The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 42, July 1938 - April, 1939 Page: 291

Book Notes and Acknowledgments

BOOK NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With the publication of Jean Delanglez, The Journal of Jean
Cavelier (Chicago, 1938, pp. 179, $2.50) the Institute of Jesuit
History has produced its second book. Delanglez, by the way, was
also the author of the first, Some La Salle Journeys. The book
is really a translation and annotation of the journal which La
Salle's brother, the abbe Jean Cavelier, kept of La Salle's expe-
dition to rTIexas and of his own overland journey back to Canada.
This journal, or chronicle of La Salle's expedition, was preceded
by those of Father Anastasius Douay and of Henri Joutel and
covers the years 1684 to 1688. The book opens with a critical and
interesting study of Jean Cavelier. The journal proper is printed
in both French and English on pages facing one another and
fills forty translated pages. There are thirty-two pages of valu-
able editorial notes, a bibliography of eight pages, and a good
index of seven pages. The book will find its place in the Texana
of the period.
R. L. B.
Sequoyah, by Grant Foreman (University of Oklahoma Press),
is one of the most interesting works from the pen of this well-
known writer on topics dealing with the American Southwest.
The story of Sequoyah, an illiterate Cherokee Indian who con-
ceived and perfected in its entirety the alphabet or syllabary of
his language, is based largely on newly discovered source mate-
rials. Sequoyah realized the magic of writing as employed by
the white man and set about to give the Indian a "talking leaf."
It was a slow, laborious task, but was so well accomplished by this
untutored Cherokee that many of his people mastered the entire
syllabary of eighty-six characters within a few days. In Fore-
man's words, "Heroic and pathetic was the figure of this man
groping in the dark for something he had never seen; an objective
only vaguely conceived, but something he very definitely believed
he could bring into being for the great good of his people." (p. 73)
The beautiful "Ode to Sequoyah," by the Creek Indian poet, Alex
Posey, is given at the conclusion of the volume. Sequoyah lists at

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