The inventor, aptly called the Cadmus of his race, was a mixed-blood known among his own people as Sikwâ'yi (Sequoya) and among the whites as George Gist, or less correctly Guest or Guess. As is usually the case in Indian biography much uncertainty exists in regard to his parentage and early life. Authorities generally agree that his father was a white man, who drifted into the Cherokee Nation some years before the Revolution and formed a temporary alliance with a Cherokee girl of mixed blood, who thus became the mother of the future teacher. A writer in the Cherokee Phoenix, in 1828, says that only his paternal grandfather was a white man. [262] McKenney and Hall say that his father was a white man named Gist. [263] Phillips asserts that his father was George Gist, an unlicensed German trader from Georgia, who came into the Cherokee Nation in 1768. [264] By a Kentucky family it is claimed that Sequoya's father was Nathaniel Gist, son of the scout who accompanied Washington on his memorable excursion to the Ohio. As the story goes, Nathaniel Gist was captured by the Cherokee at Braddock's defeat (1755) and remained a prisoner with them for six years, during which time he became the father of Sequoya. On his return to civilization he married a white woman in Virginia, by whom he had other children, and afterward removed to Kentucky, where Sequoya, then a Baptist preacher, frequently visited him and was always recognized by the family as his son. [265] Aside from the fact that the Cherokee acted as allies of the English during the war in which Braddock's defeat occurred, and that Sequoya, so far from being a preacher, was not even a Christian, the story contains other elements of improbability and appears to be one of those genealogical myths built upon a chance similarity of name. On the other hand, it is certain that Sequoya was born before the date that Phillips allows. On his mother's side he was of good family in the tribe, his uncle being a chief in Echota. [266] According to personal information of James Wafford, who knew him well, being his second cousin, Sequoya was probably born about the year 1760, and lived as a boy with his mother at Tuskegee town in Tennessee, just outside of old Fort Loudon. It is quite possible that his white father may have been a soldier of the garrison, one of those lovers for whom the Cherokee women risked their lives during the siege. [267] What became of the father is not known, but the mother lived alone with her son.