Episode Details

Ely S. Parker, born Hasanoanda on the Tonawanda Reservation in New York in 1828, grew up translating between the Seneca and the white scholars who visited his family. After three years reading law in Ellicottville, he was barred from the bar exam because Native Americans were not considered U.S. citizens. He turned to engineering, helped by lawyer Lewis Henry Morgan, whose Grand Order of the Iroquois studied Haudenosaunee culture through Parker and who helped him into Rensselaer. Parker worked on the Erie Canal and federal buildings in Galena, Illinois, where he met Ulysses S. Grant at the family leather shop.

When the war came, New York's governor refused his Seneca regiment and the Secretary of War called it a white man's war. Grant brought him in as a captain; he served at Vicksburg and became Grant's military secretary, and at Appomattox in April 1865 he wrote out the surrender documents. As Grant's Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the first Native American in the post, he led the Peace Policy until a smear campaign by William Welsh led to his 1871 resignation. He lost his fortune in the Panic of 1873 and died in Connecticut in 1895.

• Parker held the Seneca title Keeper of the Western Door, a role tied to diplomacy with outsiders.
• Morgan dedicated his book on the Iroquois League to Parker.
• At Appomattox, Lee remarked on seeing one real American in the room, and Parker replied that they were all Americans.
• A House committee cleared him of fraud, but Congress then stripped his office of budget control.
• He appears on the 2022 Sacagawea dollar, and a New York appellate court admitted him to the bar posthumously in November 2025.