Sequoyah never attended school, could not read English, lived with a disabling leg condition, and was mocked by neighbors for failing at farm work. Within about a decade he had engineered an original writing system that carried the Cherokee Nation from an oral society to widespread literacy. This episode traces his life from Tuskegee in the 1770s through struggles with alcohol, his reinvention as a self-taught silversmith and blacksmith, and his fascination with the talking leaves of European settlers.

We follow his twelve years of obsessive work, including the early logographic attempt that failed, his wife burning his materials, and the breakthrough of breaking Cherokee into 85 syllables, borrowing letter shapes from an English Bible he could not read. Then comes the dramatic proof: a witchcraft trial where his six-year-old daughter Ayoka ...