Into the West with Washington:
The Rev. David Jones talks about Washington's early guide Christopher Gist and a famous Cherokee relative, Sequoyah
Left: The Rev. David Jones (right) and his brother, Jay, are descendants of Christopher Gist.
During his years as the archdeacon of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, the Rev. David Jones could view the gravestones of Pittsburgh's earliest settlers outside his office at Trinity Cathedral downtown. "I'd sit and think what must it have been like in those days," he recalls. For answers he turned to his father, who had chronicled the family's most famous ancestor from that era: Christopher Gist.
Gist (1705-1759) was the intrepid Ohio Company surveyor who introduced George Washington to Western Pennsylvania. He was born into one of Maryland's wealthiest families, which had arrived with Lord Baltimore in 1679 to found the English colony. After two extensive surveying trips west - the second with his son Nathaniel - Gist led a group of settlers to the area between the Youghiogheny and Monongahela rivers near Uniontown in 1752. The pioneers were sent west by the Ohio Company, a group of sharp-eyed British and Virginian land speculators. Gist met Washington in Maryland at Will's Creek, today's Cumberland, to guide the young Virginia militia officer on his 1753 journey north. Washington's assignment was to deliver a rebuke to the French at Fort LeBoeuf, now Waterford, Pa., as the French and Indian War unfolded. The journey was cold and perilous. At one point, Washington dodged a bullet fired by an Indian near present-day Evans City, Butler County. On their return south, they forded the Allegheny in bitter December weather. Washington was thrown into the icy waters near what is now the Washington Crossing Bridge (40th Street).
"Before we were half way over, we were jammed in the ice in such a manner that we expected every minute to perish," Washington wrote in his journal. "I put out my setting pole to stop the raft, and the rapidity of the stream jerked me out into 10 feet of water, but I saved myself by catching hold of one of the raft logs." The party landed safely, and Gist and Washington forged a historic bond.
Washington wrote admiringly that Gist "has extensive dealings with the Indians, is in great esteem among them, well acquainted with their manners and customs, is indefatigable, and patient, most excellent qualities indeed where Indians are concerned. And for his capacity, honesty, and zeal I dare venture to engage."
"The family story always went that if it hadn't been for Gist, there would have been no president," says Jones, 59, who grew up in Mount Lebanon. He is Gist's great-great-great-great-great grandson. Now retired and living in Evanston, Ill., Jones had served at churches in Somerset, Ross Township and Penn Hills before working at Trinity. His ancestor, while not ordained, also presided over church services: Gist held the first Christmas service west of the mountains in 1751.
Left: This painting by Alonzo Chappel shows a young George Washington (right) and Christopher Gist crossing the icy Allegheny River in 1753.
Later, Gist served as a guide for the disastrous expedition led by Gen. Edward Braddock in 1755 to capture Fort Duquesne. Nathaniel Gist fought alongside Washington at the Battle of the Monongahela in the present town of Braddock, where the general was mortally wounded. "Right near Kennywood," Jones points out.
Engaged by the British to recruit Cherokees from the South as allies, Gist, fluent in several Native American tongues, convinced hundreds of them to travel north.
He succeeded. Many camped at Fort Loudon, Fulton County, in the summer of 1758 with the Forbes Expedition, which chased the French from the Point that November. The Gist connection to the Cherokee also would have far-reaching results.
When Gist died of smallpox in 1759, his family turned south. Nathaniel Gist had a son with a Cherokee woman named Wut-teh in Tennessee. The child's English name was George Gist, but he is best known as Sequoyah (1776-1843), a famous Cherokee leader and the inventor of its written language. Though he did not speak English, he was fascinated with the idea of a written alphabet. The system he developed in 1821 allowed the tribe to publish newspapers and books, and later he represented the western tribes in Washington, D.C. The Sequoia tree is named for him.
The late Howard Gist Jones, the Rev. David Jones' father, a descendant of Sarah Gist, a daughter of Nathaniel Gist and his wife, Judith Cary Bell, traced the family history through several more distinguished generations. Sarah married Jesse Bledsoe, a U.S. senator from Kentucky; her sister married Nathaniel Hart, brother-in-law of Henry Clay. Descendant B. Gratz Brown was the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1872.
David Jones credits his father, who died in 2006, with carefully preserving the family records. "He was very interested in genealogy even in the pre-Internet age, when it was more time-consuming," he says. And he is proud that the family's 18th-century names live on: A 42-year-old nephew in Dayton bears the name Christopher Gist Jones.
Footnote: On the skylight above Carnegie Museum of Art's Hall of Sculpture, you can see George Gist's syllabary, or alphabet, in "Tongue of the Cherokee," a work completed in 1988 by Lothar Baumgarten. Now temporarily covered for the Carnegie International, it will be unveiled again in January 2009.