My father, Sequoyah, was one of the first Cherokees to become a blacksmith. No one taught him that trade. He learned it the way we have always learned things—by watching. He went to the blacksmith shops of white men and sat outside, carefully observing them at their work. He saw how they used the bellows to make the fire hot enough to melt iron. He saw how their forges were constructed, how they used buckets of water to cool the red-hot metal. Then, when he knew enough, he began to do his own blacksmithing. Soon everyone was coming to him to get their horses shod or to have things made of iron.

Even before my father became a blacksmith, he knew a great deal about working with metals. When he was a young man he began melting down silver coins to make the sort of jewelry that is still much in demand among our people. I cannot count how many times I have seen Tsalagi men and women wearing silver nose rings or earrings or armlets or bracelets that bear the stamp GEORGE GUESS on them.

Those words of his name were the only words in English he knew. His friend, Charles Hicks, the son of a Tsalagi woman and a Scots trader, had been educated by the missionaries. Charles Hicks was the one who showed my father how to make the shapes that spelled out his English name. It was a smart way to advertise. Anyone who saw one of those beautiful objects made of silver would read his name and know who made it. They would know where to go if they wished to buy something like it. If my father had just kept at his silversmithing he might have been the most prosperous man in Willstown—had it not been for whiskey.

Because my father often did blacksmith work for white men, he had easy access to hard drink. He shared that whiskey with Tsalagi friends who liked strong drink as much as he did. They all were amused by the stories he would tell and the songs he would sing while he was drinking. But he was often too drunk to work.

I remember those days when I was little. I remember the smell of the whiskey everywhere in our cabin. That same smell hung heavy on my father’s breath as I sat on his lap while he told stories.

I also remember the men who drank with him, some of whom were not as gentle as my father when the whiskey was thicker in their veins than their Tsalagi blood.

“Stay away from those men,” my mother told me. And I did as she said.

Some nights when the men were drinking, my mother and I would not even sleep in our own house, but would take our blankets outside and sleep under the arbor out back. Some nights even, we would wake with snow on our blankets and frost in our hair.