Jeff Z. Klein (Niagara Frontier Heritage Project)

Charles Burchfield, 28, was already an accomplished watercolorist when he moved to Buffalo from Salem, Ohio, in November 1921 to take a job as a designer at the M.H. Birge & Sons wallpaper company. But in 1925, he really found his home.

Father Nelson Baker — the “padre of the poor,” the man who built the Our Lady of Victory complex in Lackawanna into an astonishing city of charity that featured an orphanage, a boys’ protectory, a home for unwed mothers and their infants, a hospital, a grade school and high school, a nurses’ home, a farm to help feed the hungry, a soup kitchen that served more 450,000 meals during the first three years of the Great Depression, and finally the great basilica that has become a national shrine and pilgrimage site.

Everywhere you go in North America these days, it seems, you see the Six Nations flag. You’d think it’s been flying forever. But in fact, it is less than 40 years old.

Chauncey Olcott, a son of Buffalo and Lockport, did not set foot in the Emerald Isle until he was 40 years old.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sport of running was dominated by Indigenous men. Such famous runners as Tom Longboat (Onondaga), Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox), Louis Tewanima (Hopi), Deerfoot-Bad Meat (Siksika), and Ellison Brown (Naragansett) were all winners of Olympic gold, the Boston Marathon, and other prestigious races of the era. But the first among them was a Seneca from the Cattaraugus Territory… the original Deerfoot.

William Wells Brown took part in a 1835 brawl in which black Buffalonians, he said, “assembled to protect a brother slave and his wife and child from being dragged back into slavery, which is far worse than death itself.”

Robert Creeley (1926-2005), one of the most important American postmodern poets of his era, belongs to the world. But he also was — and continues to be — a Buffalo treasure.

Mary Elizabeth Johnson Lord was a prominent Buffalo matron. “Kind to all animals herself, it pained her to see them abused,” as one local newspaper put it. Now, more than a century and a half later, if they could, they’d still be thanking her.

It’s right there on Fredonia’s village seal: a lamp with five small flames and the words “First gas well”---a shorthand way of laying claim to the proud distinction of being the first place anywhere in the world to be lighted by natural gas.

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.