American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION In 1891, a shorthand version of the Cherokee syllabary was introduced which permitted rapid, accurate writing of the Cherokee language. This shorthand system, composed of various regular combinations of short lines and dots, was developed by William Eubanks (1841-1921), a Cherokee. Eubanks’s shorthand is strikingly similar to Pitman shorthand, a system then at the height of its popularity in America. The success of Cherokee shorthand was not great, yet it may have had some impact on the development of the equally unusual dot-notation variant of the Sac and Fox syllabary, as suggested by similar styles of construction. Biographical information on William Eubanks, or Unenudi, is sketchy. It is recorded that he was born in 1841 in the Illinois district of the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory. During the Civil War, he fought for the Confederacy as a captain under the command of General Stand Watie4 and afterwards found employment translating between English and Cherokee for The Cherokee Advocate, the leading newspaper of the Cherokee Nation. In 1892, the year following introduction of his shorthand system, he translated the Constitution and Laws of the Cherokee Nation into the Cherokee language. He is reported to have been an accomplished amateur astronomer and was active in researching what he believed to be historical links between the Cherokee, Hebrew, Egyptian, Greek, and Sanskrit languages.