What Ely Samuel Parker was able to accomplish would have been remarkable for any man. But that Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca, accomplished all he did during a period of outright hatred against Native Americans is nothing short of incredible. And if his amazing life could be summed up in one single moment, that moment came on a cloudy April afternoon at the very end of the Civil War.
Ely Parker---he would always say his first name rhymed with “freely”---was born in 1828 at Indian Falls, which was then within the Tonawanda Seneca Reservation. He was the sixth of seven siblings whose father was a Baptist minister, a relative of Red Jacket and a chief who had fought for the Americans in the War of 1812, and whose mother was a granddaughter of the successor to the great spiritual leader Handsome Lake.
Parker, whose Seneca name was Hasanoanda (Reader), grew up fully bilingual, fluent in both Seneca and English, and went on to successfully straddle both worlds. He attended Yates Academy in Orleans County and Cayuga Academy in Aurora, Ont., excelling so much in his studies that tribal leaders chose him to represent the Senecas in negotiations with the U.S. government… at one point he dined with President James K. Polk. Parker went on to study law while working at a firm in Ellicottville. After three years he applied to take the state bar exam… but was denied because, like all Indigenous people at the time, he was not a U.S. citizen. (That snub was corrected in 2025, when the New York State Bar Association finally admitted Parker, posthumously, to the bar.)
Parker turned to engineering and attended R.P.I. in Troy in the early 1850s. That got him a job as a surveyor on the Erie Canal and as city engineer for Rochester. Around that time he was made Grand Sachem of the Six Nations and was given the name Donehogawa (Keeper of the Western Door of the Longhouse), and, soon after, he was named a captain in the New York State Militia. In 1857 the federal government put him in charge of lighthouse construction for Lakes Erie, Huron, Michigan and Superior. In 1860 while on assignment for the U.S. Treasury Department in Galena, Ill., he met and befriended Ulysses S. Grant, then a retired army officer.
When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Parker tried to join the Union forces. But each time he tried, he was rebuffed because he was an Indian. In mid-1861, he offered to raise a New York regiment of Haudenosaunee volunteers, but the governor refused. He tried to join the Union Army as an engineer, but again he was turned away. In his memoirs, Parker remembers U.S. Secretary of State William Seward telling him that “the struggle in which I wished to assist, was an affair between white men and one in which the Indian was not called on to act. The fight must be made and settled by the white men alone.”
Frustrated, Parker asked Grant for an appointment as a military engineer. Grant, who’d joined the army at the outbreak of war and rose to the rank of major general, came through. In 1863, he obtained for Parker an appointment as a captain of engineers. Later that year, Parker served with Grant as chief engineer for the Union victory at the Siege of Vicksburg. After Grant was promoted to commander of all Union forces in March 1964, Parker followed and served as Grant’s aide-de-camp for the rest of the war.
That is how Col. Ely Parker came to be present at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, helping to draft the surrender papers that Robert E. Lee would sign that day. Lee was introduced to each officer, but when Lee was introduced to Parker, he looked at him, according to another Union officer who was present,in “evident surprise”.
Then Lee held out his hand and said, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker held out his in response and said, simply, “We are all Americans.”
Parker went on to other prominent positions. In 1869, Grant, by then president, named Parker the first-ever Indigenous Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. At the time, the bureau was riddled with fraud and an instrument of injustice against the tribes, especially of the West. Parker had already needed to reconcile fighting for the Union Army after President Lincoln ordered the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Minnesota after rushed military tribunals in 1862, for their part in the U.S.-Dakota War (still the largest mass execution in American history). Now Parker tried to act as a bridge between the native people fighting for their way of life and the relentless advance of an America driven by Manifest Destiny.
Parker’s own musings on the subject suggested a certain empathy with other native peoples, but ultimately it seems clear where he himself stood. Once he wondered “whether it has been well that I have sought civilization with its bothersome concomitants and whether it would not be better even now to return to the darkness and most sacred wilds (if any such can be found) of our country and there to vegetate and expire silently, happily, and forgotten as do the birds of the air and the beasts of the field?... The thought is a happy one, but perhaps impracticable."
During his tenure as commissioner, Parker fired corrupt agents and cut red tape to expedite the delivery of supplies to Western tribes. He was promptly accused of mismanaging funds, a charge for which he was exonerated. But the damage was done, and he resigned the post after two years.
Parker moved on to private life with his wife and daughter, making and losing a fortune on Wall Street. His last post was as a clerk for the NYPD. He died in 1895, and in 1897, his body was moved to its final resting place at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, next to his ancestor Red Jacket.
Today, Parker is something of a divisive figure. Though he is revered by many in both the Haudenosaunee and white worlds, some in the Six Nations are ambivalent toward him. According to the Tuscarora historian Rick Hill, many across the Six Nations “didn't have much good to say about him. He was considered kind of a sell-out. That he turned his back on his people and left.”
But, Hill concludes, Ely Parker deserves our respect. “He believed in education,” he wrote. “He was an engineer. Back then, many of our people wanted to be recognized. I think Parker was trying to say, hey, we're just as good as you in all of these steps. I can become an officer in the Civil War, I can do all these things just as well as the white man. And in many ways, that's the motivation in my life, is to prove that we can do things. So people will respect our ability to get things done. And once they respect our ability to get things done, maybe then they'll start looking at our personalities and begin to respect us for who we are rather than what we represent.”
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Cast (in order of appearance):
Col. Ely S. Parker: Lee Redeye
Gen. Ulysses S. Grant: Karl-Eric Reif
Gen. Robert E. Lee: Mike Dugan
Narrator: Susan Banks
Sound recording: Brandon Nightingale
Sound editing: Micheal Peters
Piano theme: Excerpt from “Buffalo City Guards Parade March,” by Francis Johnson (1839)
Performed by Aaron Dai
Produced by the Niagara Frontier Heritage Project
Associate producer: Karl-Eric Reif
Webpage written by Jeff Z. Klein (Niagara Frontier Heritage Project)
Special thanks to:
Kathryn Larsen, vice president, content distribution, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
S.J. Velasquez, director of audio strategy, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Jerry Urban, senior radio broadcast engineer
Councilmember Mitch Nowakowski and the Buffalo Common Council for their generous support