It was not without considerable difficulty that Sequoyah induced a few skeptical and superstitious Cherokees to learn his alphabet after he had completed it in 1811. These few who were the first to try it out did so merely to expose the delusions of the alphabet-maker, but as the lesson progressed, though they had come to scoff, they began to admire until, finally, when the lesson was finished they were convinced that the seemingly impossible had been achieved—that the Cherokees could “talk on paper” like the whites. This time Sequoyah’s rise to fame was meteoric. News of his invention spread like wildfire throughout the tribe, and, at a public test made before the assembled Houses of the Cherokee Congress, his alphabet was officially adopted as the means of elevating the tribe. Sequoyah had become the Cadmus[7] of his nation. Then occurred a spectacle without a parallel among primitive people; that of gray-bearded savages studying in groups with unfettered zeal in order to become the equal of the white man in knowledge. Almost overnight the entire nation became an academy. To be able to read and write became a craze with the Cherokees. Never was Plato’s fine phrase of a people being “possessed and maddened with a passion for knowledge” better exemplified. Mass meetings in abundance were held and the new method of “talking on paper” was taught virtually wholesale. It was even common to see groups teaching each other in cabins and along the roadside. “Within a few months thousands of formerly illiterate savages, without the aid of schools or the expense of time or money, could read and write.” In fact, by the time the Monroe Doctrine was promulgated in 1813, reading and writing had become so general among the Cherokees that “they carried on a correspondence by letter between different parts of the nation and were in the habit of making receipts and giving promissory notes in affairs of trade. Directions were even inscribed on trees indicating the different roads.” This is manifest evidence of the ease with which Sequoyah’s syllabary was learned. “In my own observation,” states Phillips, “Indian children will take one or two years to master the English printed and written language, but in a few days can read and write in Cherokee. They do the latter, in fact, as soon as they learn to shape letters. As soon as they master the alphabet they have got rid of all the perplexing questions that puzzle the brains of our children. It is not too much to say that a child will learn in a month by the same effort as thoroughly in the language of Sequoyah that which in ours consumes the time of our children for at least two years.”