By the beginning of the 19th century, many Cherokee had adopted many white ways of living, building American-type farms, wearing American-style clothes, developing American-style systems of government, and buying African slaves to work on plantations, while missionaries who settled in the Cherokee Nation in 1803 promoted Christianity as many Cherokee pursued these adaptations to show the white community that they would be compatible neighbors who shared similar ways of living and believing. One of the most remarkable developments was the creation of a written language. In 1809, Sequoyah, known in English as George Gist, began thinking about the way whites communicated by writing and soon started work on a method of writing the Cherokee language. In 1821, he completed his syllabary and submitted it to the leading men of the Nation, and thousands learned it within months. Missionaries translated the Bible into Cherokee in 1825, and in 1828 the Nation began publishing a bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. Never before, or since, in the history of the world had one man, not literate in any language, perfected a system for reading and writing language.