they have this uh what they call the factory that's set up in the telco blockhouse. And the factory um is a trading post, they bring over $60,000 worth of uh trade goods. Uh there's you know cloth, guns, knives, metal tools, um, cloth, 40 different types of cloth, uh sewing implements, and my very favorite item that they had office supplies. So when I came here to the Sequoia back in 2000, I'm visiting Sequoia who's got a piece of buckskin and a piece of charcoal working on trying to create a writing system. He's got a piece of bark, a birch bark, and he's got charcoal and he's making marks. And no, he could have walked right into the telegra blockhouse, right into the factory, and because he was a blacksmith, he would have been able to afford a lap desk, paper, pens, ink, pencils, and so office supplies. Office supplies. But now, if I remember correctly, and of course, this may be one of those areas where it is of dubious um, you know, whether this happened or didn't happen. But after his wife burns his material, all that stuff, that he then redid it on buckskin to make it more permanent. Is that I don't you don't have that? No, I've never heard of that. Okay. Uh that was in one of the one of the accounts I had. It's actually I haven't recorded the script at this time that we're doing this. Uh I've got the script, I haven't recorded it yet. I may have to pull that out. Uh I'd like to see it if you got it. So I don't remember what what source I got it from at this point. I mean, I've it was in something that I researched uh for the script, but uh, I mean, some of this stuff I've started researching 10 years ago. So um some of that stuff I don't have access to anymore, unfortunately, is the hard part. Um so and I I didn't unfortunately didn't cite it, didn't do APA citations on it at the time I was writing the original stuff. So um I'm trying to do that now with the stuff that I do uh as much as I can to to uh because I want I want to give credit to those those places, but also I want to make sure that if it's not right, then I can say, well, that's where I got it from. Well I um see I'm that's why I had that assumption in the beginning, but there again, you know, with the blockhouse there, um I mean he had access to paper and pens and ink, and so so but one of the other things is about the telco blockhouse, there's he learns to blacksmith there, and that's part of that Americanization, the industrial arts, learning to blacksmith. So he learns that there. Um I worked my way, well, I worked my way through Western Carolina University as a blacksmith. And so I had no problem ever remembering who owed me money. And Sequoia's problem, once he becomes a blacksmith, he can't remember what people owe him for his work. And so you know, the Cherokee have a spoken language, and if you gave me two apples and another person gave me two apples, I have four apples. Well, they could say that, but they didn't have any numbering system or any symbols to record, like two plus two equals four. And so what Sequoia does first is he created a numbering system. And he would take that and he would draw your face and then using his numbering system record how much money you owed him. So it was an accounting system, a way of remembering what people owed him for his work. So that's the first thing he does. Now And I've never seen that in anything. I'll show you a reproduction of his numbers. Right. And so, but I mean it when you say that, it's like, but of course he did. Yeah. You know, and and of course that was the genesis for what he actually does later. But but that's that's remarkable. I've never heard that, never seen it anywhere in any of the stuff that I've done. Well, 1825, when the nation adopts his uh writing system as the official writing system, um, somebody said, Hey, what about he created a numbering system? We want to use the Sequoia's numbering system. And like somebody else said, uh we already know the Arabic system, we'll just stick with it. So so nobody picked up on it. Um there's a gentleman out in Oklahoma. Um, basically Sequoia's numbering system goes from one through a million. So um this gentleman out in Oklahoma has created a billion and a trillion, and he takes great pleasure in writing out in Sequoia's numbering system uh the U.S. national deficit. Oh wow. So Okay. So he creates this, and so if we come back to the telco blockhouse, I c I do a program uh called the Spark. One he learns to blacksmith there at the telco block house. That leads to his numbering system. It's also at the telco block house. There's like the main gate, and on the left side of the main gate was the commander's quarters. There was a two-story with porches on the both first and second floor. Uh the commander, the captain, lived in the top is with his wife and family. They lived up above. His office was on the bottom floor. So that's on the left side of the main gate. On the right side of the main gate is the guard house. It was also the same kind of building, two-story with porches on both floors. And so you would have the guard house on that first floor. That's where your officers and NCOs would have been, where your orders would have been written out. So whether it was at the captain's side or it's the guard house side, Sequoia could have been standing on the porch, or he could have been standing out in the grass on the parade ground, looking through an open window, looking through an open door, but that's where he saw the officers, the sergeants, the NCOs writing orders. That's where the spark began. The talking leaves. We could create our own riding system. And so to me, that's why the Telco Blockhouse is such an important site for Sequoia and for the Cherokee Nation. One other major decision that was made there, reparations were given out, so you would have anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 Cherokees that would come there. And one of the things I to mention, it was Moy Toy, who was the main head man, that he wanted to get the problems. You had, I mean, this was the border between the United States and the Cherokee Nation. And you had bad people on both sides of that border that were crossing, that were murdering, raping, robbing, stealing. And Moy Toy wanted to get that stopped. And so he actually had contacted Governor Blunt, and Governor Blunt had sent representative down. There was a Captain Beard, and some of his militia attacked, killed a couple of other head men, almost killed Hanging Maw, but Governor Blunt's representative get it stopped. And the intention was to arrest Captain Beard and have him tried for murder. It never happened, but there was the intention, but it didn't happen. But what ends up happening is Hanging Maw ends up giving the land where the telco blockhouse was to Governor Blunt, who then turns it over to the United States government, and a United States military facility is built there. And the thing is, is the Indian agent's there, and so if the Cherokee have problems, they come and tell the Indian agent. The Indian agent can help work that problem out. If there's problems with the U.S. side coming into the Cherokee Nation, there again, those problems could be worked out. It was never a really large garrison. I don't think it ever got over 30 or 40 guys or soldiers. And so as I mentioned, you'd have three to six thousand Cherokees coming in for reparation. But one of the meetings that happened at the blockhouse uh with the Cherokee Nation is where they decided whether or not to let missionaries into the nation. And so, of course, we that leads to Brainerd Mission, Spring Place, missions throughout the nation. So the Cherokee Nation. So And that was, if I remember correctly, when you're talking about the the printing going on in in Georgia and Knee Choda. One of the things that they did was printed the Bible in the Cherokee language. So um okay. But this is by this is in the um uh this is in the early 1800s when this happens. Okay. Um and then of course New Echota's um by that time it's uh uh 18 uh 12 down the road, yeah. So um so and and thank you for spending the time that you spent spent on the telecom. I mean, of course that's all right here. Um at what point was it, you know, during the 1830s with the whole all the removal or what at what point did this really stop being anything around um the the to any extent the Cherokee? Okay, uh by 18 uh 19 this area was ceded to the United States government. Um there was a series of treaties that were at the Telco Blockhouse, and so all the Cherokee that were citizens, they were out of here by 1819. Um there's different stories that Sequois's mother took him down to Wheelstown or other places. So there's a you gotta weed through all these different, you know, you know, when you have oral history, there's a lot. Lot of different sometimes you don't let a good story, you know. Get in the way of the facts. So you got to go through all of that. Um but my personal and as well, based on uh Dr. King, uh Sequoia's maybe going back and forth down to Willstown um up until he's definitely moved out of here by 1819 because that was when this was seeded. Um so he's living down in Willstown. It was here in the Cherokee Overhill, he starts trying to create the writing system. It's when he gets down to Willstown in 1821, is when he finishes the writing system. And his youngest daughter, Aoka, she's a little girl about six to twelve years old. She's the only other person that can read and write using Sequoia's syllabary. Um she ends up, or excuse me, Sequoia ends up writing a speech out. And he gives this in public in a Cherokee gathering. And of course, the Cherokee are standing around going, he can't be doing that. We can't write our language down. What's he doing? And so that not knowing uh leads to gossip. Well, I think he's doing witchcraft, I think he's casting spells, I think he's doing something evil. Well, that goes around to the elders. Now, what's the big deal? Well, the Cherokees have always had laws. They had laws before the Europeans ever showed up. And uh one of those laws, you know, there were oral laws. So as a Cherokee boy and a Cherokee girl are growing up, they're taught the law, so they know what proper behavior is. One of those laws is you could be put to death for witchcraft, casting spells, doing evil. Well, when the elders hear these rumors, this gossip, they sent word to Sequoia and said, hey, you need to come before us. We need to see what you're up to. And there again, there's a multitude of stories of wit, how it happens, where it happens. Um, the one I believe is it's that uh he goes from Alabama over to Georgia to a Cherokee courthouse. They get there, when they get there, they take Lileoka off so she can't hear, see, or know what's said. Then Sequoia goes to one of the elders and says, start speaking. As the elder speaks in Cherokee, Sequoia writes down every word he says. When they get finished, they bring Lilaoka back and they give her this talking leaf, this piece of paper, and she reads word for word what the elder told Sequoia. And with that test, it proves this is not evil. This is incredible. We can put our words on paper. And according to Cherokee tradition, there were a group of warriors that they would have been tasked with executing Sequoia and Aoka if they had found them to be witches. But they come up to Sequoia after this test and said, Teach us. We want to learn to read and write in our own language. And according to tradition, they took him, uh, Sequoia took him over to some oak trees, they sat down, and he began to teach them how to read and write using his syllabary. Now, one of the things in Cherokee culture, uh, if you're an artisan, uh a woodcarver, a potter, a basket, part of doing that art is to teach that art to other people so it doesn't die, that it continues. And so those Cherokees, those warriors that learned to read and write from Sequoia went out into the community and taught other Cherokee how to read and write. And so there's been studies done, and I've seen numbers from 90% of the Cherokee in the Cherokee Nation in North Georgia could read and write using their syllabary. And if you went due east to just the Georgia counties, 17% could read and write using English. Right. Yeah, I've I've seen some crazy numbers like that. Um and and and the the amount of time that it took for the Cherokee to become that proficient was just unreal, how quickly it happened. It was like a matter of just a few years. Well, I think my personal is I think Sequoia came up with a running sentence. And there's a uh a Cherokee speaker, and there's a couple of other Cherokee speakers that are starting to work on this. They actually translated that running sentence, but there's holes because they don't know what that word is, or if it's two words, or what that is, and so there's holes in this thing. But I he would teach that running sentence to you, and so you would keep writing that sentence just like we would write Tom and Jane ran up the hill, you know, and you wrote it over and over again. Um, and so then you would actually learn the symbol that goes with the sound, and then you could start sounding things out, start reading, start writing slowly. The more you read, the more you write, the better you become at it. So and I think it what is it, the the quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog uses all the letters of the alphabet, so you would have something along those lines that would write. Yeah. So so that that yeah, that makes that makes total sense. And that would very quickly explain uh for our listeners. Um, of course, this is in the episode, but I'll explain it again here. What what he created was not an alphabet, he created a syllabary, that is, every every sound in the Cherokee language has a unique symbol that represents that sound. So that whenever if once you know all the all of the uh symbols that are associated with given sounds, you are now able to write because you can just you just convert that sound into its appropriate symbol. Whereas in in um, for example, in the English language, the sound s may be represented by S, it may be represented by C, it may be represented by two S, or um K may be represented by a K or a C or a C H, you know, a hard C H, those so so but in in the in the Cherokee language, that's not the case. One sound, one symbol. Right. So uh we can come back to this later, but Sequois creates his own symbols in his own mind by his own hand, and they don't really exist anywhere else in the world. And due to when uh uh Elias Buknott is appointed by the nation to go buy a printing press because they want to create a newspaper. And so Elias Bukknott ends up hooking up with Reverend Samuel Wooster, who happens to be the son of a printer. And even the letterpress foundry, uh Sequoia symbols are very cursive and very flowing. If they went to, they couldn't afford them to create all the thousands of type that you would need. And if you went to that expense, that type is so thin that it would flatten out and you would have to buy more type. And so between Elias Bootnott, Reverend Samuel Wooster, and the letterpress foundry, they adapt Sequoia symbols to the symbols we see today, the printing press syllabary. And to kind of illustrate that, if to us as English readers and writers, you see a W on the syllabary. Well, you take English and you throw it out the window. English has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's the Cherokee syllables, the sounds. And so that symbol that I'd mentioned is la. So Sequoia he broke it down to the sound. My favorite story, and there's a multitude of stories of how he comes up with it, but my favorite story is he's just chilling out one afternoon, he's sitting and he's listening to the bird sing. And as he hears the bird song, he hears repetitive sounds in the song. And that gets him to thinking, well, what if I break it down to the sound? So he finds 87 sounds in the Cherokee language and he gives them symbols. And so he didn't take that one more step and say, create this ziggly line, you know, squiggly line, and that's an L sound, and we create this dot and that's an A sound, and then we take those two squiggly line and a dot and put them together to create la, then he would have created an alphabet. Right. But he stopped at the syllable, at the sound. And so therefore, you know, if you know the language, you just have to learn the symbol that goes with the sound, and then you start sounding it out. And and and that's actually while there are limitations to a syllabary, of course, one of the limitations to an alphabet is that you've got to learn a whole host of combinations to understand those sounds. Um and again, there are multiple combinations for the same sound, so you never know from a spelling standpoint. With with the syllabary, you can learn, you can become you can become um literate in a very short time. Right. And and um and and it's it's always the same. You don't have you don't have you know blue million alternate spelling. I mean, Sequoia in the English language has at least three or four different spellings. Right. It's only got one in the Cherokee language. Right. So that's you know, that's one of the I mean e each language each of those approaches has pros and cons. Right. So um let's talk a little bit about um Sequoia. So so we moved forward into the 1830s. And of course, there's um a great deal of you you had mentioned there'd been the people who already had gone west. There was a group that were living in Arkansas. Sam Houston lived with them for a time, actually. Actually, no, he was uh by the time Sam Houston went out there, they were already in the Indian territory. Oh, really? Okay, so that was that was something that I read that was incorrect then. Because there's stuff I've seen on Sam that has him, you know, going to Arkansas, but it's actually, and I'm trying to remember the name of the town. Very good friend lived there, lives there. Uh, I can't think of the name of the town. Anyhow, they had moved out um over. What happens is Sequoia lives um for five years down at Wheelstown. He finishes the syllabary, he packs up, he packs up and moves to um uh the Illinois Bayou in Arkansas. And so he's living there. He's in a treaty group that comes back to Washington uh in 1828. Uh that's when his portrait is painted, and then a print is made later from that. The portrait is destroyed in a fire at the Smithsonian. Uh, but we have that print that was made from it, so we have a likeness of Sequoia. Um he's there. The U.S. government will not let them leave until they sign off on the treaty, uh, giving the land in Arkansas back to the United States government and then relocating to the Indian Territory, which will become Oklahoma. Um, and so uh finally the treaty party agrees to sign off on it, but they note that this has to be ratified by the nation. Under penalty of death, we cannot give the land away. It has to be the nation that gives it away. And so uh Sequoia works his way back. Uh there's a story that he goes by uh Colonel Gis' home. He's Gis is Nath Nathaniel's dead by now, but he visits and spends several days, which I find interesting. So his Gis' family keeps Sequoia for a couple of days. So you don't do that unless you enjoy somebody or you know, accept somebody. And I think, you know, with him creating the writing system and being world famous, that's what opened the door for him into Colonel Gis' family. Um and and and of course he's blood kin, he's drunk, but but to be very clear at the time we're talking about here, um, you know, because I I can't even speak from my own family history. When when there was uh an intermarriage between Indians and and uh the whites, a lot of times the whites completely disowned the um, you know, and disavowed any relationship as a result of that. It was just, it was, you know, it the any any kind of interracial relationship was not approved of in uh a lot of uh I'll say certain social circles. Yeah. Um so so for him to be stay there several days. That that's remarkable because I mean that that that that shows you know we we accept even you know it may be that he's part, you know, he's half Cherokee, but he's still he's still one of us. In Cherokee society, if you have a Klan that makes you jolly. So his best friend, his family, his uncle, his mother, they did not see him as a half-blood. They saw him as Cherokee, period. Right. And so that's how, you know, in his society, uh I think he could speak English, but he's interviewed when he's in Washington, D.C. by a reporter. And the the reporter writes in the interview, I asked Sequoia the question, the interpreter told him what it was, or excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, I asked Sequoia the question, he answered, and the interpreter told me what he said. Almost verbatim three or four times in that interview. So Sequoia knew how to spend it. Understand it, yeah. But I think he's a very traditional Cherokee, and so he, if it came down to making money, blacksmithing, salt my uh salt rendering, if it boiled down to business, I think he could speak English. But as a traditional Cherokee in that situation, he spoke Cherokee, period. So and you may not be able to answer this, and and there may not be an answer to it for that we have, but when he was with his family, his English family, the Gist family, um, during those few days, would there have been an interpreter there? Probably not. Interesting. So there's not a whole lot about that. It's just I've tried to see if I could find stuff from the GIST family that may have written a diary or mentioned it, but I haven't found anything. So but uh he travels back to um the Illinois Bayou in Arkansas, and this is 1828. By 1829, he's packed up and he's living over in uh the Indian Territory, and um he lives there, I think, uh 14 years, 10, 15 before he heads off towards uh Mexico. Um so that group, there's about three to four thousand Cherokee that have packed up as early as like eighteen teens have packed up and started going to Arkansas to that land the U.S. had given them. Then the U.S. wants it back, and so that group, that three or four thousand Cherokee, then end up in the Indian territory. And it's like Talisaw? It's around Telequah, which is Telico Plains. It's no Telekaw. I mean in Oklahoma, in the yeah, they they call it Telico Plains out there? Well, it's called Telequah. Okay. Which translates Telico Plains. Okay, gotcha. And so I I was just thinking Talisaw was uh um where the like the birth where his cabin is now or something like that. It's uh always Salasaur. Salisaw, but not Talisaw, Salisa. Salisaw. And um, yeah, that's where his home place cabin is out there. Um and so he's that group's already there by 1829. And so they're almost they're out in the Indian territory almost 10 years before the force removal happens in 1838-39. And so when the when the Trail Tears happens, they're the new settlers, whereas Sequoia and those out there were the old settlers. They kind of have two different political views, and so you end up having a kind of a civil war that breaks out in 1840 uh between the old settlers and the new settlers, and um and that kind of carries on uh into the 1900s. Um the I remember when I first took this job and uh we gotten a subscription to the uh the Cherokee Phoenix out in Oklahoma, um the last Cherokee Marshal had just retired that had been at this um standoff at the Cherokee uh Nation Courthouse. So he was retiring, and I remembered that it happened like in 81, 1981, and I remembered that and I'm like, wow, this is kind of cool. So I remembered that happening, and then now the the U.S. Marshall's retiring, right? So, so or the excuse me, Cherokee Marshal, well, not a U.S. Marshal, it was Cherokee Marshal. And and during that time that we're talking about here with the um with the forced migr forced migration, with the um unrest between the two political factions, the old and the new, if I have read correctly and I'm finding a lot of what I thought I knew, I don't, obviously. So so I mean that's if if that's not come out in the course of this conversation, um then you've missed something. But um he he is something of an elder statesman during this time. Right. And I think uh by this time, Sequoia is he's continuing to teach. Um he had uh took over a salt rendering uh process of salt, so he would have been fairly wealthy, well off. Um uh and he he's spending a lot of his time uh trying to maintain the peace between the old settlers and the new settlers. Uh you'll come across places where they call him Chief Sequoia. He was never a chief, he was never head man, he was never, but he was involved in uh in nation politics. And so um and as you've alluded to, I don't think we ever really called it out specifically, but he actually even went to Washington. Right. That was uh 1828. Right. So as a as as as something of a delegate or a a representative of the Cherokee people. Um one of the things that we haven't talked about that we I think we kind of skipped over, um he was recognized um for his his um his syllabary, the the the innovation of the syllabary by the Cherokee people. They gave him a medallion. Right. Uh I haven't read on that in a while. It's it's kind of it's one of those things that you get into telling the story and it can last forever because they actually make the medallion, but he's already gotten out to Arkansas. And so it's I'm trying to remember, they ended up getting somebody to bring the medallion finally to him, and it's like um I'm thinking it's he doesn't get the medallion until the 1830s. And so, you know, he creates the writing system and presents it in 1821. The printing press, uh, they start looking, you know, they adopted his official writing system in 1825. The printing press is by 1827, and so they some in there is where they kind of do the medallion. Um and then it finally, they finally get it to him, I think, in the 1830s. Okay. So well, the interesting thing, if if I'm remembering correctly, correct me if I'm wrong on this, um, and I know you will. Um one side was in the Cherokee language, the other side was in English, is what I've read. I can't see it right now. We have kind of we have two replicas in the museum. Right. So we'll look at that. If if if what I've read is correct, one side it's in Cherokee language, it refers to him as Sequoya. Um and all and then on the other side it's George Gist uh in English. I've honestly I can't, it's been so long since I sat and looked at it, and it's in my mind. So we'll we'll we'll we'll definitely look at that in a in a in a in a little bit. Um but anyway, he's recognized for this. He has this medallion. Um is it correct that he still has this with him when he goes to Mexico and he's buried with him? I would imagine yes. Okay. So and a lot of people that we've had this discussion with, um, you know, we we believe it's with him. And he did keep journals, and those were probably with him. Um one of the things I used to kind of you know kind of put in the minds of is you know, maybe those journals are in a trunk up in somebody's attic and they have no clue what it is. Right. And so, you know, maybe they might come to light and they would answer a lot of questions that we have about Sequoia. So um we've mentioned a couple of times uh about him going to Mexico. Why? Well, after the removal happens and Chief Ross gets out uh and the nation is together. Um uh Chief Ross remembered stories about a group of Cherokee from here in the overhill during uh the American Revolution, they just pack up and head off towards Texas, Mexico. And so um they kept runners going back and forth until they got to the Mississippi. Once they crossed over the Mississippi, um they didn't know what happened to the group. They were just headed towards Texas or Mexico. And so um uh Chief Ross wants a group to go and invite them to reunite with the nation now that they were out in the Indian territory. And so Sequoia, one of his sons, and a couple other Cherokee volunteer to go. Well, they set off, they they end up down in Mexico and they find this missing group of Cherokee, but they're happy living where they're at. They're not gonna go anywhere, they're fine. And uh so Sequoia and his son start back towards Texas. Well, on the way, as this there's a multitude of stories, right? Um, as they start back, uh Sequoia takes ill, his son finds this cave in northern Mexico, they put him in a cave, uh, the son and the others they had uh uh some horses and supplies stolen. So they leave a few supplies with Sequoia, and the son and the others go to get resupplied. While they're gone, there's a flash flood, and what little supplies Sequoia has is washed away, destroyed, and Sequoia's left with like a belt axe and a blanket. And so he writes a note to his son and he sets off into the desert. Well, the son and the others get back, they find the note, they get his tracks, they track him down, bring him back to the cave, and as this story goes, he dies, and the son buries him in a cave in northern Mexico. And it takes like the son and the others like two years to get back to the nation. And so you have another story that he gets a little better and they set out for a town in southern Texas. Well, on the way to the town of southern Texas, he dies, but they take him on in the town in southern Texas, bury him in an unmarked grave. The third story is they make it to the little town in southern Texas. He dies in the little town in southern Texas, they bury him in an unmarked grave. Of course, the son and the other Cherokee pack up and leave. The people living in the town pack up and leave if you've been to southern Texas. So they pack up and leave. The wind, the rain blows everything away, and the point of the story is we don't know where he's buried. I've seen one place where he was buried in Colorado. Uh I've seen one place, well, there was a documentary done a few years ago by a Native American production crew, which did an awesome job about doing the story. And they found two towns in Mexico that claim he's buried in unmarked graves in their towns. Um so that's how I ended my tours back a year or two when I first got here. We don't know where Sequoia is buried. Well, I was doing a tour for some Cherokee Nation citizens that were going to Cherokee, North Carolina, and two of the gentlemen took me off the side and said, Oh, we know where he's buried. We just don't want anybody else to know. And then we got to talking about it. And why I talk about this now, I mean, originally I think when they first said that, I thought, okay, these guys are pulling my leg. And but we got to talking about it, is that there's been groups out of Georgia. There's two towns in Georgia claim Sequoia lived there. And I've never found a primary source that he ever lived in Georgia. I know he went to Georgia, and I'd be at Trail Tears conferences, and gentlemen from both towns would, one of them would jump me and was like, Why don't you tell him that he lived in my town? I'm like, find me a primary source that he did. And then the other guy would come up and start on me, and I'm like, same thing. Give me a primary source that he lived in your town. And then by the time I left, the two of them were fighting that he was in my town. No, he was in my town. So, you know, where was that going? Um with the burial. Oh, so there's been groups out of Georgia, there's been groups from uh uh Tennessee, there's been groups from even Oklahoma that have wanted to go find Sequoia and bring him home. Now, this is why it when we talked first earlier, these are our grandparents, these are our ancestors. Traditional Cherokees believe if you're dead and you're buried right there, you're not there, but you do not disturb those remains. Right. Thanks to NAGPRA, the archaeologists do it totally different now. 60, you know, the 80s and back, they went in and dug everything up that went into boxes and went on to shelves, it was looked under a micro, you know, studied and tested and whatever. And so now you have to do ground penetrating radar. Well, there's burials here, there's a the structure that was over here, but there's no burials. So we can investigate that archaeolog archaeologically, but we will not dig over in this area where the burials are. We will not disturb the ancestors. And so why I believe the gentleman is that they're protecting him from being disturbed, having his remains removed. So I think that's one of the reasons there's so many stories of where he's buried, right, is to throw people off so that they can't find him and disturb his remains. Right. Well, I would think uh if it hasn't been disturbed since the time, one of the things, if it were ever found accidentally, that would tell us this is this is him, it's his grave, i is the medallion. I think the medallion is with him. I think that if if his if his son, if his son buried him, that would be there. That, I mean, if he had a special knife, um, you know, those things would be with him. And those would be things that would, you know, have been okay, you know, would would not have deteriorated with with time. I mean the journals, if the journals were buried with him would have, of course, by now been dust. Yeah. Uh but but the the silver medallion would still be a silver medallion, and you'd still be able to see it. So no, um and and and then there's kind of a little bit of an epilogue. Um in the early 1900s, the five civilized tribes who are in Oklahoma, what's now Oklahoma, it's the territory at that time, they come together and petition or are in the process of petitioning, and it it it never comes to fruition, but they try to create the state of Oklahoma, or state of uh Sequoia, rather. Um and it's it would have been in what is now Oklahoma. And I I I can't remember it's been so long since I've read about why that wouldn't happen, but I think it's uh they did create Sequoia County. So that that um that was um that was something only recently came across. I'm sure it's been known for a long time, of course, and people in in that, but but it's not well known. Um I don't think uh when we're talking about the story of Sequoia, of course, we all know about the Sequoia trees uh down the road here, Sequoia nuclear power plant, there's Sequoia schools all over the place. Um I want to say there's even uh like in Oklahoma for the school systems, there's like a Sequoia Writing Award that is given. Um so obviously he's not just part of the Cherokee culture, although he's very much a part of that culture, he's part of the larger American culture, the world culture. Yeah. Um, you know, the the story goes that um the uh botanist that was um in um You talking about California? No, no, no. Um the botanist that was in I think Vienna, Switzerland. Oh, okay. Okay, so uh that was where they were naming, giving the Latin names to all these different plants that they were finding all over the world, and whoever had sent in samples of you know the giant Sequoia tree and the cones and stuff. And so the one story, there again, we have multiple stories, is that uh the botanist that's writing all this up and giving the names gives it gives the tree calls him sequoia because of what this gigantic thing sequoia had done is create excuse me, creating a writing system being illiterate. And in all the records from 5,000 years around the world, no one person has ever been recorded of creating a writing system that was illiterate. And so because of this, uh he wanted to name this world's gigantic tree something huge, so he calls it sequoia, and he spells it different. Now, there's a book that a gentleman published that um basically argues uh that that's false, that it was actually the botanist misspelled the Latin word for cone, and that it was that it was calling it, he was naming it cone in Latin. And so uh there was a professor up at the University of Tennessee, uh, she went over a number of years ago, went over to that institute where they all that happened, the naming of the plants, and and um she was going looking for a smoking gun, like hoping that the the botanist notes had something you know penciled in off to the side. Um she didn't find any smoking gun, so we still don't know. Um so I kind of tell both stories. I tend to believe that he named him after Sequoia, the man. The giant. Yeah. So, but who knows? Okay. So we um probably at this point we're getting to the point where we probably want to wind it down, but one of the things I want to ask you, I'm gonna borrow, I'm gonna take a uh a page out of Dan Rather's notebook here. What have I not asked you that I should have asked you? Oh, goodness gracious. I think we've kind of highlighted Sequoia's life. I mean, uh in reflecting back, I I think we've pretty much hit you know the major points of Sequoia's life. I think we got it. Okay. Well, I um I I certainly thank you for this time. I mean, it's been incredibly informative for me. You know, uh I thought I knew this story fairly well, and I'm finding I don't know it as well as I thought I did. Um, but I mean it's it's you know it's fat there, there's it's it's multi-layered, of course, and and the more you peel back layers, the more you find things you didn't know previously. And and of course, as you've noted here, uh a lot of those layers sometimes are um different sourcing, different stories that may or may not be true. And when you're dealing with oral history, oh yeah you've got a lot of uh uh a lot of adding of uh or embellishing sometimes that happens there. You know, don't don't let don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. Oh yeah. That's the that's the problem with the storyteller. Right. And and so um and and it's interesting, I think, then, that you know, from the standpoint of the Cherokee people, starting in the 1820s, it's documented. You know, it's it's very similar to you know, if we look at the history of Rome. Um, you know, you look at the first, you know, we've got fairly well understood from the Republic onward, but prior to the Republic, it's a lot of oral history. And so there's a lot of there's a lot of legend, there's a lot of you know, you know, Remus and Romulus, that all of that. So uh I think that probably in a very real way there's a similarity in the story of the Cherokee people, and and and I'm gonna share this. Um won't go down this rabbit hole as part of it, we'll talk later, I'm sure, on it, but um saw something just last week on YouTube where anthropologists studying DNA linked the Cherokee with the tribes uh of the Great Lakes from a from a genealogical standpoint that evidently it was a result of a migration of part of them down to this area. Of course, uh prior to the Cherokee being here, there was a group, I think they were called the Uchis. Uh so so you know that that certainly uh is is when I saw that it was like, do I believe that? I don't know. I don't have enough information yet, but it's interesting to look at it. So I didn't know if that was something you had heard or seen or anything on that. There's uh there's legends or stories that the Cherokee and I've heard this from a couple of different people when I've been out uh in Oklahoma, and I've heard it once from someone in the Eastern Band. Um, but there's a uh the story of the Cherokee people were actually on an island and one of the headmen said that they needed to leave, and they're in boats, and it coincides with one of the islands blowing up the volcano. And I I've only heard this been years since I've heard this story. And they basically land on a finger of land, which would be the Baja Peninsula, and they travel north, and then they continue to travel um into the sun and northwards and end up with these uh what is it, five Great Lakes, they call them uh five inland seas, and that they're there for a while, and then one of the headmen says it need they need to go south, and so they get they come south. And uh from the archaeologists I've talked with, what kind of shows I think uh is it like 11-1500 years ago, there's like two distinct cultures here, and then the two in some areas are a beautiful blending of the two cultures into what becomes Cherokee, and then in other areas there's war, death, pestilence, destruction, fire, you know, and what comes out of that is the Cherokee culture. So I mean the Cherokee maintained it was the largest tribe or largest landmass parts of eight states in the east, uh east of the Mississippi. So so the archaeology kind of supports that story, and so um I wish I wish I knew it better to tell. But uh well that was just something I I mean literally for the first time I heard it last week. I haven't heard about the DNA stuff. This yeah, so I and I wish I'd saved the link because I would love to go back to it. Now I think I was in the middle of something else, and I know I was in the middle of something else and and and clicked out of it before I realized what I'd done. So Charlie, thank you so much. Yes, sir. My pleasure. I have thoroughly enjoyed this, and I I know that uh when when our listeners listen to it, they're gonna enjoy it as well. So thank you. Well, thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Yes, sir. Love talking about Sequoia. Yeah, well, it's it's it it shows, and of course, that explains why you're here. Yeah. So thank you very much. Thank you.