But fate had willed it otherwise. The Cherokees had reached the zenith of their advance. Gold was discovered in their domain in 1829. This event led to dishonorable deeds of the white man and gave the annals of American-Indian history another black page. In their rapacity, the border ruffians of Georgia violated the sacredness of treaties and with a vicious disregard for the rights of their legal owners, appropriated by violence the rich lands of the Cherokees. Gradually all the fine achievements of these splendid savages melted into thin air. When the United States Supreme Court decreed that the misappropriated Cherokee lands be returned to their rightful owners, President Jackson, a frontiersman and an Indian hater, defied its authority with his famous rebuke, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” Finally, after nearly nine years of agitation and disquietude, negotiations with the Government ended in the Ridge Treaty, an infamous concoction which was brazenly sustained. By its means the remaining fragment of what was once the Cherokee Nation were exiled at the point of the bayonet to a country beyond the Mississippi. Unfortunately, the new home allotted to the Cherokees proved to be inhospitable. The land was claimed by the Osage as their ancestral hunting ground, and the already impoverished Cherokees had to hold it by force of arms. Nor were the Osage the sole authors of their woes. The Arkansas band resented this intrusion of their eastern brethren. Fratricidal war broke out and the tribe became further wasted. Warred on from without, and torn by strife within, the Cherokees, as a people, were in danger of extinction. Foreseeing this end, Sequoyah and others attempted to avert it. As President of the Council of the Arkansas band, he was largely instrumental in effecting a reunion which put an end to strife and declared the Eastern and Western Cherokee “one body politic under the style and title of the Cherokee Nation.” Sequoyah was by this time in his eighty-second year and well merited the boon of rest and relaxation. Lest he leave no margin to his life and crowd it to the very end in his devotion to his people, he retired from active political life. But his forceful mind denied his crippled and aged body the rest it deserved. Speculative ideas possessed him and he formulated a theory that he could devise a universal alphabet for the red man. Under the dominion of this newer and deeper ambition he came to feel that he had yet a mission to perform. Though his people had suffered an excess of calamity, his spirit was unbroken. Having sounded the depths of human disappointment, he rose again, full of courage and faith in the salvation of his race. Not in the habit of taking the advice of others and not having lost one jot of his most distinguishing characteristic—intensity of purpose—he determined to make an investigation among the remote tribes of the West in search of some common element of speech.