Ely Parker: Iroquois Chief and Union Officer

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Parker’s selection to draft the surrender papers at Appomattox was a just recognition of his exquisite penmanship and skill with the English language. After joining Grant’s staff, he took care of most of the general’s personal papers. Once Grant had drafted each day’s orders and correspondence (pushing the papers off the table and onto the floor of the tent as he wrote, to the amazement of his visitors), he would sort them all into a tidy pile and hand them to Parker, who would then make copies as necessary. He typically signed his general’s orders ‘By Command of Lieut. Gen. Grant, E.S. Parker, Asst. Adj’t Gen’l,’ in a clear, elegant hand much beloved by his superiors.

The drafting of the articles of surrender, literally Parker’s last act in the war, was unquestionably the crowning moment of his military career, and one of the highlights of his life as well. Certainly it provided him with much currency (social and otherwise) later in life. However, the U.S. military wasn’t finished with Parker, or he with it. He stayed on as a member of Grant’s staff until 1869, eventually rising to the rank of brigadier general. During his postwar service, Parker occasionally toured military facilities in the occupied South, making recommendations on where he thought the Army could safely cut costs, close facilities and muster out its troops.

Most of Parker’s time, however, was spent as an emissary to Indian tribes in the West. He traveled constantly, especially in Oklahoma and on the Plains, settling differences resulting both from the turbulence of the war and from the nation’s notoriously corrupt Indian policy. He was popular among other Indians, who were gratified that the politicians in Washington would send another Indian to treat with them. Parker’s experiences out West prompted him to submit to the government a four-point plan for establishing a permanent peace with the native Americans, one in which all dealings would be fair and aboveboard. His plan was well received by his superiors, and much of it consequently was adopted as national policy. Ironically, it would later come back to haunt him.

In 1867, Parker finally married. His bride was a young Washington socialite, Minnie Orton Sackett. She was white, the stepdaughter of Lt. Col. William Sackett, a New York Volunteer killed at Trevilian Station in June 1864. They were married on Christmas Eve; Grant stood as best man and gave the bride away in the absence of her father. The mixed marriage caused something of a stir in Washington society, however, and the couple was maltreated on more than one occasion by less-enlightened contemporaries.

The presidential election of 1868 brought an abrupt change in Parker’s career. In November of that year, Civil War hero Lt. Gen. Grant became President-elect Grant, and he soon brought his friends with him into the White House. Parker was appointed commissioner of Indian Affairs, based on his previous experience and on the assumption that no one was better qualified to helm the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Thus Parker became the first Indian to hold the office. On April 26, 1869, after being confirmed by Congress, Parker resigned his Army commission and took his place as head of the BIA. His two-year reign was a tempestuous one; he was too honest, too interested in the cause of justice for his own race, for it to be otherwise.

Parker’s first act was to sweep his agency clean of its entrenched bureaucracy, which was dominated by unscrupulous Indian agents who all too often sold their clients’ supplies and pocketed the profits. This was the established way of doing business in the BIA. Not all the agents were guilty, but enough were to tarnish the agency’s reputation. It was just such corruption that had decimated the Cherokee as they passed along the Trail of Tears in the 1830s.

Parker set out to change all that. Following the plan he had previously formulated in his postwar days, he cleared the BIA of the old civilian agents and replaced them with reputable Army personnel and Quakers, whom he believed would be less corruptible. Although Parker was somewhat naive in this belief, his actions did serve to quell much of the wheeling and dealing going on at the Indians’ expense. But his changes to the system inevitably earned him powerful enemies who were determined to break him politically.

In the end, it was one of Parker’s own commissioners, a man he had trusted as a friend, who brought him down. William Welsh was a Philadelphia merchant who headed the Board of Indian Commissioners, a body that had been formed at Parker’s recommendation before he left the Army. Variously described as a Quaker and an Episcopalian, Welsh was a pugnacious Indian missionary who placed the blame for all the corruption in the BIA on the shoulders of Ely Parker, whom he considered ‘but a remove from barbarism.’

In the summer of 1870, Parker toured the American West and personally examined the Indian situation there. It soon became obvious that food shortages along the Missouri River were leading to short tempers on the reservations. In order to keep the Indians on their reservations and away from dangerous confrontations with white settlers, it was necessary to feed them–and quickly. As the governor of the Dakota Territory told Parker, ‘We must feed or fight the Indians in this superintendency.’

Unfortunately, Parker’s enemies in Congress conspired to delay the appropriations necessary to quickly purchase the needed supplies. In order to forestall Indian attempts to break away from the reservations to fend for themselves, Parker found it necessary to go outside proper channels in order to acquire urgently needed supplies for the desperate Indians. He broke some minor rules in making arrangements on the spot with a local contractor, but in the end probably averted a new Indian war.

Nevertheless, Parker’s actions, which were mild compared to what had transpired before he had taken office, were enough for Welsh and his followers to press charges of fraud against the commissioner. In December 1870, Welsh forwarded a letter to Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano, charging that ‘a few adroit manipulations on contracts and purchases have made at least $250,000′ for Parker and his contractor. Parker was also implicitly blamed for all that was wrong with the bureau, despite the fact that much of the trouble had started long before he had taken over as head of the BIA. Parker’s real crime lay in bypassing the Board of Commissioners and ignoring their suggestions–which by law he had every right to do, especially in an emergency situation.

Welsh’s letter was published in the Washington newspapers, and immediately instigated a sensational backlash against the charming head of the BIA. In February, Parker was called before the House of Representatives to answer Welsh’s charges. After a lengthy hearing that stretched into July, he was exonerated of any wrongdoing, and was even complimented for averting a major Indian war that might have cost the Treasury millions of dollars to extinguish. However, in its subsequent report, the committee berated Parker for not consulting the Board of Indian Commissioners in this and other matters, and at Welsh’s insistence Congress quickly passed a law that required Parker to consult the board on all matters, in effect relegating him to a figurehead role.

This was too much for the proud Seneca to bear. After several months of soul-searching and testing the new limits of his power, Parker resigned from his position. Although he publicly stated that he was leaving voluntarily to go into business, he privately told his friends that he had resigned because he had become a ‘rock of offense’ for the administration. He was also hurt by Grant’s lack of support, as the president had distanced himself from Parker during the course of the proceedings, lest his administration be tarnished with yet another taint of scandal. Ironically, Parker was probably the most honest of Grant’s appointees–the real scandals were yet to come.

Despite his ignominious downfall, Parker’s accomplishments as head of the BIA were significant. He engineered a peace policy with the Indians for which Grant was to become famous, and he managed to root out (at least temporarily) much of the rot within the system. Furthermore, the simple fact of his being an Indian impressed the tribes under his care and put them at their ease. In addition, he put an end to the treaty-making policy of previous administrations, which had always been strictly to the advantage of the whites. And he could boast that, although some violence had occurred during his tenure, there had been no Indian wars during the two years he was in office. Although his contemporaries were less than fair to him, history has treated Commissioner Parker kindly.

After he left government service, Parker moved to Wall Street and proceeded to make a fortune on the stock market; he lost it just as quickly in the market troubles of 1873­1875. Thereafter, he made an attempt to re-enter the profession of civil engineering, but found to his dismay that it had ‘run away from him’ during his absence. In 1876, he was forced to take a low-paying job as a clerk in the New York City police department. But Parker still managed to stay active in the militia, various military societies and the Masons, achieving high rank within each organization. Likewise, he and his wife were well respected in New York social circles.

Their only child, a daughter, was born during this less-than-affluent period. Maud Theresa Parker was an engaging little tomboy who was proud of her Indian heritage, and whom Parker fondly referred to as Ahweheeyo, or Beautiful Flower, in his native tongue. She eventually married Arthur Bullard, a member of one of the more prominent old Massachusetts families.

Plagued by strokes and diabetes in his last years, Parker died on August 30, 1895, at his country house in Fairfield, Conn. He was buried with full military honors and much fanfare at Oak Lawn Cemetery in Fairfield. In 1897, he was reinterred next to the remains of his famous ancestor, the Seneca orator Red Jacket, at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, N.Y. This cemetery, which was located much closer to the Tonawanda Reservation, had once been part of the old Granger farm–ultimately fulfilling his mother’s prophetic dream. After successfully carving niches for himself in two dissimilar worlds, Grand Sachem General Ely Parker was at last laid to rest within the comforting bosom of his ancestral homeland.

This article was written by Floyd B. Largent, Jr. and originally appeared in America’s Civil War magazine.

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