Sequoyah is one of the few Native Americans in U.S. history to not have his contributions to society erased.

He is commemorated by, among other things, the name of sequoia trees, as well as the more dubious honor of having a country club named after him. The accomplishment that gained him these rewards? Nothing less than inventing a writing system, the Cherokee syllabary, from scratch—visible in the portrait on the tablet he is holding. Sequoyah is one of the few people known in recorded history to have individually created an entire orthography, and the only person to have done so while being illiterate beforehand.

He was born sometime in the 1760s in Tennessee, near the former capital of the Cherokee Nation, to a Cherokee woman and an absent half-white trader. Some form of physical disability (it is unclear whether it was as a result of an accident or was congenital) kept him from becoming a warrior or hunter, and as a result he was primarily a trader and craftsman. His dealings with European settlers in this context, as well as his experiences in the War of 1812, introduced him to the English writing system. He realized that the written language was a huge piece of cultural technology that gave Europeans a considerable advantage, and decided that the Cherokee Nation needed a similar system.

The process of developing the syllabary was beset with troubles. His wife burned many of his early notes, encompassing about ten years of work, under the impression that it was sorcery, and Sequoyah himself was put on trial for witchcraft by his tribe leader. He proved that it was a functional writing system by sending messages to his young daughter, who was the only person who had been open to learning it. Once Sequoyah’s work was vindicated, he was asked to teach it widely, and quickly the literacy rate of the Cherokee rose well above that of the surrounding white settler communities. Some linguists believe that this is because the syllabary is more efficiently designed than the Latin alphabet, with all of its weird spellings and exceptions that learners have to memorize. With the Cherokee syllabary, every potential syllable in the spoken language is simply represented by one of eighty-six letters. It’s considerably more logical than having to remember rules like “i before e except before c.” (Another modern, well-known example of a syllabary is the Japanese writing system.)

The General Council of the Cherokee Nation awarded Sequoyah a silver medal with an inscription in English and Cherokee to commemorate his invention, which he is wearing in the portrait. Despite the success and import of the writing system, it didn’t dissuade American imperialism, and he was one of the people on the forced migration known as Trail of Tears that Andrew Jackson implemented. Sequoyah survived the relocation, but died two decades later. The Cherokee syllabary lived on, and is still in use today by the Cherokee Nation, and was the inspiration for multiple other writing systems based on indigenous languages.

Although Sequoyah made certain that American written history expanded to include him and his people, his legacy was threatened not much later. A fire in Smithsonian Castle (the early stages of the Smithsonian Museum complex) in 1865 burned the original painting, as well as many other portraits of prominent Native American delegates by Charles Bird King. It was a cold winter, and workers in the portrait gallery installed a wood-burning stove incorrectly, leaving embers in the ducts which later caught fire and destroyed the gallery along with most of the upper stories of the building. It’s the kind of story that really drives home an appreciation for automated central heating.