Ely S. Parker (Donehogawa): Civil War Hero, Ethnologist, Political Leader

After 1800, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, like most Native American tribes, faced a long struggle against destruction of their land bases, cultures, and livelihoods. These struggles also spawned revival movements, one of the most important of which was the Code of Handsome Lake. The Haudenosaunee successfully resisted removal westward for the most part, but at the same time lost very large amounts of their homelands to European immigrants. Against all odds, some Iroquois became prominent in American society, illustrated here by Donehogawa (Ely S. Parker), secretary to Ulysses S. Grant. While he was serving as a lieutenant colonel under General Grant’s command, Parker wrote the articles of surrender that General Robert E. Lee signed at Appomattox, ending the Civil War.

Parker also served as Adodaroh (Tadadaho), the chief executive of the Iroquois League, which to this day meets at Onondaga (near present-day Syracuse, New York) and coordinates national councils of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Onondagas, as well as the Tuscaroras, who joined the confederacy in the early eighteenth century. The early English colonists often called the confederacy “The Six Nations.”

Parker had planned a legal career, and passed the necessary examinations, but was denied certification because he was American Indian and therefore not a US citizen. Parker then switched to civil engineering, and also acquired considerable background in ethnology. He helped to inspire Lewis Henry Morgan’s pioneering studies of the Iroquois. Parker became an early member of the Grand Order of the Iroquois, a fraternal society established by Morgan.

Parker was also an early collector and descriptor of Haudenosaunee history and ethnography. On this intellectual road, Parker profoundly influenced the thoughts and writings of Morgan, who is widely considered the founder of modern-day anthropology as an academic field. Donehogawa was Morgan’s “advisor” (i.e., ghost-writer) for the most accurate sections in Morgan’s classic study, League of the Ho-Dé-No-Sau-Nee, or Iroquois (Rochester, 1851).

After the Civil War, Parker became the first Native American commissioner of Indian affairs after Grant was elected president. Meanwhile, his friend Morgan read and wrote extensively. Morgan’s books influenced Friedrich Engels, whose book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan— first published in 1884 in German and 1902 in English—included a description of Haudenosaunee polity, culture, and history. Engels and Karl Marx would cite the Haudenosaunee way of life as an example of utopian community in what later came to be called communism, which, evolving as it spread over large parts of Europe and Asia, declined from a utopian vision into state-controlled autocracies during most of the twentieth century.

Parker’s tenure in the Indian Bureau coincided with investigations by Congress under Senator James B. Doolittle of corruption on the frontier. The Doolittle Report received considerable publicity, finding that, in a large number of cases, Indian wars could be traced to the provocations of European Americans who had seized Native lands illegally after breaking treaty terms. Parker came into office under the aegis of a Peace Policy initiated by Congress after publicity surrounding the Doolittle Report, in an attempt to deal honestly with remaining Native American nations. However, the Indian Rings, whose members had done so much to corrupt the system and profited so handsomely from government contracts for services paid but rarely delivered, made Parker’s life miserable and his job impossible.

During Parker’s tenure as Indian commissioner, however, he helped stimulate considerable public outrage over the treatment of Indians nationwide, particularly those on the Plains who were being ruthlessly pursued as he held the position. After Parker was hounded out of office, he expressed his disgust: “They [the “Indian Rings”] made their onslaught on my poor, innocent head and made the air foul with their malicious and poisonous accusations. They were defeated, but it was no longer a pleasure to discharge patriotic duties in the face of foul slander and abuse. I gave up a thankless position to enjoy my declining years in peace and quiet.”[1]

Long before the subject came to the attention of other scholars, Parker noted the debt of the US political system to the Iroquois. In an “Address to the New-York Historical Society, May 28, 1847,” Parker noted the fascination of the US founders, including Benjamin Franklin, with the Iroquois League: “Glad were your forefathers to sit upon the thresholds of the Longhouse[;] rich did they hold themselves in getting the mere sweepings from its door.”[2]

During his later years, Parker made a large amount of money playing the stock market but was ruined when he was forced to pay the bond of another man who had defaulted. After retiring from service with the US government, Parker was appointed New York City building superintendent in 1876. He held the post until he died in 1905. Parker is buried in Buffalo, New York, in a common plot with his grandfather, Red Jacket.

The Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker (Gawasowaneh), great nephew of Ely Parker, became one of history’s leading Native Americans in anthropology and museum directorship as well as a prolific author. Born April 5, 1881, on the Cattaraugus Seneca reservation, the one-quarter-blood Parker was a distant relative of the Iroquois prophet Handsome Lake. After studying at Dickinson Seminary, Pennsylvania, Parker came to know Dr. Frederick Ward Putnam, a leading museum director, while studying at Harvard. Parker never finished his degree at Harvard, but he became a field archaeologist for Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1903. Parker also worked part-time at the American Museum of Natural History before he was appointed state archaeologist for the New York State Museum, Albany in 1906. Parker took the lead in excavating several Iroquois sites, and organized the New York State Archaeological Survey as he built the state museum into a major center for archaeological study. In 1922, he published The Archaeological History of New York.

In 1925, Arthur Caswell Parker was appointed director of the Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences, a role that he filled for almost two decades. While Parker was best known as a museum director, he also was a prolific writer with roughly 500 publications to his credit, including books, journal and magazine articles, radio scripts, and stage plays. He died on January 1, 1955, in Rochester, New York. Like his great uncle Ely S. Parker, he left an important legacy of intellectual inquiry and pathbreaking leadership.

Selected Bibliography

Armstrong, William H. Warrior in Two Camps: Ely S. Parker, Union General and Seneca Chief. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1978.

Johansen, Bruce E., ed., Native American Political Systems and the Evolution of Democracy: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).

Johansen, Bruce E., and Donald A. Grinde Jr. The Encyclopedia of Native American Biography, 280–282. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.

Parker, Arthur C. The Life of General Ely S. Parker: Last Grand Sachem of the Iroquois and General Grant’s Military Secretary. Buffalo, NY: Buffalo Historical Society, 1919.

Parker, Arthur C. Parker on the Iroquiois, ed. William N. Fenton. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968.

Parker, Arthur C. The History of The Seneca Indians [1926]. Port Washington, N.Y.: Ira J. Friedman, 1967.

Porter, Joy. To be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.