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CONFINING INDIANS: POWER, AUTHORITY, AND THE
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CONFINING INDIANS: POWER, AUTHORITY, AND THE
COLONIALIST IDEOLOGIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY REFORMERS

VOLUME ONE
By

C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of History

2008

ABSTRACT

CONFINING INDIANS: POWER, AUTHORITY, AND THE
COLONIALIST IDEOLOGIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY REF ORMERS

By
C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa

This dissertation examines a critical, though much neglected, period in the
development of federal Indian policy. It draws upon the life and career of Ely Parker and
a constellation of other Indian policy reformers and reform organizations to illustrate the
contested and complex voices that attempted to speak for Indian people and the roles that
Indian people themselves played in the policy debates of the mid-nineteenth century. It
contends that throughout this period, supporters of policies designed to protect Indian
communities as distinct entities, or to provide Native peoples with opportunities to
balance dispossession and compensate for a history of colonialism, confronted a group of
conservative, zealously Christian, elitist reformers who championed indigenous
conﬁnement and coercive assimilation within the context of United States expansion.
The rhetoric these men and women employed, and the actions they took, shed light upon
the intersectionality of race, class, and gender discourses in Indian/white relations and
although this era was signiﬁcant for the establishment of a framework for dissent against
disruptive colonialist governance, it ultimately resulted in the professionalization of
federal Indian affairs and in the solidiﬁcation of policies aimed at dispossession and
domination by the end of the century as the state itself developed an active colonial
bureaucracy, a role once ﬁlled by agents outside mainstream administrative structures.

This project explores the notion of “conﬁning Indians,” which refers to the often

forced containment of Indian communities on reservations. Conﬁnement, during this era,

though, also conveyed a notion of social, political, economic, and cultural
marginalization for Indian people. The reformers that populate these chapters ﬁt into two
distinct categories. Ely Parker, Thomas Bland, and the National Indian Defense
Association comprised one group and supported compensatory legislation to create
opportunities for dispossessed Indian groups. They also fought to maintain Indian
communities as distinct entities. The Welsh family, members of the Board of Indian
Commissioners, and the Indian Rights Association comprised a second group,
characterized by their support for coercive assimilation. These individuals all believed
that United States expansion would likely continue into the future, but their goals hinged
upon an expectation of complete Indian conﬁnement. The policy agenda of the coercive
assimilationists focused on land allotment and sought to replace customary Indian
cultural and political practices with Euro-American structures and values. They also
promoted mandatory Christian education for Indian youth and encouraged their parents to
become involved in the market economy. None of these policies could succeed without
the complete and total conﬁnement of Indian people by the government. On the other
hand, the “compensatory” reformers rejected this expectation of conﬁnement, and
although they did not imagine a lengthy continuation of the nation-to-nation relationship
between Indian people and United States, they believed that with the proper tools and
opportunities Native people could assimilate and compete successfully within
mainstream society on their own terms, following their own time frame. Understanding
how the notion of “conﬁning Indians” shaped the development of these competing policy
frameworks, as well as how it informed emerging political conﬂicts and debates, is a

critical pathway through which to conceptualize nineteenth-century Indian policy reform.

For Sara
And

In loving memory of
my Grandfather

Joseph Genetin (1927-2004)

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am profoundly grateful for the advice, insight, and wisdom of my dissertation
committee. Susan Sleeper-Smith has provided gentle guidance and sharp scholarly
critique through every stage of this project and her inﬂuence is apparent on every page.
She has been a most wonderful advisor and I am a better scholar, professional, and
person because of her mentoring. Thank you so very much Susan! I want to thank
Maureen Flanagan for her unﬂagging support and inspiration as she read and reread
versions of this manuscript. She is one of the sharpest critics I have ever met and my
work has beneﬁtted greatly from her keen eye. Gordon Stewart’s kind words and
conﬁdence in my abilities never failed to brighten my spirits and strengthen my resolve.

I hope that forty years into my own career I can maintain the enthusiastic intellectual
curiosity and positive attitude that he demonstrates. Mindy Morgan and Scott
Michaelsen added unique interdisciplinary perspectives to my dissertation committee.
Mindy’s excitement about my research and Scott’s deep theoretical insights pushed me to
clarify my ideas and make them accessible to a larger audience. To all ﬁve of these
scholars I offer my deepest gratitude and sincerest thanks.

Several other faculty members at Michigan State University enriched my
academic experience and shaped my research in important ways. I want to thank Thomas
Summerhill, David Bailey, and Laurent Dubois for reading and discussing portions of
this manuscript and for encouraging me to pursue new and different directions in my
research. Work that I completed in graduate seminars with Lisa Fine, Mark Kombluh,

Robert Bonner, and Maureen Flanagan found its way into these pages in a variety of

ways and I am grateful for their guidance during my ﬁrst years here. I am also thankful
for the institutional and intellectual support of the Michigan State University American
Indian Studies program. I have beneﬁtted greatly from the speakers, programs, and
workshops that AIS provides. 1 especially want to thank Susan Applegate Krouse, the
program director, for her support. My intellectual journey at MSU has been more
enjoyable for all the lunches, coffee breaks, and hallway conversations I have had with
the wonderful scholars here. In particular I would like to thank Sam Thomas, Denise
Demitriou, Pero Dagbovie, Christine Daniels, Laura Fair, Ethan Sega], Aminda Smith,
and Keely Stauter-Halsted.

Scholarly endeavors are often solitary and isolating, but my graduate student
colleagues made this process much less so. I want to thank Heath Bowen, Carlos
Alemén, Dan Dalrymple, and Ben Sawyer for countless card games, aftemoons spent on
the basketball and racquetball courts, evenings spent pursuing other interests, and our
shared obsession with fantasy football. I am also grateful for all the wonderful
conversations I have had with the rest of the “room 8” folks, including Jaime McLean,
Micalee Sullivan, Jason Friedman, Ted Mitchell, John Wisti, Andrea Vicente, Lindsey
Gish, Brandon Miller, Piril Atabay, Amy Hay, Tim Weber, Thomas Henthom, Ryan
Pettengill, and Sonia Robles. I would also like to thank the other American Indian
Studies graduate students at MSU, including Megan McCullen, Megan McCune, Stuart
Willis, Justin Carroll, Melissa Rinehart, and Sakina Hughes. Thank you for making this
place an enjoyable place to learn, teach, and work.

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation-American Indian Studies

Consortium played a profoundly important role in my education. Through it I had the

vi

opportunity to meet and work with some of the most talented and inﬂuential scholars in

the ﬁeld today. I would like to thank all of the members who listened to and commented
on the various parts of this project that I presented at CIC-AISC meetings, including Fred
Hoxie, Brian Hosmer, Greg Dowd, Jeanie O’Brien-Kehoe, Brenda Child, Jacki Rand,
Phil Deloria, Lucy Murphy, and Larry Nesper. I also want to the thank the students in the
2003 Spring Graduate Student Seminar and the 2006 Fall Workshop, both held at the
Newberry Library. In particular I would like to thank Jennifer Guiliano, Michel Hogue,
Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote, and Angela Parker, for their collegiality and for challenging me to
be a better thinker and scholar. It was through the CIC-AISC that I met Cathleen Cahill
and her insight, generosity, support and encouragement have meant very much to me.
The CIC-AISC also provided generous ﬁnancial support, without which this project
would not have been possible.

I owe an incredible debt of gratitude to all of the librarians and archivists who
assisted me in my research and the institutions that supported this project ﬁnancially. For
a scholar of American Indian history, the Newberry Library is one of the greatest and
most welcoming places to work. I want to thank the staff of the D’Arcy McNickle
Center for American Indian Studies, especially Olivia Little and Laurie Arnold. John
Allbrey’s knowledge of the Newberry’s collections and the professional and efﬁcient
services offered by the library’s staff made my work there very productive. This work
was supported by a CIC-AIS/Newberry Library Fellowship and for that I am grateful.

An American Philosophical Society Library Resident Research Fellowship (supported by
the Phillips Fund for Native American Research), made possible a wonderful sojourn to

one of the nation’s most storied institutions of learning and research. J .J . Ahem’s and

vii

Roy Goodman’s enthusiasm for my work and knowledge of the collections there helped
immensely. I want to recognize the other staff members who assisted my work at APS,
including Martin Levitt, Valerie-Anne Lutz, and Earle Spamer. I am also grateﬁrl to
Daniel K. Richter, who opened his home to me and provided opportunities at the McNeil
Center for Early American Studies on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. The
staff of the Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester introduced me to the
papers of Lewis Henry Morgan and Arthur Parker. I want to thank Sarah DeSanctis and
Mary Huth, in particular, for their hospitality. Paul Mercer, James Folts, and Chris
Beauregard, as well as the rest of the staff at the New York State Library and Archive
made my time there well spent. I want to thank Olga Tsapina at the Huntington Library
for locating and shipping several materials that were crucial to the completion of this
project. Finally, I have the utmost respect for and gratitude to Laura Schiefer and the
other staff members of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Library. They do
a wonderful job with minimal resources. My research also beneﬁted from the ﬁnancial
support of the American Historical Association in the form of two Littleton-Griswold
Grants for Research in United States Legal History. The History Department at Michigan
State University funded initial research in the form of a Research Enhancement
Fellowship and the College of Social Science helped me ﬁnish the writing with a
Dissertation Completion Grant.

My interest in Native American history and my historical curiosity came into
being at Bowling Green State University as an undergraduate and as an MA. student.
There I had the opportunity to meet and work with many wonderful scholars. Edmund

Danziger saw potential in my work and inspired me to pursue this career. He is a true

viii

scholar, a wonderful community-member, and a great mentor. He will never truly
understand how much his support has meant to me. Rachel Buff, Liette Gidlow, Don
Neiman, and Rob Buffington all taught and motivated me as I made the critical transition
into graduate studies. Their inﬂuence shapes me to this day. I also had the opportunity
to work with many great students at BGSU, but none more so than Jim Buss. I am
profoundly grateful for our friendly competition and his advice, council, and support.

My family has provided inspiration and support throughout my life and I am most
grateful to them. My mom, Judee Genetin, a lifelong student (and teacher), demonstrated
a love of reading and learning to me at a very young age. Her own educational pursuits,
her undying love and support, and her conﬁdence motivates me every minute of every
day. She has always encouraged me to pursue my own dreams and I have taken her
words and actions to heart. My Grandma, Carol Genetin, inspired me to be creative and
to think in new and colorful ways. Her love, sympathy, and compassion have made me a
better person. I am also blessed with amazing siblings. Victoria’s strength, convictions,
and understanding; Elle’s maturity and willpower; and Jon-Michael’s intellect and sharp
wit are all inspiring in their own ways. I am so thankful for their patience and love. My
Grandpa, Joe Genetin, did not live to see this project ﬁnished, but I know he would have
been proud. This project is dedicated, in part, to his memory. The newest member of our
family, Isis, is an absolute joy, and her presence has reminded me of the truly important
things in life. I also had the honor of being welcomed into another family as I worked on
this project. I want to thank Jane and Dick Wright, Rich and Noah Wright, and Amy and

Justin Wainwright for their generosity, curiosity, and interest, as well as their support.

Finally, I want to thank my wife, Sara. Without her, completing this project
would have been far less rewarding. I am so thankful for the opportunity to share my life
and experiences with her. She is my partner in all things, and the one woman in all the
world for me. Thank you, Sara, for putting up with the research trips, long hours, and for

your love, patience, and support!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... xiii

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1
Ely S. Parker and Nineteenth-Century Indian Policy Reform(ers) .......................... 4
Concepts and Analytical Frameworks ................................................................ 15
Questions ................................................................................................................ 24

CHAPTER 1

CONFINING TONAWANDA: THE OGDEN LAND DISPUTE AND

THE POLITICAL EDUCATION OF AN INDIGENOUS LEADER .............................. 32
The Ogden Company and the Disruption of an Indian Community ...................... 41
Indians and Citizens in Western New York ........................................................... 5 3
Reforming Tonawanda Governance ...................................................................... 65

CHAPTER 2

DONEHOGAWA, SCHENANDOAH, AND THE LITTLE SNIPE:
ETHNOGRAPHERS, INFORMANTS, AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY

NOTIONS OF INDIANNESS ........................................................................................... 77
The “Warrior in Two Worlds” ............................................................................... 84
Parker and Morgan in the Early-Nineteenth Century ............................................ 93
Parker and Converse in the Late-Nineteenth Century ......................................... 105
CHAPTER 3

“[A]LL INTENT ON SEEING THE WHITE WOMAN MARRIED TO
THE RED MAN”: THE PARKER/SACKETT AFFAIR AND THE PUBLIC

SPECTACLE OF INTERMARRIAGE ........................................................................... 118
A “Mysterious Disappearance” ............................................................................ 131
. . .and a Public Obession ...................................................................................... 142

CHAPTER 4

“[F]OR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A PERMANENT AND PERPETUAL

PEACE: ELY PARKER’S ROLE IN THE EARLY PEACE POLICY .......................... 164
Public Debates and Indian Policy(ies) ................................................................. 173
Parker’s Political Education ................................................................................. 179
Parker and the Peace Policy ................................................................................. 187

xi

CHAPTER 5

“BLACK DECEPTION, DAMNABLE FRAUDS, AND PERSISTENT
OPPRESSION”: ELY PARKER, WILLIAM WELSH, THE BOARD OF
INDIAN COMMISSIONERS, AND THE CONTENTIOUS

PEACE POLICY ............................................................................................................. 202
Coercive Assimilationists: William Welsh and the
Board of Indian Commissioners .......................................................................... 208
Indian Policy On Trial: The 1871 House of Representatives’ Hearing ............... 221
CHAPTER 6
EX/TENSIONS OF REFORM: THOMAS BLAND, THE WELSH
FAMILY, AND THE ALLOTMENT CONTROVERSY ...................... - ......................... 2 38
Critics of Coercive Assimilation: Thomas Bland and the National
Indian Defense Association ................................................................................. 245
Coercive Assimilationists in the 18805 and 18903: Herbert Welsh
and the Indian Rights Association ....................................................................... 264
The Allotment Controversy and the Evolving Role of the State ......................... 286
IRA Victory ......................................................................................................... 297
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................ 303
John Collier and the Backlash against Coercive Assimilation ............................ 303
Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Indian Policy Reform ....................................... 306
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................ 3 12

xii

 

LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE 1: Ely S. Parker, ca. 1863 ..................................................................................... 5
FIGURE 2: Lithograph of Lee’s Surrender at Appomattox ................................................ 6
FIGURE 3: Seneca Lands Remaining after the Treaty of Big Tree (1797) ....................... 33
FIGURE 4: Parker as a Youth, ca. 1840 ............................................................................ 39
FIGURE 5: Nicholson Henry Parker, 1854 ....................................................................... 48
FIGURE 6: Lewis Henry Morgan, (1818-1881) ................................................................ 80
FIGURE 7: Harriet Maxwell Converse, (1836-1903) ....................................................... 81
FIGURE 8: Frederick Ely Parker, 1912 and Arthur C. Parker, 1918 ................................ 85
FIGURE 9: Caroline G. Parker .......................................................................................... 95
FIGURE 10: General Ely S. Parker and Minnie O. Sackett ............................................ 122
FIGURE 11: Ulysses S. Grant on Inauguration Day, March 4, 1869 .............................. 190
FIGURE 12: William Welsh (1810-1878) ....................................................................... 205
FIGURE 13: Dr. Valentine T. McGillycuddy ................................................................. 240
FIGURE 14: Advertisement for the “Pocket Gymnasium” ............................................. 248
FIGURE 15: Senator Henry L. Dawes ............................................................................ 252
FIGURE 16: Red Cloud, ca. 1880 ................................................................................... 260
FIGURE 17: Herbert Welsh, ca. 1883 ............................................................................. 266
FIGURE 18: Matthew K. Sniffen .................................................................................... 278
FIGURE 19: Charles C. Painter ....................................................................................... 284

xiii

 

Introduction

Following seven bitter months of public controversy Seneca sachem Ely S. Parker
resigned from his position as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. He had been the ﬁrst
Native American to hold this ofﬁce, but stated that the duties and responsibilities of his
once important position had become, “under the present arrangements. . .those of a clerk
to a Board of Indian Commissioners, operating outside of and almost independent of the
Indian Bureau.” “I would gladly and willingly do anything in my power to aid in
forwarding and promoting to a successful issue the President’s wise and beneﬁcent
Indian policy,” he continued in his June 1871 resignation letter, “but I cannot, in justice
to myself, longer continue to hold the ambiguous position of Commissioner of Indian
Affairs.”1 In the aftermath of the Civil War, as the federal government of the United
States worked to reunite a fractured nation and a divided polity, the governance of Native
people and communities took on a new importance as policymakers and citizens looked
at western settlement as a safeguard against the sectional tensions that had characterized
the previous generation.2 Within this context, non-Native and Native reformers such as
Ely Parker developed policy agendas and reform campaigns, and fought vicious political

battles against each other as they struggled to control the increasingly important Bureau

 

l “Resignation of Gen. Parker as Indian Commissioner,” New York Times, 18 July 1871.

2 In her recent book, Heather Cox Richardson argued that the American West played a central role
in the popular mindset, as well as in the development of the government in the post-Civil War era. It was
within and through this region, she asserted, that citizens and policy-makers rectiﬁed the contradictory
notions govemment intervention and rugged individualism to reveal, by the end of the nineteenth-century,
the middle-class imperialism that characterized Theodore Roosevelt’s term in ofﬁce. See Heather Cox
Richardson, West ﬁom Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2007), 3-5, 343-345.

of Indian Affairs. More signiﬁcantly, they questioned and rethought the ftmdamental
roles and responsibilities of the American state.

In this dissertation I examine a critical, though much neglected, period in the
development of federal Indian policy. I utilize the life and career of Ely Parker and a
constellation of other Indian policy reformers and reform organizations to illustrate the
signiﬁcant contestation and complexity of voices that attempted to speak for Indian
people and the roles that Indian people themselves played in the policy debates of the
rnid-nineteenth century. I contend that throughout these debates and conﬂicts, supporters
of policies designed to protect Indian communities as distinct entities, or to provide
Native peoples with opportunities in an effort to balance dispossession and compensate
for a history of colonialism, confronted a group of conservative, zealously Christian,
elitist reformers who championed indigenous conﬁnement and coercive assimilation
within a larger context of United States expansion. The rhetoric these men and women
employed, and the actions they took, shed light upon the intersectionality of race, class,
and gender discourses in Indian/white relations at mid-century, and although this era was
signiﬁcant for the establishment of a framework for dissent against disruptive colonialist
governance, it ultimately resulted in the professionalization of federal Indian affairs and
in the solidiﬁcation of a policy agenda aimed at dispossession and domination by the end
of the nineteenth century as the state itself developed an active colonial bureaucracy, a
role once ﬁlled by agents outside mainstream administrative structures.

This project problematizes the existing interpretations of Indian policy
development in the post-Civil War era. Scholars of American Indian policy characterize

the mid-to-late nineteenth-century period as an almost linear progression toward the land

 

severalty program embodied in the 1887 General Allotment Act, a program that forced
Indian people to abandon communal land ownership practices and embrace private,
individual landholding in an effort to open the reservations for non-Native settlement and
economic exploitation. Indeed, the common interpretation states that “to be pro-Indian,”

”3 These writers have focused

in this era, “was to be pro-allotment and pro-assimilation.
on the ways in which the common social, religious, and economic backgrounds shared by
the Quaker and Episcopalian missionaries of the 18705, as well as the reformers who
called themselves the “Friends of the Indians” in the 18805 and 18905, including the
Indian Rights Association, the Women’s National Indian Association, the Boston Indian
Citizenship Committee, and the attendees of the annual Lake Mohonk Conference in
upstate New York shaped their policy agendas and colonialist ideologies.4 This process,
though, was more complex. Other reformers such as Ely Parker in the 18605 and 18705,

and Thomas Bland and his National Indian Defense Association in the 1880s, though

operating within colonialist ideologies of their own, established a signiﬁcant tradition of

 

3 Siobhan Senier, “Allotment Protest and Tribal Discourse: Reading Wynema’s Successes and
Shortcomings,” American Indian Quarterly 24(3) (2000): 420-440, 422.

4 The idea that the missionaries and reformers were "well-intentioned" runs throughout this
literature. In the 19305 two books began this trend. In the ﬁrst, D.S. Otis asserted that it was not private
interests that motivated the development of the allotment program, but rather that it came out of the
idealism of Congress and the reformers who wished to protect and "civilize" Indians. J .P. Kinney argued
that the late-nineteenth centrn'y reformers represented the culmination of two hundred years of efforts to
assimilate and "civilize" the Indians. See D.S. Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1934 [rep. 1973]) and J. P. Kinney, A Continent Lost — A
Civilization Won: Indian Land Tenure in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1937). Henry Fritz
suggested that there were some conﬂicts during that Lake Mohonk conference, but these involved the
timetable and intensity of coercive assimilation plans, not the coercive/assimilative ideology itself. See
Henry Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860-1890 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1963). See also Francis P. Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the
Indian, 1865-1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976); Clyde Milner, With Good Intentions:
Quaker Work among the Pawnees, 0tos, and Omahas in the 18703 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1982); Robert Keller, American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 1869-1882, (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Francis P. Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government
and the American Indians, vol. 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Frederick Hoxie, A Final
Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1 920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1984 [rep. 2001]).

 

dissent against coercive assimilation programs and their accompanying rhetoric of
indigenous conﬁnement. The development of the allotment and coercive assimilation

legislation, then, was both contested and complex.

Ely S. Parker and Nineteenth-Century Indian Policy Reform(ers)
Few scholars know that the Seneca leader Ely Parker drafted the surrender

agreement which ended the United States Civil War. On April 9, 1865, General Ulysses
S. Grant entered Wilmer McLean’s parlor in the village of Appomattox Court House and
introduced each member of his personal staff to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Lee
welcomed each man with a courteous, if condescending, handshake and greeting. That
was, until he saw Ely Parker. Witnesses in McLean’s parlor reported that when Lee saw
Parker’s complexion and features he mistook the Indian for an African American and
became visibly angry that Grant would insult him by inviting such a person to the
surrender negotiations. In fact, many onlookers feared the negotiations would end
immediately. However, Lee realized his mistake, composed himself, extended his hand
toward Parker, looked directly into his eyes and said “I am glad to see one real American
here.” Parker grasped Lee’s hand and replied “We are all Americans.”5 At the very birth
of the Reconstruction era, Parker’s statement personiﬁed what many believed could be
the legacy of the immense sacriﬁces of the Civil War: that in the end, the nation would
overcome sectional differences and racial tensions. In fact, even his presence, as an
Indian man, at this incredibly signiﬁcant historical moment indicated the optimism that

would characterize the years following the surrender. Looking back from the perspective

 

5 Parker’s biographers oﬁen recount this particular event. See Arthur C. Parker, The Life of
General Ely S. Parker: Last Grand Sachem of the Iroquois and General Grant’s Military Secretary
(Buffalo: Buffalo Historical Society, 1919), 129-133 and William H. Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps:
Ely S. Parker, Union General and Seneca Chief (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1978), 108-111.

4

 

Figure 1: Ely S. Parker, ca 1863
Source: Arthur C. Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, inside cover

 

Figure 2: Lithograph of Lee’s Surrender at Appomattox.
Parker is depicted as the third standing man from the right.
Source: Jean Edward Smith, Grant

 

of the turn of the twentieth century, however, Parker’s statement seems naive and the
recreations and stories of this moment often failed to mention even his presence at the
proceedings. Clearly events in the mid-to-late nineteenth century changed the ways
Americans conceptualized notions of reform and the position of non-white thinkers and
reformers within the processes of the government.

Most scholarly examinations of Native American reformers focus on the late-
nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and highlight the ways Indian individuals or
groups responded to the land allotment and coercive assimilation policies of the 18805
and 18905. Outspoken critics and supporters of these policies such as Carlos
Montezuma, Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), Henry Standing Bear, Arthur Parker, Sarah
Winnemucca, Charles Eastman, and Susette La Flesche populate these studies and
demonstrate the varied ways Native people engaged with the mechanisms of colonial
governance at the nadir of Native American history.6 Other scholars focus on Native
writers in the early-nineteenth century such as William Apess and George Copway.
These individuals lived prior to the post-Civil War solidiﬁcation of American colonial
governance and did not confront political power directly, but used their writings to

comment upon the history and trajectory of Indian/white relations.7 This study focuses

 

6 See Peter Iverson, Carlos Montezuma and the Changing World of American Indians
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); Leon Speroff, Carlos Montezuma, MD. : A
Yavapai American Hero: The Life and Times of an American Indian, 1866-1923 (Portland: Amica Press,
2004); Susan Rose Dominguez, “The Gertrude Bonnin Story: From Yankton Destiny into American
History, 1804-1938” (PhD Diss., Michigan State University, 2005); Lucy Maddox, Citizen Indians: Native
American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Joy Porter, To Be
Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
2001); Siobhan Senier, Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson,
Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); Raymond
Wilson, Ohiyesa: Charles Eastman, Santee Sioux (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); and Benson
Tong, Susette LaFlesche Picotte, M.D. : Omaha Leader and Reformer (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1999)

 

 

on the mid-nineteenth century in an effort to understand how one body of Native-
centered reform ﬁt within the larger context of state development during the exact period
in which federal policymakers shaped and deﬁned the ill-fated land allotment and
assimilation policies that characterized the subsequent generations. And while the
following chapters focus directly on the life and career of Ely Parker, they also seek to
examine his connections to other prominent reformers in the period. In doing so, I hope
to show the complex ways Indian leaders engaged with government-sponsored reform in
the nineteenth-century United States and how the opposition to assirnilationist reformers,
often attributed to early-twentieth-century, non-Native reformer John Collier, was
initiated as an Indian-centered agenda in the mid-nineteenth century.

Ely Parker (or Hasanoanda, “Leading Name”) was born in 1828 on the
Tonawanda reservation in western New York State and studied at the adjoining Baptist
mission school as a child. Around the age of ten his parents sent him north to the Six
Nations reserve in Canada along the Grand River so that he could focus on customary
Seneca skills and cultural practices including woodcraﬁ and the annual ritual cycle. The
young man returned to New York in 1840 to ﬁnd his community in chaos. The twelve-
year-old Parker quickly grasped the larger forces shaping events in western New York as
the Ogden Land Company worked tirelessly to dispossess and remove the Seneca in an
effort to proﬁt from their land speculation. In the 1838 Treaty of Buffalo Creek, Ogden

ofﬁcials used alcohol, bribery, forgery, threats, misinformation, and a disregard for

 

7 See Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of
Historiography, 1827-1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Andy Doolen,
Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2005); Robert Allen Warrior, The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonﬁction (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British
Literature, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756-1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and David
Carlson, Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2006).

customary Seneca governmental practices to dispossess the Indians of all their remaining
New York lands except the unoccupied, one square mile Oil Spring Reservation, as well
as the Wisconsin lands purchased for them by the United States. Seneca leaders
immediately fought the execution of this treaty. Although Parker did not participate in
the initial resistance campaign, he perhaps recognized the value of understanding the
English language and devoted himself to education. He completed two more years at the
Baptist mission school and in 1842 earned a tuition-free enrollment at Yates Academy in
Cayuga, New York. In 1844 Seneca leaders, aware of his linguistic abilities, employed
the sixteen-year-old Parker as an interpreter for petitions and protests, and frequently
brought him to Albany and Washington DC to meet with prominent political leaders.
Parker was the descendent of a politically powerful Tonawanda family. His mother
belonged to the Wolf Clan, the same as Red Jacket and Handsome Lake’s successor,
Jimmy Johnson. His inclusion in these political matters at such a young age prepared
him for a future leadership role in the community.8

In 1844, Parker traveled to Albany with a Tonawanda delegation and while there,
visited a bookstore to search for ethnographic and historical data that might aid Seneca
leaders as they presented their case to New York legislators. Lewis Henry Morgan, a
lawyer and founder of the Grand Order of the Iroquois, a literary fraternal organization,
was also searching for materials on Iroquois history and culture in this bookstore, and

approached the young Seneca. Over the next several years Parker became Morgan’s ﬁrst

 

8 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 17-19; Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 53-55, 75-
76; Elisabeth Tooker, “Ely S. Parker” in American Indian Intellectuals ed. Margot Liberty, (St. Paul: West
Publishing Co., 1978): 15-30, 17-18; “Ely Samuel Parker: From Sachem to Brigadier General,” New York
State and the Civil War 1 no. 4 (1961): 1-5, 1-2; D.A. Brown, “’One Real American,’” American History
Illustrated 4 no. 7 (1969): 12-21, 13; and Arthur C. Parker, “Ely S. Parker - Man and Mason,”
Transactions — American Lodge of Research 8 no. 2 (1961): 229-247, 232-235.

 

and most signiﬁcant informant, and assisted in the creation of The League of the Ho—de-
no-sau-nee, or, Iroquois (1851), one of the founding studies of American anthropologyg
In return, Morgan provided Parker with an entree into the Cayuga Academy in Aurora,
and helped him prepare for the bar exam. As an Indian though, Parker was not a citizen,
he could not be admitted to the bar, and in 1848, Morgan persuaded him to begin a career
in civil engineering. Parker completed a basic course at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute
in Troy and began a career working on the New York canals. He then constructed
buildings for the United States Treasury Department, ﬁrst in Detroit and later in Galena,
Illinois.10 At the same time, the Tonawanda community acknowledged Parker’s
leadership and efforts in the Ogden Land dispute and “raised” him to one of the ﬁfty
sachemships of the Iroquois Confederacy, in 1851. He was 23 years old. Along with his
new status in the community came a new name as well: Donehogawa, or “Open Door.”
This was the customary name bestowed upon the Iroquois sachem that guarded the
western door of both the physical and symbolic longhouse against outsiders. As the
Seneca spokesperson who dealt most directly with non-Native people in the nineteenth

century, this was an appropriate name for Parker.H

 

9 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, l-3, 39-41; Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 80-
90. For one of the most sensitive readings of the Parker/Morgan relationship, see Philip Deloria, Playing
Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 71-94. See also William F enton, “Tonawanda
Longhouse Ceremonies: Ninety Years After Lewis Henry Morgan,” in Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of
American Ethnology Bulletin 128 (Washington DC: GPO, 1941): 139-148. For more on Morgan life’s life
see Bernhard Stern, Lewis Henry Morgan: Social Evolutionist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1931); Carl Resek, Lewis Henry Morgan: American Scholar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960);
Elisabeth Tooker, Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1994).

10 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 41-43; Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 91-98.
See also “Alumni Notes,” The Polytechnic 12 no. 1 (1895): 11.

11 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 49-51; Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 91-92.

See also Arthur C. Parker, “Ely S. Parker: Last Grand Sachem,” The American Indian 1 (1944): 11-15. For
more on the real and symbolic signiﬁcance of the longhouse in Iroquois culture and society see Daniel K.

10

 

In Galena, Parker met and beﬁ’iended a store clerk and Mexican War veteran
named US. Grant. He was also an active member of many fraternal organizations. In
1857, with the help of several non-Native lawyers and concerned citizens, Parker brought
to a conclusion the decades-long Ogden Land dispute. The Tonawanda paid a high price
in both social and political capital, but they maintained a portion of their homeland. In
1861, Parker returned to Tonawanda to help alleviate some of the community tensions
unleashed by the legacy of the land dispute and reformed the reservation government by
instituting a system of elective ofﬁces and legislative mandates. ‘2 When the Civil War
broke out he petitioned the Department of War for a commission in the Union Army,
citing his militia experience, but Secretary William Seward denied the request. Finally in
1863, he was granted a commission at the rank of Captain and joined Grant at the Battle
of Vicksburg. He served ﬁrst as an assistant adjutant general, and then quickly became
Grant’s military secretary, as well as a cherished member of his inner circle. After the
war ended, Parker stayed in DC as Grant’s aide-de-camp and took the opportunity to
work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as it negotiated with the southern Indian groups

who had joined the Confederacy.13 In 1867 he married a young, white, Washington DC

 

Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European
Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). For the best discussion of Seneca
culture more generally, see Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York:
Knopf, 1969).

12 Armstrong, Warrior in T wo Camps, 61-70; Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 94-98.

13 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 71-107; Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 99-116.
Although there has been very little written about Native service during the Civil War in general, the best
treatment of an individual group’s involvement is Laurence Hauptrnan, The Iroquois in the Civil War:
From Battleﬁeld to Reservation (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993). Hauptrnan devoted one brief
chapter to a discussion of Parker entitled “’Grant’s Indian’: Ely S. Parker at the Battle of Chattanooga” and
asserted that while his Seneca heritage and Tonawanda experiences shaped the ways that he understood his
Civil War experience, after the war, he abandoned his people and sought fame and fortune in mainstream
society.

11

 

~«

~

socialite named Minnie Sackett and although events surrounding the wedding were
clouded in mysterious circumstances and public scrutiny, he and his wife became ﬁxtures
in elite DC society. After Grant’s inauguration, the new President appointed Parker as
the ﬁrst Indian Commissioner of Indian Affairs."

Parker accepted his appointment optimistically, convinced that his experience
working with legislators and policymakers, as well as his ability to operate within the
federal bureaucracy, would allow him to implement a reform agenda based on the lessons
he learned during the Ogden Land dispute. Parker intended to shape the Bureau of Indian
Affairs by creating public oversight committees to monitor policy administration. He
wanted these committees to be led by both Native and non-Native individuals. He also
intended to establish and protect speciﬁc land rights for Native communities, a process
that he believed to be crucial to any BIA reform agenda. Finally, he proposed to make
the Office of Indian Affairs a more efficient, effective, and impartial bureaucracy by
transferring it back to the War Department (it was housed in the Interior Department after
1849) in an effort to end corruption and to protect policymakers from the inﬂuence of
land speculators, railroad companies, and the contractors who supplied goods for treaty
appropriations. Parker also believed that the government should provide money, goods,
and new opportunities for Native people, particularly in the form of education, in an
effort to compensate for their dispossession.

Almost immediately Parker ran into ﬁerce opposition from a group of
conservative, Christian, elitist, non-Native reformers. One of these men was William

Welsh, an Episcopal layman who built a fortune in mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia

 

l4 Annstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 122-136; Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 143—
147.

12

 

though the importation of West Indian sugar.15 Welsh worked for various philanthropic
causes and founded several Episcopal churches and a hospital. Later in life he became an
outspoken voice in the development of Indian policy. From 1869 through the end of his
life Welsh channeled his energies into a reform agenda that attempted to mold Indian
people into his conservative, Christian vision of “civilization” by eliminating tribal
autonomy and by destroying Indian communities. Welsh used the Board of Indian
Commissioners, an early innovation of Grant’s Peace Policy to oppose Parker. This
board was led by George Stuart, another wealthy Philadelphia merchant, who was
“zealously Christian,” and by Felix Reville Brunot, a Pittsburgh businessman, who had
fought for temperance and other conservative reforms as a college student. '6 The Board,
described as an unpaid oversight committee of concerned citizens, provided these men
signiﬁcant power in the execution of their duties. Their driving philosophy, however,
argued that the Christian philanthropists of the United States understood the best interests
of Indian peoples, even better than Indian peoples themselves. They worked within the
bureaucratic framework to monitor Indian appropriations and the purchase and
disbursement of goods and supplies, while they simultaneously pushed a reform agenda
that was Christian, conservative, coercive, and “civilizing.”

In 1871, Welsh ﬁled formal charges against Parker and the BIA. He alleged that
Parker had committed fraud and had willfully mismanaged the Indian Ofﬁce. Although a

House of Representatives investigation exonerated Parker later that year, he resigned

 

15 Francis P. Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians
vol. 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 502.

16 Robert E. Thompson ed., The Life of George H. Stuart: Written by Himself (Philadelphia: J .M.

Stoddart and Company, 1890), 20-21, quoted in Francis Prucha, The Great Father vol. 1, 503. For more on
Brunot, see Charles Slattery, Felix Reville Brunot (New York: Green and Co., 1907).

13

 

from the position. Following his public service, Parker won and lost a fortune in the
stock market, and later became a clerk in the New York City Police Department. He
became close friends with Harriet Maxwell Converse, a poet and ethnographer, and aided
her as an informant and conﬁdant. Later in life Parker suffered from diabetes,
succumbed to a series of strokes, and died in 1895.17

Although Parker did not play an active role in federal policymaking after 1871,
his notions of an efﬁcient and impartial bureaucracy and compensatory legislation
appealed to later activists and thinkers and they built upon the reform framework that he
had established. One of these men, Thomas A. Bland, an Indiana physician, writer, and
activist in the late-18705 and 18805, also opposed the movement toward land allotment
and coercive assimilationist policies. Bland’s organization, the National Indian Defense
Association (N IDA), confronted the politically powerful Indian Rights Association
(IRA), led by Herbert Welsh - William Welsh’s nephew. Bland and the NIDA
questioned the goals and methods of coercive assimilation policies as well as the
implications such policies had for the role and responsibilities of the state. In doing so,
they encouraged policymakers to pause and consider Indian voices, thus slowing the
legislative process signiﬁcantly in the mid-18805. In 1887, however, Welsh, the IRA,
and their political allies succeeded, and Congress passed the General Allotment Act,
which ushered in an era of dispossession, poverty, and despair for Indian communities
across the nation. Even though Bland and the NIDA lost the legislative battles of the

early-18805, the debates and conﬂicts that characterized this period suggest that Indian

 

'7 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 152-183; Parker, The Life ofGeneral Ely 5. Parker, 150-
180.

14

affairs played an important role in the larger reform context of the late-nineteenth

century.

Concepts and Analytical Frameworks
The following chapters explore the notion of “conﬁning Indians,” which refers to

the often forced containment of Indian communities on reservation lands. Conﬁnement,
during this era, also conveyed a notion of the social, political, economic, and cultural
marginalization of Indian people. Throughout the early-nineteenth century, legislators,
military officials, and settlers sought to remove Indians from regions of settlement and
contain them within a rapidly decreasing land base, and while dissenting opinions existed
in the pre-Civil War period, after the war emerging groups of increasingly visible and
powerful reformers developed divergent notions of Indian conﬁnement and sought to
codify these notions into written policy. I deﬁne the reformers that populate these
chapters into two categories. Ely Parker, Thomas Bland, and the National Indian Defense
Association comprised one group and supported compensatory legislation to create
opportunities for dispossessed Indian groups. They also fought to maintain Indian
communities as distinct entities. William and Herbert Welsh, the members of the Board
of Indian Commissioners, and the Indian Rights Association comprised a second group,
most appropriately characterized as coercive assimilationists. These reformers all
operated within the larger framework of late-nineteenth-century reform and understood
that United States expansion would likely continue into the future, but the goals of the
coercive assimilationists hinged upon an expectation of complete Indian conﬁnement,

while the former did not.18 The policy agenda of the coercive assimilationists focused on

 

'8 In his recent book, historian Philip Deloria argued persuasively that expectations of
containment played a signiﬁcant role in shaping late nineteenth-century notions of Indian violence and

15

forced land allotment and sought to replace customary cultural and political practices
within Indian communities with structures and values based on Euro-American models.
They also wanted to develop a system of mandatory Christian education for Indian youth,
while encouraging their parents to become involved in the market economy. None of
these policies could succeed without the complete and total conﬁnement of Indian people
by the government. '9 On the other hand, the reformers who supported compensatory
legislation rejected this expectation of conﬁnement, and although they did not imagine a
lengthy continuation of the nation-to-nation relationship between Indian people and
United States, they believed that Native people should be supplied with the tools and
opportunities to assimilate into and compete successfully within mainstream society on
their own terms, following their own time frame. Understanding how the notion of
“conﬁning Indians” shaped the development of these competing policy frameworks, as
well as how it informed the emerging political conﬂicts and debates, is a critical pathway

through which to conceptualize the history of Indian policy reform in this period.

 

warfare, as well as paciﬁcation. While I ﬁnd his description of “containment” too narrowly deﬁned, and
prefer the more expansive “conﬁnement,” my thoughts and analysis have been inﬂuenced signiﬁcantly by
his assertion that popular discourse shaped ideas about Indians in this period. See Philip Deloria, Indians in
Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005), 20-21.

'9 Deloria grouped these processes as technologies of power and stated that to “be known by
name, date and location of baptism, rations drawn, and enrollment number was to be intimately visible to
the colonial bureaucracy. It made it easy to locate a particular person in time and in space and to determine
the need for education, discipline, containment, and shunning.” See Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places,
26. James C. Scott offered a lengthy examination of these colonial state processes, which he referred to
collectively as a project of establishing “legibility.” He argued that only when a state could make its
citizens and wards legible, could it effectively and efficiently conduct its functions including taxation,
conscription, and ration distribution, among others. See James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain
Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Ann
Laura Stoler as well as many other colonization studies scholars have addressed these issues in various
regions arormd the world. Stoler’s application of Foucauldian theory to colonization studies has been
particularly inﬂuential. See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault 's “History of
Sexuality" and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

16

This research focuses on the colonialist ideologies of nineteenth-century
reformers in an effort to make sense of the complex and often contradictory viewpoints
these men and women expressed as they debated policy proposals. In his recent study of
Lakota/U.S. relations leading up to the Wounded Knee massacre, historian Jeremy Ostler
argued that scholars who are inclined to be sympathetic toward Indian perspectives and
positions have been “uninterested in critically analyzing the ideologies, policies, and on-
the-ground actions associated with the United States conquest of and establishment of
colonial rule over Indian people.” Furthermore, he asserted that while many reformers
ﬂamed their notions of assimilation using a language of altruism and philanthropy,
“assimilation functioned in the larger scheme of things as a rationale for the
dispossession of Indian lands and the destruction of diversity in the name of national

”20 I build on Professor Ostler’s contention and suggest that understanding

homogeneity.
the ways in which these colonialist ideologies developed and the ways that their
proponents interacted within the framework of the evolving bureaucratic state can reveal
the larger signiﬁcance of Indian affairs within the context of the post-Civil War nation.
As Ostler concluded, whether or not anyone was (or is) willing to admit it, by the end of
the 18005 “the United States was ﬁrmly committed to a system of colonial rule.”2|
This project also seeks to examine colonialist action in the nineteenth-century
federal government as it evolved through the ideologies of prominent reformers and

reform organizations. Focusing ﬁrst on the Ogden/Tonawanda land dispute, I suggest

that the primary impetus for colonial action in the pre-Civil War era came from regional

 

20 Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and US. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 5,8.

2] Ostler, The Plains Sioux, l7.

l7

actors outside the state, such as land speculators like the Ogden Company, transportation
developers, and mineral extraction industries.22 While these proﬁt-seeking individuals
and corporations often appealed to the federal government for assistance in their efforts
to rob Indians of their lands and resources, and undermine their rights of self-
govemment, state action itself was only one colonial weapon among the many they used,
including fraud, deception, misinformation, and sometimes outright violence. Following
the Civil War, however, the state became the active force in United States colonialism
through its land allotment and coercive assimilation programs. In this period, reformers
and policymakers sought to open Indian lands for settlement and development in an effort
to stimulate westward expansion and an economic windfall in the aftermath of the Civil
War and rather than appealing for colonialist action from the federal government, as they
had in the past, settlers, miners, developers, and land speculators beneﬁted from federal
legislation directly. The federal government itself proﬁted from the sale of unused
reservation lands throughout the allotment process. Unable to remove Indians further,
though, these reformers and policymakers worked to conﬁne them spatially on individual
land plots and socially through coercive assimilation.

Scholars of United States history are often reluctant to consider the nineteenth-
century a colonial period, but as analyses of colonialism have expanded, some historians
and theorists have begun to consider the ways in which the United States advanced a

variety of colonialist agendas throughout this period.23 Immediately after the Civil War,

 

22 While the removal policies of the 18305 might seem like an exception to this interpretation, it is
important to note Andrew Jackson was himself a land speculator and his administration’s efforts to remove
Indians was both motivated by and beneﬁted land speculators and developers.

23 See Amy Kaplan, “’Leﬁ Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of
American Culture,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1993). In this article, Kaplan asserted that America’s exclusion from postcolonial

l8

 

some historians assert that the state acted broadly as an active colonial agent, particularly
through Reconstruction programs and the Freedmen’s Bureau, and then in the West,
through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.24 In the late-18605, some policy-makers even
considered the annexation of Canada, parts of Latin America, and the Caribbean. By the
end of the century, United States colonial excursions extended westward to the Islands of

Hawai’i and the Philippines.25 Indian policy, understood within the larger context of this

 

studies has reiterated the popular notion that it existed outside the larger global history of colonial
expansion and resistance, rather than as an interrelated part of it. Several scholars have called for a
corrective to this older trend. The most inﬂuential general call for scholars to situate United States history
within the framework of global colonization studies is Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The
Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American
History 88, no. 3 (Dec. 2001): 829-865. Stoler also edited a larger volume of essays in which other
scholars attempted to demonstrate the analytical prospects of following her ideas. See Ann Laura Stoler ed,
Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press,
2006). One of the most inﬂuential suggestions for scholars to situate American Indian history within the
framework of global colonization studies is Frederick Hoxie, Parading through History: The Making of the
Crow Nation in America, 1805-1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). American Indian
activist/scholars have more readily asserted their interpretations of United States colonialism in recent
years. See for example Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
(Cambridge: South End Press, 2005) and Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and Michael Yellow Bird eds., For
Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 2005).

24 The classic text on Reconstruction and the Freedmen’s Bureau is Eric Foner, Reconstruction:
America ’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). For more see
Richardson, West from Appomattox; Paul Cimbala, Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen 's
Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, [865-1870 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Paul
Cimbala and Randall Miller eds., The F reedmen 's Bureau and Reconstruction (New York: F ordham Press,
1999). On settlement of the Western Territories, see Robert Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American
West, 1846-1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984); Robert Utley, Frontier Regulars:
The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891 (New York: Macmillan, 1974); Robert Wooster, The
Military and United States Indian Policy, 1865-1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988);Richard
White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A History of the American West (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1991); Robert Wooster, Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1993); Karen Merrill, “In Search of the ‘Federal Presence’ in the American
West,” Western Historical Quarterly 30 (Winter 1999): 449-474; Thomas Buecker, Fort Robinson and the
American West, 1874-1899 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); and Douglas McChristian,
Fort Bowie, Arizona: Combat Post of the Southwest, 1858-1894 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
2005).

25 In 1865-1866 the idea of American annexation played a key role in the development of the
confederation movement in Canada. In 1866 an annexation bill even passed the House of Representatives.
For more on Canadian confederation see Ged Martin, Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation,
1837-1867 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995); Christopher Moore, 186 7: How the
Fathers Made a Deal (Toronto: M&S, 1997); and Frederick Vaughan, The Canadian Federalist
Experiment: From Deﬁant Monarchy to Reluctant Republic (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press,
2003). For more on United States involvement in Latin America and the Caribbean in post-Civil War Era
see William Nelson, Almost a Territory: America's Attempt to Annex the Dominican Republic (Newark:

19

nineteenth-century colonial action suggests that Indian affairs were related to these more
visible and public agendas, both within and outside the nation.

Studying colonialism, however, is not a simple task and scholars can no longer
situate these events or historical actors within simplistic dichotomies, such as
domination/resistance, traditionalist/progressive, or accommodationist/hostile.26 Even
the formerly monolithic categories of colonizer and colonized, once relied upon by
scholars, are now understood as problematic.27

The chapters that follow focus upon the subtleties, nuances, and variances in
nineteenth-century Indian policies of the United States and rely on assumptions gleaned
from recent literature in colonization studies. First, colonial regimes were not
monolithic, but existed in a constant state of ﬂux. As colonial theorists Frederick Cooper

and Ann Stoler argued, “competing agendas for power, competing strategies for

 

University of Delaware Press, 1990); Steven Topik, Trade and Gunboats: The United States and Brazil in
the Age of Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Theodore Webb, Impassioned Brothers:
Ministers Resident to France and Paraguay (Lanham: University Press of America, 2002); David Healy,
James G. Blaine and Latin America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001); John J. Johnson, A
Hemisphere Apart: The Foundations of United States Policy Toward Latin America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1990); and Robert Holden and Eric Zolov eds., Latin America and the United
States: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For more on the annexation
of Hawai'i see Tom Coffman, A Nation Within: The Story of America's Annexation of Hawai ’i (Kane'oha:
EPI Center, 1998) and Noenoe Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American
Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). For more general studies of American Imperialism in
this time period see Ernest Paolino, The Foundations of American Empire: William Henry Seward and US.
Foreign Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973) and Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An
Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963); Eric T. Love,
Race Over Empire: Racism and US. Imperialism, [865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004); Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the
Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

26 Theorist Jurgen Osterhammel examined the ways in which the study of colonialism has shifted
over time. He argued that deﬁning the analytical terms of colonial studies holds profound import. See
Jurgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, trans. Shelley L. F risch (Princeton: Markus
Wiener Publishers, 1997), 4.

27 Jeffrey Ostler found that even when Sioux leaders acted in ways that have been constructed as
accommodationist, they often did in an effort to resist total assimilation domination. Ostler, The Plains
Sioux, 7.

20

maintaining control, and doubts about the legitimacy of the [colonial] venture” often
characterized these regimes.28 Individual reformers and reform organizations in the post-
Civil War period competed and struggled to gain or maintain power and authority within
the federal state structures and reﬂected these theorists’ contentions quite clearly.
Second, the “otherness” of colonized people was an unstable notion that had to be re-
evaluated and re-asserted frequently.29 Whether they provided opportunities for Native
people to participate in their reform campaigns, as did the reformers who supported
compensatory legislation, or attempted to demonstrate that they understood the best
interests of Indian people, better than Indian people themselves, as was the case with the
coercive assimilationists, the “otherness” of Indian people was a constant source of
contestation. The concept of “resistance” requires critical analysis as well. At crucial
moments in the nineteenth-century United States the needs and interests of Native leaders
converged with those of the Washington bureaucrats and Indian agents. Within these
moments it was not uncommon for leaders who often fought against government
programs to support their implementation and administration, for example, Red Cloud,

the Oglala Sioux leader supported BIA-run schools and the institutionalization of Euro-

 

28 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of
Rule,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (Nov., 1989): 609-621, 609. See also Ann Laura Stoler,
“Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of
Intimacy in North American History ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006): 1-23;
Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, Power (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005), 26-32. .

29 Cooper and Stoler, “Tensions of Empire,” 610. See also Ann Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts
and Racial Frontiers: Cultural Competence and the Dangers of Metissage” in Carnal Knowledge and
Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002): 79-111, 79; Uday Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” in Tensions of Empire:
ColonialCultures in a Bourgeois World eds. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997).

21

American agricultural practices among the Lakota, and Ely Parker suggested the BIA be
transferred into the War Department.30

In the post-Civil War era, reformers also varied in the lengths to which they
wished to extend dispossession and coercive assimilation policies. Some reformers
believed that the only answer to the “Indian Problem” was the complete and total
assimilation of Native people and usurpation of indigenous sovereignty, while others
envisioned a relationship between the state and its wards as one in which “the sovereign
aims toward a mutual, an organic relationship with the people being governed.” These
reformers, like those who championed compensatory legislation, might support state-
sponsored education for Indian children or the restructure of customary practices of
governance in Indian communities, but they did not envision the complete usurpation of
indigenous sovereignty.3 ' Finally, the events and actions examined in these chapters
reafﬁrrn the assertion that the history of colonialism is both a story of conquest and
territorial acquisition and a story of the development of state structures and bureaucratic

mechanisms within the federal government.32

 

30 Osterhammel referred to this process as the “convergence of interests.” Osterhammel,
Colonialism, 64.

31 My understanding of direct and indirect colonialism is inﬂuenced greatly by Akim Reinhardt’s
study of John Collier and his reform program in the 19305 BIA. Reinhardt argued that Collier differed
from other policymakers in the allotment period because he supported indirect colonial measures similar to
those of the British in India. His Indian New Deal programs were modeled on these structures. 1 have
found, in my study of reformers leading up to the allotment period, that the notions of indirect colonialism
existed, though in a less articulated form, much earlier than Collier’s administration. See Akim Reinhardt,
“A Crude Replacement: The Indian New Deal, Indirect Colonialism, and Pine Ridge Reservation,” Journal
of Colonialism and Colonial History 6, no. 1 (2005).

32 Osterhammel asserted that the process of colonialism could be best understood as “a history of
the gradual emergence of state structures and societal forms and their geographic expansion or contraction
within nominally claimed regions.” See Osterhammel, Colonialism, 28.

22

It is impossible to study the history of Indian/white relations in the United States
without acknowledging the signiﬁcance of power relationships and notions of authority
as they existed between and among Indian agents, bureaucrats, and Indian people
themselves. For my purposes, power represents the ability of one person or a group of
people to establish and shape the parameters within which other people acted. Authority
refers to the ability to make these parameters ﬁrm.33 The following chapters suggest,
though, that these were contested notions and that within the bureaucratic framework of
the government, Indian agents, military officials, legislators, and reformers, as well as
individuals within Indian communities struggled against one another to assert both power
and authority. It is also important to recognize that as these people struggled, they did
not do so on a level playing ﬁeld. Political and economic structures placed Indian people
at a disadvantage in nineteenth-century society, but this fact makes understanding the
actions of Indian leaders as they engaged in political debates with agents of the BIA even

more critical.

 

33 The study of power and authority within the context of colonialism has developed signiﬁcantly
in the past thirty years. In particular scholars have approached this topic along two related trajectories. On
one hand, they have studied how agents of the state exercised power over colonized populations in different
geographical contexts. For this approach see Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Revelation and
Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991); Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women ’s Travel Writing and
Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991); and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). On the other hand, historians and anthropologists have
begun to focus more closely on how power and authority were deﬁned within colonized populations. For
this approach see Raymond F ogelson and Richard Adams, eds. The Anthropology of Power: Ethnographic
Studies from Asia, Oceania, and the New World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Mary W.
Helms, Ulysses ’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographic Distance
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Gregory Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American
Indian Struggle for Unity, 1740-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1991); Geoffrey White and Lamont
Lindstrom, Chiefs Today: Traditional Pacific Leadership and the Postcolonial State (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997); Eric Wolf, Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999); and Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and
the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

23

Questions
This dissertation raises several questions about the study of Indian history and

about the opportunities this ﬁeld provides to reframe larger issues in United States
historiography. First, in an effort to reject an older historiographical approach that
privileged the experiences of the United States government and government ofﬁcials,
Native and non-Native scholars have produced studies of the particular histories and
unique circumstances of individual Indian communities.34 On one hand, this trend has
revealed the richness and depth of the Indian experience in American history, yet on the
other, because it limits the ability to synthesize or demonstrate the connections Indian
people had to the larger nation, it has the potential to make the study of Indian history a
marginalized, insular, and ignorable ﬁeld. My project asks: how can we continue to
honor the unique and important histories of individual tribal nations and Indian
communities, while simultaneously recognizing that the Indian experience in the
nineteenth century shaped the United States in profound ways? One potential analytical
approach might be to examine how a localized issue had broader national implications.
Along these lines, I analyze the connections between a unique controversy, namely the

Ogden Land dispute at the Tonawanda reservation, and the reform agenda of the Peace

 

34 Some of the best examples of the classic, “top-down” approach include Loring Benson Priest,
Uncle Sam ’s Stepchildren: The Reformation of United States Indian Policy, 1 865-1887 (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1942); Francis Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis; Edmund Danziger, The
Indians and the Bureaucrats: Administering the Reservation Policy during the Civil War (U rbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1974); Francis Prucha, The Great Father; Fred Hoxie, A Final Promise. Some
of the best examples of the community-based approach include Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of
Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979); Richter, The Ordeal of the
Longhouse; Michael McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and its Peoples, 1724-1774
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992): Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South
Carolinians Through the Era of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Hoxie, Parading
Through History; Jean O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick,
Massachusetts, 1650-1 790 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Rebecca Kugel, To Be the Main
Leaders of Our People: A History of Minnesota Ojibwe Politics, 1825-1898 (East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press, 1998); Saunt, A New Order of Things; Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age,
1750-1830 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

24

Policy on the national level. Although separated by time and space these developments
suggest that it was the political education Ely Parker received during the land dispute that
provided the foundation upon which the Peace Policy was built. From these events in the
18405 and 18505, Parker came to recognize, on a close, personal level, the fundamental
ways that dispossession and colonial action could disrupt an Indian community. Parker
was realistic and understood, as the nineteenth century progressed, that United States
colonialism would likely continue, but he designed a reform agenda that sought to
minimize the disruptions this process caused for Native people. He did this by trying to
create policies that would protect Indian communities as distinct entities, and that would
provide educational and employment opportunities, as well as money and goods in an
effort to compensate for the disruptions related to dispossession. He believed that these
opportunities could help Native people assimilate into mainstream society on their own
terms, in their own time. Approaching the study of Indian history in this way
demonstrates the interconnectedness of local events and national developments.

Second, this project problematizes the established narratives about Ely Parker,
like those of other prominent Indian leaders who worked within non-Native structures of
governance, as an indigenous “sellout.” I suggest that Parker was an innovative
policymaker who wedded an indigenous worldview with a western intellectual
framework. He also, however, underestimated the level to which the state had shifted
toward a system of disruptive, coercive assimilation by the early-18705. Viewed within
the context of the evolving nineteenth-century state, his efforts to reform BIA corruption,
to create policies, and to expand indigenous educational opportunities can more

appropriately be interpreted as a “path not taken,” rather than an abandonment of an

25

indigenous heritage. Parker’s life is also illustrative of the tensions and conﬂicts that
surrounded nineteenth-century indigenous leaders who sought to resist dispossession and
cultural disruption by working with the mainstream structures of governance.

This dissertation also asks how the events, debates, and conﬂicts of the mid-to-
late nineteenth century shaped Indian policy in the twentieth century. Examining
Parker’s Indian-centered reform framework suggests that early-twentieth century
developments that resulted in the creation of the Indian New Deal, had their foundation in
intellectual traditions from the immediate post-Civil War period.” As he attempted to
work within and reform the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the late-18605 and early-18705,
Parker fought against those who saw dispossession and coercive assimilation as the only
appropriate goals of federal Indian policy. Although he lost the political battles in this
period, his ideas evolved through the work of Thomas Bland and the National Indian
Defense Association in the 18805 as they battled against a new generation of coercive
assimilationists. Finally, after several dark decades during the allotment period, John
Collier emerged as a champion of compensatory legislation for Indian communities.
Although none of these individuals appear to have known each other directly, their policy
agendas and notions of reform drew from the same framework that Parker established in
the aftermath of the Civil War.

Finally, by focusing on the development of Indian policy in the post-Civil War
period this project also asks questions about the broader narratives of state development

in the United States. First, it asks how and why so many reformers saw the

 

35 The only lengthy study of Collier’s life and career is Lawrence Kelly, The Assault on
Assimilation: John Collier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1983).

26

Reconstruction era as a potential moment of optimism for the reconﬁguration of racial
politics as they pertained to American Indian people. It also asks why this moment was
brief and ﬂeeting. The chronology of this study, however, also spans the period between
the Reconstruction and Progressive Eras. Narratives of American state development
generally focus on the signiﬁcance of the Civil War and Reconstruction and then jump
forward to urban social and political reforms and the bureaucratic innovations of the
Progressive Era.36 The mid— to late- nineteenth-century BIA, however, served as a crucial
meeting ground for ideologies of governmental authority and its development not only
demonstrated the lengths to which the federal government was willing to experiment in
this period, as policymakers allowed the state to take on increasingly active functions, but
also shows the evolution of social policymaking from the hybrid public and private
character of Reconstruction programs to the institutionalized federal compensatory

programs of the early-twentieth century.37 Highlighting the primacy of the BIA in this

 

36 Scholars of American Political Development suggest that re-evaluating the evolution of the
state in the nineteenth century is of critical scholarly importance. See William Leuchtenburg, “The
Pertinence of Political History: Reﬂections on the Signiﬁcance of the State in America,” Journal of
American History 73, no. 3 (1986): 585-600. For a good overview of the history and current direction of
the APD school see Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Among the best examples of APD scholarship see
Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative
Capabilities, 1877-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Richard Bensel, Yankee
Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social
Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 1992); William Novak, The
People ’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995); Elisabeth Clemens, The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of
Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

37 At this point there is only one monograph length study of the development of the Bureau of
Indian Affairs in this period. It is primarily an institutional history that does not thoroughly contextual its
subject. See Paul Stuart, The Indian Office: Growth and Development of an American Institution, 1865-
1900 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1979). A recent dissertation by Cathleen Cahill seeks to broaden and
deepen the scholarly understanding of this development, in particular by focusing on the role of women in
the Indian Service. See Cathleen Cahill, “’Only the Home Can Found a State:’ Gender, Labor, and the
Federal Indian Service, 1869-1928,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2004). Her introduction situates

27

“V

Cr

I—‘a

evolution and recognizing how some state-centered social policymaking was modeled
ﬁrst in Indian policy suggests that recognizing the importance of the Native American
experience in this era is critical to understanding mid— to late-nineteenth century United

States history.

In order to begin understanding how an evolving and increasingly pervasive American
colonialist ideology shaped nineteenth-century Indian affairs, the ﬁrst part of this
dissertation examines a local community controversy and the signiﬁcance its legacy
played in the development of national level Indian policy later in the nineteenth century.
Chapter One examines Ely Parker's political socialization and education in the unique
Western New York State political environment and argues that his early experiences
there, particularly the cooperation between Native and non-Native people during the
Ogden Land dispute, the signiﬁcance of land speculators and business interests
inﬂuencing state policy, and his growing interest in developing efficient and impartial
bureaucratization as a reform strategy, shaped his policy agenda at the federal level, but
also demonstrated the ways in which dispossession and threats of removal profoundly
affected customary notions of power and authority within Indian communities. It was
this experience that suggested to Parker the possibilities of compensatory legislation.
The next two chapters focus closely on Parker’s experiences as an Indian leader
within the social and cultural framework of nineteenth-century American society.
Chapter Two examines the relationships that Parker formed with Lewis Henry Morgan in

his early life, and Harriet Maxwell Converse after his term as Commissioner of Indian

 

the BIA within these broader federal developments very clearly, and has been inﬂuential in my thinking.
See pages 3-4.

28

Affairs, as well as the scholarly interpretations of his life. While many scholars,
inﬂuenced by Arthur C. Parker’s biography of his great-uncle Ely, have interpreted
Parker as a man torn between Native and non-Native identities, his relationships with
prominent ethnographers throughout the nineteenth century suggest otherwise. He
maintained an active engagement with popular notions and depictions of Indians and
while he highlighted certain characteristics or traits that reﬂected these notions as they
shifted and evolved, he also demonstrated a consistent public persona as a Seneca man.
Both Lewis Henry Morgan and Harriet Maxwell Converse supported Indian interests and
in their research, writing, and activism, they opposed those who sought to dispossess and
coercively assimilate Indian people. They shared in Parker’s political ideals and through
the information and insights he provided, they positioned themselves as experts on Indian
history and culture in the nineteenth century. While Parker’s relationships with these two
ethnographers, separated by several decades, differed in subtle ways, they also revealed
his consistent effort to associate with individuals who supported Indian people and Indian
communities.

During his youth and later adulthood Parker found success and public acceptance,
at least in part, through his connections to prominent ethnographers, in the interim
though, as a young adult and a middle-aged man, his association with Union General US.
Grant and his marriage to a young, white socialite shaped his career path and
opportunities. Chapter Three uses the public spectacle of the Ely Parker / Minnie Sackett
wedding as a lens for understanding public perceptions and the tensions present in
instances of intermarriage in this period. In this interim period in the middle of the

nineteenth-century, Parker continued to engage with popular notions of Indian people, at

29

times supporting mainstream depictions, while at other times challenging them through
rhetoric, reform, and his own public persona. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil
War, Parker found, in Washington DC, much success and a public audience that was,
though curious, willing to accept him. He and his young, white wife became ﬁxtures in
Washington DC society and Parker rose to become a signiﬁcant federal policymaker.
While to the DC public he came to epitomize the standards and ideals of middle-class
Victorian manhood, he continued to understand himself as a Seneca leader.

In the ﬁnal three chapters of this dissertation, the analytical scope is expanded
signiﬁcantly to examine how social policies came to shape colonial governance in the
mid- to late- nineteenth century, as well as the position of Indian people within this
process. Chapter Four examines the signiﬁcant role Ely Parker, the ﬁrst Native
American Commissioner of Indian Affairs, played in the creation and development of the
Peace Policy. It argues that although various scholars have attempted to characterize it as
an exclusively religious, military or humanitarian movement, the one key element that
united all of the disparate parts of the policy was its attempt to end corruption and
mismanagement through bureaucratization, public oversight, and the development of
compensatory legislation. These were strategies that Parker developed early in his
political life, and he designed this agenda to address the place of Indian communities in
an increasingly complex political, legal, and social nation within a context of federal
reform.

Chapter Five argues that the early Peace Policy era represented a moment of
possibility for radical change in the direction of Indian affairs - especially through the

reform agenda of a signiﬁcant Native American leader, and through public oversight of

30

policy administration. While the mechanisms of the policy appear disjointed and
contradictory, it is clear that there were two overarching philosophies, one championed
by Parker, the other by William Welsh and the Board of Indian Commissioners. These
political philosophies, though part of the overarching project of reform in the nineteenth-
century nation, differed from each other in subtle, yet signiﬁcant ways. Ultimately and
unfortunately, the contentiousness of the conﬂicting visions for the role and
responsibilities of the Bureau of Indian Affairs that emerged in the creation and
administration of this policy effectively ended this optimistic period for Indian
communities and provided the foundation for the allotment program, the ultimate colonial
policy that conﬁned Indians spatially, politically, economically, and socially in the late-
nineteenth century.

Finally, Chapter Six examines the generation of Indian policy reformers that
followed Ely Parker and William Welsh. It argues that, by the late-nineteenth century,
Indian policy reform evolved into conﬂicts over notions of state-centered social-
policymaking and reformers, far from being like-minded activists as most scholars have
constructed them, they clashed bitterly over several related issues. The most crucial
disputes involved deﬁnitions of citizenship, especially the economic and social privileges
and responsibilities that citizenship entailed, the role of the state as an active or passive

institution, and the relationship between Indians and the government.

31

Chapter 1

Conﬁning Tonawanda: The Ogden Land Dispute and the
Political Education of an Indigenous Leader

[Our] positions are not now what was assumed by Chiefs 50 or 75 years ago,
then they had time to consult one another but now we have to act the moment we
think, or else our affairs must frequently suffer.
Ely 5. Parker, 1852'

At the end of the American Revolution, western New York was contested territory. By
1790, many of the eastern nations of the Iroquois confederacy, particularly the Oneida
and Onondaga sold their land to the state, but the Seneca still retained considerable tracts
in the west. Simultaneously, both Massachusetts and New York also claimed this land,
the former through the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, the latter through a
royal grant to the Duke of York. When these two states met in Hartford, Connecticut in
1786, Massachusetts transferred their claim to political rights within the disputed ground
to New York in exchange for the pre-emptive rights to the soil. Thus, the Seneca
homeland fell into New York’s political boundaries. If the Seneca chose to sell their
lands, however, Massachusetts would proﬁt from them. This pre-emptive right changed
hands several times during the subsequent decades. Individual land speculators Oliver
Phelps, Nathaniel Gorham, and Robert Morris ﬁrst purchased the land rights from

Massachusetts and, in 1797, members of the Morris family negotiated the Treaty of Big

Tree, under which the Seneca sold all of their western New York territory except large

 

1 Ely S. Parker to "Sir Isaac" Newton Parker, 22 June 1852, Box 3 - 1849-1852, Ely S. Parker
Papers, APS. See also Conable, "A Steady Enemy," 318.

32

 

 

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Figure 3: Seneca Lands Remaining after the Treaty of Big Tree (1797)
Source: Laurence Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests, 93

33

 

 

reservations on the Buffalo Creek, Allegany River, Tonawanda Creek, Cattaraugus
Creek, and Genesee River. Morris subsequently sold the pre-emptive right to the Holland
Land Company. This company, in 1810, transferred these rights to David Ogden and the
Ogden Land Company. 2

By the late-17005 and the early-18005, both New York State and the United States
attempted to establish political and legal jurisdiction over the Seneca. The Albany
Legislature passed laws to control the liquor trade and to punish white intruders on Indian
land. Legislators also tried to extend New York criminal law over reservation
inhabitants, especially after Tommy Jemmy, a Seneca chief and follower of the Seneca
prophet Handsome Lake, ritually executed Caughquautaugh in 1821.3 Caughquautaugh
had been convicted of witchcraft by the Seneca and local non-Natives, outraged by the
act, pressured the state legislature to impose state legal codes on the Indians.4
Meanwhile, the United States established jurisdiction over the Seneca in the Treaty of
1794. In a signiﬁcant break from tradition, this treaty dealt separately with each Iroquois
nation, rather than as a whole confederacy.

In the early-nineteenth century, Quakers - both Hicksite and Orthodox -
established missions and schools on the western New York reservations, while the Ogden

Company struggled to proﬁt from their land speculation by encouraging the Seneca to

 

2 Mary H. Conable, "A Steady Enemy: The Ogden Land Company and the Seneca Indians," (PhD
diss., University of Rochester, 1994), Chap 1: "The Beginnings of the Struggle." For more on the Holland
Land Company see William Chazanof, Joseph Ellicott and the Holland Land Company: The Opening of
Western New York (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1970), and William Wyckoff, The Developer's
Frontier: The Making of the Western New York Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

3 For more on Handsome Lake, see Wallace, Death and Rebirth 1969).

4 Laurence M. Haupttnan, A Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New
York State (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 115.

34

part with their remaining lands.5 Thomas L. Ogden, suggested to Quaker missionaries,
that all of the New York Seneca move onto the Allegany reservation.6 The missionaries
though, believed that Allegany land could not sustain the entire Seneca population and
opposed the land speculators. Still trying to proﬁt from their investment in 1819, the
Ogden Company drafted a proposal to forcibly remove all the Seneca to Allegany, but the
Indians, supported by Quaker missionaries resisted their efforts. Cities along the Erie
Canal expanded in the 18205 and by the early-18305 land values had increased
dramatically, especially those on the Buffalo Creek Reservation which bordered and
essentially hemmed-in the city of Buffalo. 7

The Ogden Company capitalized upon the population growth in Buffalo and
appealed to legislators who supported the emerging national-level Indian removal
policies. Red Jacket, Complanter, Handsome Lake, and Governor Blacksnake, as well as
other prominent Seneca leaders rejected many offers to sell their remaining lands in New
York; however, individualistic interests, factionalism, confusion, and occasional fatalism

instigated by Ogden and the state commissioners, resulted in important land cession

 

5 For more on Quaker efforts to create schools see Mark A. Nicholas, "A Little School, A
Reservation Divided: Quaker Education and the Allegany Seneca Leadership in the Early American
Republic," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 30, no. 3 (2006):1-21; David Swalzer, A Friend
Among the Senecas: The Quaker Mission to Cornplanter's People (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books,
2000); Lois Barton, A Quaker Promise Kept: Philadelphia F riends' Work with the Allegany Senecas
(Eugene, OR: Spencer Butte Press, 1990).

6 The Allegany Reservation was second smallest of the four major western New York reserves,
covering roughly 30,500 acres. Cattaraugus was the smallest at 28,000 acres, while Tonawanda at 46,200
acres and Buffalo Creek consisting of 83,500 acres were the largest. See Conable, "A Steady Enemy," 9-
10.

7 See Conable, "A Stead Enemy," Chap. 2: "The First Attempt: Concentration, 1819." See also
Hauptman, A Conspiracy of Interests, especially Part 2: "The Seneca Country."

35

treaties in 1826 and later in 1838.8 In the 1826 treaty, the Seneca ceded all of their
remaining lands in the Genesee Valley and agreed to a reduction of the Tonawanda,
Cattaraugus, and Buffalo Creek reservations.9 Indian leaders, most notably Red Jacket,
argued that they never truly supported the treaty and without senate ratiﬁcation, it held no
power. Prominent Senecas later charged that United States commissioners, inﬂuenced by
Ogden officials, coerced them to sign by threatening that federal legislation would
remove them forcibly and would not provide compensation for their land. 10 Despite these
problems, the 1826 treaty and its land cessions stood.ll

The election of Andrew Jackson and his vice president, New Yorker Martin Van
Buren, emboldened the Ogden Company after its 1826 “victory.” By the early-18305,
Buffalo continued to ﬂourish and became a center for both lake and canal shipping.
Ogden Company trustees, Thomas L. Ogden and Joseph Fellows, planned to make
additional Indian lands available for non-Native development. Historian Laurence
Hauptrnan called the 1838 Buffalo Creek Treaty “one of the major frauds in American
Indian history, ranking in notoriety with the Walking Purchase of 1737 with the

Delaware, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek of 1830 with the Choctaw, and the Treaty

 

8 For more on New York Seneca factionalism, see Thomas S. Abler, "Seneca Moieties and
Heredity Chieﬁainships: The Early-Nineteenth-Century Political Organization of an Iroquois Nation,"
Ethnohistory 51, no. 3 (2004): 459-488; Thomas S. Abler, "Friends, Factions, and the Seneca Revolution of
1848," Niagara Frontier 21 (1974): 74-79; and Thomas S. Abler, "Factional Dispute and Party Conﬂict in
the Political System of the Seneca Nation (1845-1895): An Ethnohistorical Analysis" (Ph.D diss.,
University of Toronto, 1969).

9 The total land base reduction was 86,887 acres. See Hauptman, A Conspiracy of Interests, 155.

10 For more on the campaign against the 1826 treaty, see Henry Manley, "Red Jacket's Last
Campaign," New York History 31 (1950): 149-168.

H Hauptman, A Conspiracy of Interests, 154-161. See also Conable, "A Steady Enemy," Chap. 3:
"Land for Peace, 1826."

36

of New Echota of 1835 with the Cherokee.”12 In the treaty negotiations three Ogden
Company ofﬁcials, James W. Stryker, Ransom H. Gillet, and John F. Sherrnerhorn, used
alcohol, bribery, forgery, threats, misinformation, and a disregard for customary Seneca
governmental practices to dispossess the Indians of all their remaining New York lands
except the unoccupied, one square mile Oil Spring Reservation, as well as their rights to
Wisconsin lands purchased for them by the United States. In return, the Ogden Company
paid them $202,000 and the federal government provided a large reservation on lands
west of Missouri, to be settled by all of the Iroquois nations.l3 Almost immediately
Quakers in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia ﬁled charges of fraud against the
Ogden Land Company. Seneca groups claimed that most Iroquois did not support the
treaty and that only a minority actually signed it.14

In 1842, after four years of intense protest, federal, state, and Ogden Company

representatives once again met with the Seneca at Buffalo Creek. This time they drafted

 

12 Hauptman, A Conspiracy of Interests, 176. For a thorough discussion of Jacksonian Indian
policy see Ronald Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1975). For a more "apologetic" examination of Jackson and his legacy in Indian history see Robert
Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Viking Publishers, 2001).

'3 All three of the Company officials were also Democratic Party loyalists and eastern New
Yorkers. Stryker, a US Indian subagent, defrauded New York Indians, mostly the Seneca, of
approximately $30,000 worth of annuity payments between the late-18305 and 1850. Schermerhom aided
Andrew Jackson's removal policies more than any other man, notably for the Cherokee of Georgia and
Iroquois of New York. His skill in this arena stemmed from an ability to create internal chaos among
Indian communities. Gillet, a one-time Democratic Congressman from Ogdenburg, secured the treaty, but
when later allegations of fraud emerged, he escaped blame. For more see Kalrnan Goldstein, "The Albany
Regency: The Failure of Practical Politics" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1969); James W. Van
Hoeven, "Salvation and Indian Removal: The Career Biography of Rev. John Freeman Schennerhom,
Indian Commissioner" (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1972); and John Garraty, Silas Wright (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1949).

'4 Hauptman, A Conspiracy of Interests, 178-190. See also Conable, "A Steady Enemy," Chap. 5:
"The Treaty of Buffalo Creek, 1838," and Henry Manley, "Buying Buffalo from the Indians," New York
History 28 (July 1947): 313-329. For more on the city of Buffalo see David A. Gerber, The Making of an
American Pluralism: Buﬂalo, New York, 1825-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989) and Mark
Goldman, High Hopes: The Rise and Decline of Buffalo (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1983)

37

a compromise treaty that returned the Allegany and Cattaraugus reservations to the
Indians, but did not return either Buffalo Creek or Tonawanda.‘5 While the Ogden
Company proﬁted ﬁnancially from the second treaty, New York Whigs and Hicksite
Quakers, as the primary architects of the negotiations, created an alliance and reshaped
state-level Indian policy. In the treaty they established themselves as the political,
educational, and spiritual “fathers” of the Seneca. In fact, Laurence Hauptman has
suggested that the treaty be called “the New York Whig-Hicksite Friend Compromise of
1842 that affected the Seneca.”16 As they had with the previous treaty, the Tonawanda
Seneca refused to sign the 1842 compromise agreement. At critical moments during the
negotiations prominent Tonawanda leaders spoke out against the proceedings and those
Seneca who signed the document. In so doing, they separated themselves from the
communities at Allegany and Cattaraugus, a political move that proved signiﬁcant later
in the 18405 and throughout the 18505.17

Born in 1828, Ely Parker was too young to play a role in either the 1838 or 1842
treaty. In 1844, though, Tonawanda elders recognized Parker’s talent for the English
language and began to employ his services as an interpreter for petitions and protests, and

he frequently accompanied them to Albany and Washington DC to meet with prominent

 

'5 The 1842 treaty is most often referred to as the supplemental treaty or the compromise treaty.
Throughout this chapter 1 use the term “compromise treaty.”

16 Hauptman, A Conspiracy of Interests, 212.

17 See Conable, "A Steady Enemy," Chap 8: "Compromise, 1842," and Nicholas, Chap. 4 " The
Full Emergence of the Seneca New Order." See also "Petition from the Tonawanda Women to President
John Tyler," n.d., Box 2: Correspondence, Dec. 1817-Aug. 1845, Isaac and Amy Post Family Papers, Rare
Books, Special Collections, and Preservation , Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester, Rochester,
New York. (Subsequent citation RRL-UR).

38

1'
i

ll
9
.5

 

Figure 4: Parker as a Youth, ca. 1840
Source: William Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 2

39

political leaders. Parker also descended from a politically powerful Tonawanda family
and belonged to the Wolf Clan. As early as the mid-18405 he began to shape the
Tonawanda resistance campaign against the Ogden Land Company.

Later in his life, a 32-year-old Ely Parker reﬂected on his youth and
accomplishments. “I am. . .relieved of a great responsibility, which was shouldered upon
me when yet a mere youth, the weight of which, I fear, has made me prematurely old,” he
wrote.18 The “great responsibility” to which Parker referred was his role as the principle
spokesperson for the Tonawanda Seneca in their land dispute with the Ogden Land
Company. The dispute shaped Tonawanda history in profound ways, and although
Parker may have felt “prematurely old” in its aftermath, this experience provided him
With an important political education and motivated the young leader to develop concepts
0f Native-white relations and governance that, within a decade, shaped his national
re form agenda.

This chapter examines the Ogden land dispute to illustrate how local
coIltroversies and dispossession could affect community-based notions of power and
authority, and the role that Ely Parker played in representing Native interests at the
private, state, and federal levels.19 As he participated in the Tonawanda resistance
cal'l’lpaign against the Ogden Land Company, Parker divided his time between the halls of

government in Albany and Washington DC, and the council house at Tonawanda.
\

2 ‘8 Ely S. Parker to Benjamin Wilcox, former teacher, Yates Academy, 10 September 1860, Folder
‘ Correspondence, 1855-1890, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1846-1924, RRL-UR.

‘9 Removal efforts, as Mark A. Nicholas asserted in his recent dissertation, shaped Indian
ggvel‘nance in signiﬁcant ways that scholars have not yet fully recognized. Most of the scholarship in this
ection has focused on Indians in the Southeast. See O'Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age; Saunt, A
P 8)” Order of Things; and William G. McLaughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton:
81th ceton University Press, 1992). Nicholas completed his dissertation at Lehigh University in 2006, and
Se Ough I have been unable to acquire a complete copy, his chapter entitled "The Full Emergence of the
neca New Order," has inﬂuenced my thinking in this analysis.

40

During this period he developed theories of governance at the reservation and federal
levels based upon a recognition and protection of Indian sovereignty, and a belief in the
value of an efﬁcient and impartial bureaucracy. He also developed a framework for his
vision of the proper relationship between the federal government and Indian people in
which the BIA would provide educational, employment, and economic development
opportunities to Native communities to compensate for dispossession and the history of
colonialism. In the post-Civil War period, these ideas provided the basis for Parker’s

reform agenda in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The Ogden Company and the Disruption of an Indian Community
In the 1830s state, federal and private interests in the eastern United States banded

together in a lethal alliance that skillfully dispossessed and removed many Indian groups
to reserved lands in the west. By the time of the Buffalo Creek Treaty, however, Andrew
Jackson no longer held the presidency and his successor, Martin Van Buren, struggled to
control the Democratic Party in the face of the Panic of 1837 - especially in New York
State.20 In fact, the 1842 compromise treaty demonstrated New York Whigs' willingness
to abandon the colonial policy of removal and replace it with a cost-effective
“civilization” campaign led by Quaker missionaries.21 First as an interpreter and later as
a leader in his own right, Ely Parker recognized that it was the Ogden Company that

posed the real and immediate danger to his community, while state and federal legal

 

20 For more on the political impact of the Panic of 1837 see Reeve Huston, Land and Freedom:
Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000); Charles McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics, 1839-1865 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Thomas Summerhill, Harvest of Dissent: Agrarianism in
Nineteenth-Century New York (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).

2' Hauptman, A Conspiracy of Interests, 210-212.

41

doctrines coupled with sympathetic politicians provided some safeguards for Indian
people. He shaped the Tonawanda resistance campaign with these ideas in mind.
Simultaneously, he also began to realize the potential utility that state and federal
bureaucratic agencies held for Indian communities.

Early in their resistance campaign Tonawanda leaders such as Two Guns and
Jimmy Johnson appealed to prominent national statesmen, especially Whigs, asking them
to support the Seneca. In a letter to Henry Clay, Two Guns asked, aﬁer acknowledging
Clay's sympathies for the Indians, that the senator exert himself “powerfully” on their
behalf so that they would not be “driven to the painful alternative of accepting the

”22 When Parker began to serve as an interpreter in 1844, he

western country.
immediately addressed the enforcement of the Ogden treaties. He learned from Thomas
Hartley Crawford, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, that neither the War Department
nor the Ofﬁce of Indian Affairs had the power to do so. Parker elatedly wrote to his

father, “the United States say they have no power whatever to enforce this treaty.”23
Soon after, New York Governor, William Bouck, and Massachusetts Governor, George

Briggs, both assured Tonawanda leaders that they had neither the power nor the interest

to implement the treaty stipulations.24 By the mid-1840s it was clear that government

 

22 Two Guns (Seneca) to Henry Clay, 1838(7), Box 1 - 1794-1845, Ely S. Parker Papers,
American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA. (Subsequent citation APS.)

23 T. Hartley Crawford to Messrs. Cook and Love, 4 January 1844, Box 1 - 1794-1845, Ely s.
Parker Papers, APS; and Ely S. Parker to William Parker, 29 January 1844, Box 1 - 1794-1845, Ely S.
Parker Papers, APS.

2“ w.C. Bouck to Chiefs Blacksmith and Jimmy Johnson, 17 June 1844, Box 1 - 1794-1845, Ely
S. Parker Papers, APS; and John G. Paerpery [Palfrey] to John Blacksmith and others, 12 October 1844,
Box I - 1794-1845, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS. Although Massachusetts sold its pre-emptive rights to the
Seneca lands, it maintained a right to employ a commissioner to witness any proceedings between the
Indians and future preemptors, such as the Ogden Company, to ensure the legality and fairness of the

42

 

ofﬁcials would not forcibly remove the Seneca as they had the Cherokee, several years
earlier. The Ogden Company, though, moved non-Native settlers onto the reservation
lands, confiscated improvements such as saw mills, fenced lots, and fields, and
continually sent or threatened to send appraisers to judge the value of the various lands,
structures, and resources to comply with the treaty provisions.

The Ogden Company's threats of dispossession represented the most urgent and
prominent concern for Parker and his community. In 1845 they sent an appeal to Silas
Wright, the new governor of New York, alleging that the company sold their lands at a
public auction and that settlers were moving onto the reserve en masse. The governor
warned them to refrain from attacking the settlers, and to wait until the validity of the
treaties had been determined, before taking other actions. Simultaneously, though,
Joseph Fellows, the Ogden Trustee, wrote to Parker that “a great deal of money and much
vexation will be saved by avoiding litigation in the Courts which must eventually result
in disappointment to the Tonawandas.”25 Despite this warning, Seneca leaders again
petitioned Governor Wright, this time asserting that the Ogden settlers “dispossess us of
large quantities of our forest lands. . . [and] of improvements actually made by our own
hands.” And, citing the New York Constitution of 1821, they asked that the Genesee
County District Attorney enter formal complaints against the intruders.26 Based on these

mid-18403 developments, Parker helped create a three-pronged resistance strategy for the

 

transactions. In the Buffalo Creek Treaty Period General Henry Dearbom ﬁlled this role. For more see
"Journals of Henry A.S. Dearbom" Proceedings of the Buﬂalo Historical Society V11 (1904): 35-228.

25 Tonawanda Chiefs to Governor Wright, 22 February 1845, Box 1 - I794-1845, Ely S. Parker
Papers, APS; Silas Wright to Tonawanda Chiefs, 4 April 1846, Box 2 - I846-I848, Ely S. Parker Papers,
APS; and Joseph Fellows to Ely S. Parker, 7 November 1845, Box I - 1794-1845, Ely S. Parker Papers,
APS.

26 Petition from Tonawanda Leaders to the Governor of New York, 1846, Folder 12842, Ely S.
Parker Papers, New York State Library, Albany, NY. (Subsequent citation NYSL).

43

Tonawanda that involved physically blocking additional attempts at settlement and
appraisement, applying for judicial action to remove trespassers at the state level, and
continuing his appeals to national level politicians to ofﬁcially invalidate the treaties
through the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.

Articles four and ﬁve of the 1842 compromise treaty stated that prior to removal,
two arbitrators had to survey and assign monetary values to all unsettled and improved
lands on the Buffalo Creek and Tonawanda reserves.27 Parker reasoned that if this
process could not be carried out, provided that neither the state nor the federal
government forced the Indians to assent, then the treaties could not be honored. He
therefore counseled community members to resist the arbitrators, refuse any
improvement moneys, and defend against any settlement by non-Natives. Allowing any
of these things to take place, Parker recognized, could be constructed as an assent to the
treaties. In a letter to his father from Yates Academy, Parker wrote that his advice “for
the present would be for the Tonawandas to hold to their lands repelling every individual
who should attempt by fraud and deceit to remove them.”28 Later, Parker's brother
Nicholson and several other community members, following his advice, planted crops in
a ﬁeld cleared by a non-Native settler. The Genesee County sheriff arrested the Seneca
men for trespassing and transported them to Batavia.29 The settler eventually withdrew

the charge. In 1849, Judge Thomas C. Love, one of the Ogden arbitrators, vacated his

 

27 Charles J. Kappler ed., Indian Aﬂairs: Laws and Treaties, Vol. II, Treaties (Washington:
Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1904), 539-540.

2" Ely s. Parker to William Parker, 29 January 1844, Box I - 1794-1845, Ely s. Parker Papers,
APS.

29 Isaac Shanks, Isaac Doctor, and Nicholson Parker to Ely S. Parker, 19 May 1846, Box 2 - 1846-
1848, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

44

position, and the company applied to replace him with J .S. Wadsworth. The new
arbitrator proposed a different appraisal method. Rather than surveying the lands and
improvements in person, he would rely on informants familiar with the reservation to
describe and estimate the values. Following Parker's encouragement, the Tonawanda
Chiefs presented a united front against this move and drafted an appeal to the War
Department. In it they argued that, because the Indians had made many “very valuable
and important improvements” since the 1842 treaty, it would be impossible to make an
accurate appraisal of the reservation as it existed then, thus invalidating the treaty.30 In
this way, the landscape itself and the ways that Indian people changed it became a
weapon for the Indians to use in their resistance effort. The Tonawanda community
employed Parker’s strategy successfully through the 1840s and 18503 allowing only
trusted non-Native advisors and friends onto their reservation for fear that unknown
whites might trick them.31

While Parker and the Seneca waited for the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs
to review their case, they pursued legal recourse against non-Native settlers invading

their reservation in an effort to stem the tide of dispossession. In 1846, Nicholson Parker

 

30 RB. Warren to Ely S. Parker, 21 February 1849, Box 3 - 1849-1852, Ely S. Parker Papers,
APS; and Tonawanda Chiefs to William L. Marcy, Secretary of War, 12 March 1849, Box 3 - 1849-1852,
Ely S. Parker Papers, APS. It is important to note that this line of argumentation is very similar to that
employed by squatters and other non-Native settlers in the Ohio Valley and further west. These men and
women, who settled federal lands, argued that the federal government should not remove them because
they had improved the land. The result of these arguments was the federal Preemption Act of 1841. For
more see Paul Wallace Gates, The Farmer ’s Age: Agriculture, 1815-1860 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston, 1960); and Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the
Maine Frontier, 1760-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

31 See Conable, "A Steady Enemy," 288-289. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft during this time noted the
difﬁculty of entering the reservation, expressing appreciation to Ely Parker in a letter. He stated that was
grateful for Parker's "friendly disposition" and that "I had hoped that my known character and friendship
for the Red Race would have shielded me from some suspicion of unfn'endliness. ..Men who come to get
Indian lands by unfair means, or carry on any sinister object are not publickly [sic] announced." See Henry
Rowe Schoolcraﬁ to Ely S. Parker, 8 August 1845, Box 1 - 1794-1845, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

45

traveled to Albany with John Martindale, a non-Native lawyer who played an
increasingly signiﬁcant role in the Tonawanda resistance campaign throughout this
period. There he requested from the Supreme Court a warrant of removal for the settlers
claiming titles under the Ogden treaties. Although the judge refused, New York Indian
Agent W.P. Angel suggested that the Seneca could prosecute any non-Native person who
cut timber from Indian lands using an 1813 statute.32 It appears they never used the 1813
law, but the Seneca did ﬁle several notable trespassing cases against settlers in New York
State, the most signiﬁcant of which was Blacksmith v. Fellows. In this case begun in
1846, Seneca Sachem John Blacksmith charged that Ogden officials Joseph Fellows and
Robert Kendle trespassed upon his land, assaulted him, and claimed possession of his
sawmill. Blacksmith won the initial trial and Fellows appealed the case all the way to the
United States Supreme Court. In 1857, after the Tonawanda had already purchased title
to some of their lands from the Ogden Company, the Supreme Court found in favor of
Blacksmith on the grounds that the treaty of 1842 never authorized any sort of forced
removal.33 Although the ruling occurred after the land dispute had ended, it validated the
long-held Seneca belief, that the treaties were unjust and fraudulent.

Dispossession was one of the most visible and practical dangers that unscrupulous
land speculators and business interests such as the Ogden Company posed to Indian

communities, but, as the Tonawanda experience demonstrated, threats of removal could

 

32 Nicholson Parker, "Memo on conference at Batavia and Albany with attorney Martindale, State
Senator Clark, and the Governor, on course of legal action for removing white settlers," 12 June 1846, Box
2 - 1846-1848, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS; and W.P. Angel to Ely S. Parker, 20 February 1848, Box 2 -
1846-1848, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS

33 Blacksmith v. Fellows, 7 NY. 401 (1852); and Fellows v. Blacksmith, 19 How. 118., 761
(1857). See also Conable, “A Steady Enemy,” 381-385.

46

also disrupt customary notions of power and authority. In their petitions and memorials
to state and federal policymakers the Seneca community presented itself as “unitedly and
unanimously” in agreement, however, the whirlwind of court cases, appraisal attempts,
conﬂicted messages from government ofﬁcials, and company threats clearly unsettled the
reservation inhabitants.34

Letters sent between Ely Parker and his family in the 18405 and 1850s paint a
picture of a community struggling to come to terms with an emerging younger generation
of leaders who claimed power and authority based on their abilities to understand,
balance, and negotiate through Native and non-Native legal and political concepts. In an
1846 letter to his brother Nicholson, Ely Parker acknowledged the problems developing
among their people. “If ever the Tonawandas were required to be united in their plans
and purposes, it is now. . . [t]he interests of future generations hang upon the course we
pursue,” he asserted. It appears that the primary factionalism there stemmed from a
Seneca man named Stephen who did not support Parker's rise to prominence. “You say
Stephen talks much about my being too young to attend to matters of such great
importance,” Parker wrote, “I do not envy his misery. . .nothing else troubles him more
than the mere knowledge of the fact that a little boy has superseded him in wisdom and
power, although he is old enough to be his grandfather.”35 Parker expressed regret over

such factionalism at home, but he reminded Nicholson, “no matter what. . .let us try and

 

34 For example, see "Memorial of Tonawanda" in Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Report,
29th Cong, 2d sess., 1847, 8. Doc. 156, 113.

35 Ely S. Parker to Nicholson Parker, 21 June, 1846, Box 2 - I846-1848, Ely S. Parker Papers,
APS.

47

 

 

Figure 5: Nicholson Henry Parker, 1854
Source: Arthur C. Parker, The Liﬁz of General Ely S. Parker, 263

48

be united and hang on to our land as the fox hangs on to its prey.”36 Perhaps they heard
Parker's concerns about factionalism and about the statements Stephen made questioning
his abilities, because the Tonawanda leaders immediately drafted a letter reminding him
of the conﬁdence they held in their young spokesman, and to demonstrate this they sent
him some additional funds for living expenses. “You may think toward us that we are
not united, but we tell you that [we] are. . .the evidence is clearly shown in sending that
sum of money to you for it passed through the Nation,” they assured him.37 Parker's
youth, though, would continue to be an issue of contention and concern, especially as he
began to play a larger role in the land dispute proceedings and within Tonawanda
politics.

In 1851, aﬂer the death of Seneca Sachem John Blacksmith, the Grand Council of
the Iroquois raised Ely Parker to Blacksmith's leadership position and bestowed upon him
the hereditary name Do-ne-ho-ga-wa, or “Open Door.”38 It was unusual for an Iroquois
man in his early twenties to be raised to such a revered position, but as a member of the
powerful Wolf Clan, and because of his leadership in the resistance campaign, it appears

that clan matrons made an exception.39 Parker's ascension demonstrated the ways that

 

36 Ely S. Parker to Nicholson Parker, 15 July 1846, Box 2 - 1846-1848, Ely S. Parker Papers,
APS. ‘

37 Tonawanda Chiefs to Ely S. Parker, 15 July 1846, Box 2 - I846-1848, Ely S. Parker Papers,
APS.

3“ Buffalo Courier, July [:7], 1851, Box 3 - 1849-1852, Ely s. Parker Papers, APS; Batavia (N19
Spirit of the Times September 30, 1851; and Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 49. For more on the rights
and responsibilities of Seneca Sachems, see William F enton ed., Parker on the Iroquois, Book III: The
Constitution of the Five Nations (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968), 34-40.

39 Spencer Cone to Ely S. Parker, 31 July 1851, Box 3 - 1849-1852, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

In this letter Spencer Cone revealed that there was some question as to whether Parker would actually be
raised, Isaac Shanks and Jimmy Johnson may not have approved of it.

49

shifting notions of power and authority caused by controversies such as the Ogden land
dispute disrupted cultural norms of kinship and intergenerational relationships. In 1852,
Seneca leaders appointed George Cooper, Parker's maternal uncle, to serve as his “sub
Sachem.” Cooper then wrote to Parker asking him for advice, he wanted to know
“exactly my duty, or the duty of my ofﬁce under you.” He also wanted an assurance that,
if he spoke during a council, the young Sachem would support him.40 Parker probably
found this request an awkward one. In the Seneca matrilineal system, a young man’s
uncle held an important position as a role model and advisor, oﬁen even more signiﬁcant
than his father, but in this case the land dispute and shifting notions of power and
authority inverted these roles.41 Parker replied deferentially, perhaps hoping to maintain
some appearance of customary kinship status. “I cannot dictate to Geo. Cooper what he
shall say or do in council. . . [nor can I] dictate what his opinions shall be,” he wrote to his
brother Newton. Then, recognizing the changes that had taken place in Tonawanda
society during his life, Parker asserted that their “positions are not now what was
assumed by Chiefs 50 or 75 years ago. . .now we have to act the moment we think, or else
our affairs must frequently suffer.”42
The Ogden land dispute affected kinship relationships in other ways as well. The

majority of the Tonawanda Seneca chose to remain in their homeland and ﬁght against

the company's efforts to dispossess them, but some believed that moving to the west

 

40 George Cooper to Ely S. Parker, 22 May 1852, Box 3 - 1849-1852, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

4] For more on the Iroquois matrilineal system and kinship relationships see William Fenton, The
Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1998), 28-29.

42 Ely S. Parker to "Sir Isaac" Newton Parker, 22 June 1852, Box 3 - 1849-1852, Ely S. Parker
Papers, APS. See also Conable, "A Steady Enemy," 318.

50

would provide opportunities otherwise unavailable in New York. These personal choices
not only disrupted community solidarity, a signiﬁcant issue on its own due to the value
Seneca history placed on unanimity, but rifts also erupted within families. The case of
Spencer Cone and the Parker family serves as a briefcase study of these issues and
demonstrates a ﬁnal danger that land speculators and business interests posed to Indian
communities.

Thirteen years older than Ely, Spencer Houghton Cone was the only member of
the Parker family to support the Treaty of 1838. He took the name of the Baptist
clergyman who helped facilitate his education, but it has also been suggested that because
of his support for the treaty, William Parker, his father, forbade him from using the
family surname. Cone may have even acted as an agent for the Ogden Company and for
a time, he moved to Enterprise, Missouri.43 Arthur C. Parker compared Cone to
Nathaniel Thayer Strong, a young pro-removal advocate from the Cattaraugus
Reservation, and described him as restless and temperamental.44 Cone's actions caused a
rift in the Parker family. He argued that the Tonawanda had been led by ignorant chiefs,
but in a letter his father stated, “I respect my rights and love my lands,” implying that
Cone did not. Ely Parker told Cone that he supported the resistance campaign because
the Indians had been unjustly treated by the “rascally white race.” Later Cone even
suggested that he knew of a document in which Tonawanda leaders agreed to the 1842

compromise treaty, a fact which would have been devastating to their resistance

 

43 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 8, 11, and 51.

44 Arthur C. Parker, "Note Describing Cone" in William Parker to Spencer H. Cone, 13 October
1846, Box 2 - 1846-18548, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

51

campaign.45 Cone was not simply the black sheep of the farme though; it was his
involvement with Ogden that caused the division. In fact, he later ended his association
with the company, returned to the reservation, and seemingly rectiﬁed his family issues.
He began to use the Parker name around 1850 and was raised to the position of war chief.
He died in 1851 at the age of 36. The relationship between Cone and the rest of the
Parker family typiﬁed the conﬂicts caused by the actions of land speculators, and this
particular conﬂict, involving his own kin, revealed on a close personal level how
disruptive these colonial actions could be for Native communities.46

Dispossession, threats of removal, shifting notions of power and authority, as well
as a disruption of community and family solidarity, all characterized the Ogden land
dispute period at the Tonawanda Reservation. As one element of his political education,
these experiences ingrained in Ely Parker a distrust of business interests that operated
outside the systems of bureaucratic governance but had the ability to shape policy, while
the sympathy shown to the Tonawanda by various state and national politicians in this
post-Removal Era, taught him that at least some bureaucrats could be trusted. These
ideas, developed at a young age, would come to fruition during Parker's term as a federal
policymaker, but they were not the only lessons he learned during the Ogden dispute.
Throughout the period between 1846 and 1861 , Parker and the Tonawanda established

important relationships with non-Native citizens in New York and Washington DC, and

 

45 William Parker and James Williams to Spencer H. Cone, 30 August 1845, Box 1 - 1794-1845,
Ely S. Parker Papers, APS; Ely S. Parker to Spencer H. Cone, 8 June 1846, Box 2- 1846-18548, Ely S.
Parker Papers, APS; and Spencer H. Cone to A.H.H. Stuart, Secretary of the Interior, 3 April 1851, Box 3 -
l849-l852, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

46 Even though he ultimately returned and re-integrated himself, the rift caused by the Ogden
dispute lasted for almost a decade and inﬂuenced Ely Parker's political education. See Armstrong, Warrior
in Two Camps, 51.

52

as the next section suggests, these experiences taught him that within speciﬁc contexts,
especially when their interests ran parallel to or converged with those of the Indians,

elements of the “rascally white race” could provide political assistance.

Indians and Citizens in Western New York
During the removal campaign in Georgia, local citizens, state and federal

policymakers banded together in a strong political alliance against the Cherokee. The
national political culture of the Jacksonian era, land settlement, development, and mining
prospects, as well as the history of Georgia's state-level aggression towards its Native
residents created an insurmountable obstacle that Cherokee leaders such as John Ross,
could not overcome.47 The situation was quite different in New York State in the years
immediately following Andrew Jackson's presidency. There, the Democratic Party
struggled to maintain its control as local citizens - farmers and laborers in the central and
western parts of New York - joined with middle-class Whigs to oppose large landholders
and pressure for land policy reform through a new state constitution. It was within this
context that Parker and the Tonawanda Seneca found unlikely alliances with and political
support from local non-Native citizens, middle-class lawyers and professionals, fratemal
organizations, national politicians, and perhaps most importantly, public intellectuals.

All of these individuals understood that population growth, transportation innovations,
and market development had created a situation in western New York in which Native

communities could not or would not continue to exist as they had in the past. To one

 

47 Theda Perdue and Michael Green eds., The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with
Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2005); Thurman Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge
Family and the Decimation of a People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986); and Gary E.
Moulton, John Ross, A Cherokee Chief (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978).

53

extent or another though, all of these men held interests that ran parallel to or converged
with those of Native leaders.48 Local farmers and citizens viewed the eastern New York
land speculators with skepticism at best, but more often with disgust because the land
barons sought to profit from the land without working the soil themselves. Local
politicians, particularly Whigs, sought to challenge the Democratic Party and its costly
removal policies, while local public intellectuals, many of whom studied local Indian
history and culture, sought to sustain these nearby communities because of the data they
could supply.

In 1844, sixteen-year-old Ely Parker traveled to Albany as an interpreter for
Tonawanda leaders. During the trip he met Lewis Henry Morgan, the lawyer and founder
of the Grand Order of the Iroquois in a bookstore. Morgan later stated, in his
characteristic, racially patronizing way, that “[t]o sound the war whoop and seize the
youth might have been dangerous.” After Morgan approached the young man, he and
Parker conversed for hours at the bookstore and later that night in the hotel rooms of the
Tonawanda delegates.49 Morgan saw Parker as a potential informant, a source of
knowledge on Iroquois history and society that he could use in his ethnographic pursuits,
especially because the young man commanded a ﬂuency of both the English and Seneca

languages, and, if he accepted this honorary membership, an individual who could lend

 

48 My understanding of the idea of convergence or collaboration between Native and non-Native
people within a colonial context has been inﬂuenced heavily by Jurgen Osterhammel's theoretical overview
of the concept of colonialism. In it he argued that when the interests of Native and non-Native people
converged, structures within the process of colonialism often became less rigid. In these cases Native
leaders might argue in favor of certain aspects of colonialism, or, as in this case, non-Native people might
become critics of colonialism itself. See Osterhammel, Colonialism, 63-64.

49 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 1-3. The quote is from "Copy of an Address Read by
Scenandoah [Morgan] at the Monthly Council of the Cayugas April 17, 1844," Lewis H. Morgan Papers,
RRL-UR.

54

validity and authenticity to the Grand Order. In Morgan, Parker found a potential ally, a
public intellectual, a man of great legal expertise, and a conduit to larger networks of
politicians, lawyers, and professionals. The relationship was symbiotic. Parker provided
Morgan with the insight and knowledge necessary to complete his ﬁrst ethnographic
work, The League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois in 1851.50 Morgan, for his part,
helped to shape and direct non-Native support for the Tonawanda throughout the land
dispute period.

Early in 1846, after accepting his honorary membership into the Grand Order of
the Iroquois, Parker traveled to Washington DC with Tonawanda leaders and met
ofﬁcials from the War Department, as well as the President.5 ' Simultaneously, Morgan
and other members of the Grand Order mobilized non-Native support in several New
York State counties. While in DC, Parker wrote to Morgan stating that this support gave
him and the delegates “additional strength” and that it made “a very strong impression

upon the feelings of many of the citizens [in Washington] in favor of the poor Indians.”

 

50 Morgan frequently asked Parker to take notes at Seneca council meetings, or spiritual rituals.
See Lewis Henry Morgan to Ely S. Parker, 26 September 1848, Folder 12 - Morgan Correspondence, 1848,
Box 1 - Correspondence, 1839-1854, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, RRL-UR; Lewis Henry Morgan to Ely
S. Parker, 29 January 1850, Folder 15 - Morgan Correspondence, Box 1 - Correspondence, l839-l854,
Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, RRL-UR; and Lewis Henry Morgan to Ely S. Parker, 2 August 1850, Folder
15 - Morgan Correspondence, Box 1 - Correspondence, 1839-1854, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, RRL-
UR. Parker usually responded with notes that Morgan included the The League. See “A translation of the
speech made by Jimmy Johnson at the Grand Council of the Confederacy of Iroquois held at the Indian
village of Tonawanda translated by Ely S. Parker,” October 1845, Vault Box Ayer MS 451, Newberry
Library, Chicago, IL. (subsequent citation NL); "Notes," no date, Folder 65 - Writings, [An Account of an
Indian Council by Ely S Parker], Box 2, Arthur C. Parker Papers, NYSL; "Separation of the Senecas and
Wyandottes," Folder 12843, Ely S. Parker Papers, NYSL. In his chapter entitled “The Purloined Indian,”
Ox Frankel suggested that the Parker/Morgan relationship had both practical and symbolic power for each
man. Unfortunately, his discussion of this relationship is brief. See Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social
Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 2006), 291-298.

51 Lewis H. Morgan to Ely S. Parker, 8 May 1844, Folder4 - Lewis Henry Morgan to Ely S.
Parker and his sister Caroline Parker, Photostats, 1844-1868, Box 1, Arthur C. Parker Papers, NYSL.

55

He also reminded Morgan that if the Grand Order continued in their support, they would
“not be sorry for it.”52 In a show of appreciation, the Tonawanda Seneca, in the fall of
1846, formally adopted three Grand Order brothers, Lewis, H. Morgan, C.T. Porter, and
Thomas Darling, into their community. They bestowed the honorary name Tah-yad-da-
o-wo-kuh, or “Lying Across,” upon Morgan, perhaps recognizing his ability to build
support between Native and non-Native people. They named Porter Dalr-ya-a-we, or “He
is Bringing,” and Darling became “Gah-e-we-yo, or “Glad Tidings,” again perhaps
acknowledging their work on behalf of the Indians.53

Lewis Henry Morgan was not the only public intellectual to support Parker and
the Tonawanda. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft ﬁrst visited the reservation in 1845 to complete
his census of New York Indians.54 In a letter to Parker, written shortly aﬁer his visit,
Schoolcraft thanked the young Seneca for his “friendly disposition.”55 Parker used this
opportunity to develop a friendship with the ethnographer and, the following May, asked
if Schoolcraft would be willing to supply some information for the Tonawanda to present
to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in their ﬁght against the Ogden Company.
Community leaders wanted to demonstrate that the Allegany and Cattaraugus reservation

land could not support all the New York Seneca, and furthermore, that in the history of

 

52 Ely S. Parker to Lewis Henry Morgan, 2 April 1846, Folder 7 - Morgan Correspondence,
January to April, 1846, Box 1 - Correspondence, 1839-1854, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, RRL-UR.

53 "Albany or Rochester Newspaper Article," 29 March 1847, Box 2 - 1846-1848, Ely S. Parker
Papers, APS.

54 For more on the life of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft see Richard Bremer, Indian Agent and
Wilderness Scholar: The Life of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (Mount Pleasant, M1: Clarke Historical Library,
Central Michigan University, 1987).

55 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft to Ely S. Parker, 8 August 1845, Box 1 - l794-1845, Ely S. Parker
Papers, APS.

56

the Seneca people, chiefs made all political decisions using the principle of unanimity,
not a system of majority rule. Schoolcraft responded within a week and authorized the
Seneca to use his expertise in their case. He stated that based on his “observation on
those reservations [Allegany and Cattaraugus]. . .they are insufﬁcient in extent to
accommodate, permanently, the entire Seneca population.” He also asserted, as Parker
knew he would, that “in former times, the majority-principle was not

known. . .Unanimity, appears to have been necessary, in the result of all important
national questions.”56 Tonawanda leaders used this information from a non-Native public
intellectual and known Indian “expert” to add credence to the petition Parker drafted and
delivered to President Polk and the senate two months earlier.” Schoolcraft continued to
support the Seneca case throughout the land dispute. In the late-18403 Congress paid him
to conduct a lengthy study of Indian people and compile the information into a usable
format.58 During his time in DC, Schoolcraft monitored developments in the land dispute
and, at a critical moment in 1849, informed Parker that the Ogden Company would
employ a new appraiser.59 This information allowed Tonawanda leaders time to react

accordingly and to develop a successful petition to counter the Ogden maneuver. Henry

 

56 Ely S. Parker to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, 2 May 1846, Folder 8 - Morgan Correspondence,
May, 1846, Box 1 - Correspondence, 1839-1854, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, RRL-UR; and Henry Rowe
Schoolcraft to Ely S. Parker, 7 May 1846, Folder 8 - Morgan Correspondence, May, 1846, Box 1 -
Correspondence, l839-1854, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, RRL-UR.

57 "A Petition of the Tonawanda band of Seneca Indians..." 29th Cong, lst sess., 2 April 1846, S.
Doc. 273, 2-3.

58 Schoolcraﬁ's study resulted in a six volume work published between 1851 and 1857 entitled

Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects on the Indian
Tribes of the United States.

59 Ely S. Parker to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, 23 January 1848, Folder 12 - Morgan

Correspondence, May, 1848, Box 1 - Correspondence, l839-1854, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, RRL-UR;
and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, 11 March 1849, Box 3 - 1849-1852, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

57

Rowe Schoolcraft and Lewis Henry Morgan provided the Seneca with access to “expert”
knowledge and with networks of support critical in their ﬁght against the land company.
His ability to move in “educated” circles allowed Parker to create friendships that were
politically useful to the Seneca.

Non-Native New York farmers and laborers also played a key role in these events.
In early 1847, Parker sent a letter to Lewis H. Morgan from Washington DC. “Petitions
from western and central New York are almost daily presented in our behalf,” he wrote,
“and I have no doubt [these petitions] will have a great bearing in the ﬁnal issue of the

”60 The signers of these petitions held and worked the land in

matter [the land dispute].
Genesee and the surrounding counties; they were farmers, laborers, and regular citizens.
If these men had lived in Georgia a decade earlier, they would have supported Cherokee
removal and one might have expected them to support the removal of the Tonawanda
Seneca in the 18405. That they did not can perhaps best be understood as a function of
the history of land ownership and land policy in New York State.

In a hold-over from the colonial period, large land owners in New York such as
Stephen Van Rensselear III used patemalist inﬂuence and a manor system of land
distribution, which included inheritable life leases, to establish their political and social
elite status. The Revolutionary generation of landholders and tenants appreciated this
patemalist system, though, and saw it as mutually beneﬁcial because it insulated both
groups against market forces, but in the nineteenth century, their sons, swept up in the

tensions of an emerging capitalist economy, fought bitter political battles over land policy

reform and governmental representation. Tenant farmers viewed themselves as the

 

6O Ely S. Parker to Lewis Henry Morgan, 13 February 1847, Folder 11 - Morgan Correspondence,
1847, Box 1 - Correspondence, l839-1854, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, RRL-UR.

58

inheritors of the Revolution and therefore, they deserved the right to own the land they
worked. Furthermore, as small producers, they saw themselves as the most trustworthy
and responsible candidates for political ofﬁce. In the anti-rent wars of the 18303 and
18403, these farmers used Indian imagery when they committed symbolic and real
violence against the landholders. During the Ogden land dispute then, local farmers and
citizens saw their interests as parallel to the sedentary and agriculturalist Seneca, rather
than the private company of elite eastern business men who held vast tracts of land but
did not work the soil.61

In petitions they submitted to the United States Senate, farmers and laborers
employed language that revealed their connection to, appreciation and support for the
Tonawanda community. One petition stated that the treaties gave Indians, “for their
lands but one-tenth of their value, and nothing for one of the ﬁnest water privileges in the
State.” The signers asserted that the Tonawanda were “moral, industrious, honest people,
rapidly improving in their condition, possessing good farms,” and like the farmers
themselves, they were “strongly attached to the homes of their fathers.” Finally,
petitioners assured the senate that the “people of the State of New York do not desire

their removal, and have no sympathies with their spoilers.”62 In another petition, the

 

61 I am deeply indebted to Thomas Summerhill for his insights into the landholder/tenant
relationship in early nineteenth-century New York. For more on the Revolutionary generation of New
York farmers and landholders, as well as their sons, and the anti-rent wars, see Summerhill, Harvest of
Dissent, 7-88. For more on the fanners' use of Indian imagery, see Harvest of Dissent, 64-65; Thomas
Summerhill, "The Farmer's Republic: Agrarian Protest and the Capitalist Transformation of Upstate New
York, 1840-1900" (PhD., diss., University of California, San Diego, 1993), 38-70; and Henry Christrnan,
Tin Horns and Calico: A Decisive Episode in the Emergence of Democracy (New York: Henry Holt, 1945),
91-93. For more on the signiﬁcance of non-Natives using Indian symbolism in their political protests, see
Deloria, Playing Indian.

62 Petition to the Senate of the United States, Folder 109 - Seneca Indians at Tonawanda, Box 24 -
Mss of Articles, etc., Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, RRL-UR.

59

residents of western New York argued that the treaties of 1838 and 1842 were “contrary
to every principle of justice and humanity,” and that “these Indians have been
unmercifully defrauded.”63 Their support gave Tonawanda leaders strength and added
weight to the arguments they presented in front of state and national policymakers.
There was, however, an alternate explanation for farmer and local citizen support.
The young, pro-removal advocate at the Cattaraugus Reservation, Nathanial Thayer
Strong, charged that non-Natives who opposed removal did so out of personal greed. In
his Appeal to the Christian Community on the Condition and Prospects of the New York
Indians he argued that these men sold liquor to the Indians, leased water rights, bought
lumber, and held licenses to live on their lands.64 They stood to proﬁt in many ways
from the Indians' continued presence in the state.65 Strong’s Appeal, can be read as a
defense of his own actions — he not only signed the Treaty of 1838, but also served as an
interpreter for the Seneca — and as a defense of the other pro-removal chiefs among the
Indians. Because he so vociferously supported removal, Strong’s argument represented
the continued factionalism among the Seneca, but his argument cannot be taken at face
value. The history of land policy and the relationships between large landholders and
tenants in New York, suggests that the farmers' support for the Indians and the petition
drive led by these citizens was an example of a circumstance in which the interests of

non-Native and Native people ran parallel.

 

63 Petition to the Senate of the United States, Folder 110 - Seneca Indians at Tonawanda, Petitions
on their behalf, Box 24 - M33 of Articles, etc., Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, RRL-UR.

64See Nathaniel Thayer Strong, Appeal to the Christian Community on the Condition and
Prospects of the New York Indians (New York: E.B. Clayton, Printer, 1841).

65 Daniel F. Littleﬁeld, Jr., "'They Ought to Enjoy the Home of their Fathers': The Treaty of 183 8,

Seneca Intellectuals, and Literary Genesis" in Early Native American Writing: New Critical Essays ed.
Helen Jaskoski, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 94.

60

While non—Native farmers and small producers conducted their petition drive,
other citizens in western and central New York - lawyers, merchants, and businessmen -
met and drafted lengthy memorials to the president and senate to express their support for
the Indians and outrage at the conduct of the land company. Some of these individuals,
such as Frederick Follett, a well-known politician and newspaper owner in Batavia, Isaac
Verplanck, and John H. Martindale, Batavia and Rochester lawyers, offered continual
support throughout the land dispute period, the latter served as one of the principle
lawyers for the Seneca. In 1846, a “large convention of the citizens of Genesee county”
assembled in Batavia to discuss the land dispute at the behest of the Genesee grand jury.
Once there, the men organized committees and drafted resolutions and memorials to be
delivered to Washington DC. They wanted to make it known that “the public feeling of
the people. . .is greatly shocked at the threatened perpetration of this wrong [Seneca
removal]? In their memorials they outlined various Ogden Company frauds, including
the use of liquor and bribes to obtain signatures. They characterized these practices as
“revolting, reprehensible, and barbarous.”66 Because the treaties did not honestly
represent the free and voluntary assent of the Tonawanda people - none of their leaders
actually signed either treaty - convention delegates argued that it was the responsibility of
the federal government to ensure that they would not be removed. Furthermore, they
believed that if there was no other solution, the federal government should purchase the
lands from the Ogden Company and transfer title to the Tonawanda people. After

reading aloud their memorial, convention delegates accepted the statements and

66 "Mass Meeting for the Indians" in Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Report, 29th Cong, 2d
sess., 1847, S. Doc. 156, 119, 121.

61

resolutions by a majority vote and named Lewis H. Morgan as their special messenger to
deliver their statements to the president and senate in Washington DC.67

Later, when a rtunor circulated that the federal government would appoint a
commissioner, dispense treaty payments, and hasten the removal process, several notable
western New York citizens, many of whom had been involved in the earlier convention,
voiced their support for the Tonawanda people. Marcus H. Johnson, an Indian agent
from Randolph, N.E. Paine from Rochester, Isaac Verplanck, the lawyer, and Frederick
Follett, a leading citizen from Batavia, all wrote to President Pierce, Secretary of State
William L. Marcy, and Secretary of the Interior Robert McClelland, in protest of the
rumored action.68 Paine stated that his protest represented “the almost universal opinion
of this community.” Follett, one of the most outspoken of the Tonawanda supporters,
used the strongest language in his letter. “We all know in this region that the Treaty in
question is a $3151,” he wrote. He also estimated that “99 out of every 100 of the
inhabitants of this region” agreed with his protest. The rumor proved to be false,
probably started by the Ogden Company to confuse and frustrate the Indians.69 The
continued support of local, non-Native citizens, though, strengthened the Seneca’s, and

especially Ely Parker's, resolve.

 

67 "Mass Meeting for the Indians," 122-125. Thirty-three different non-Native men signed these
documents, although many more may have been involved in their creation.

68 Marcus Johnson to President Franklin Pierce, 8 October 1856, Box 4 - 1853-1858, Ely S.
Parker Papers, APS; N.E. Paine to President Franklin Pierce,10 October 1856, Box 4 - I853-1858, Ely S.
Parker Papers, APS; I.A. Verplanck to William L. Marcy, 10 October 1856, Box 4 - 1853-1858, Ely S.
Parker Papers, APS; Frederick Follett to President Franklin Pierce, 13 October 1856, Box 4 - l853-1858,
Ely S. Parker Papers, APS; and Frederick Follett to Robert McClelland, 13 October 1856, Box 4 - 1853-
1858, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

69 Ely S. Parker to George Manypenny, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 25 September 1856, Box
4 - l853-I858, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS; and George Manypenny, Commissioner of Indian Affairs to Ely
S. Parker, 29 September 1856, Box 4 - l853-1858, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

62

Some local, non-Native citizens, like Lewis H. Morgan, provided more active
support than just drafting memorials and letters. Batavia lawyer, John H. Martindale,
took a leading role as legal council for the Tonawanda Seneca on the state and
occasionally national level. Martindale graduated from West Point Academy and would
later serve as a brigadier general for the Union Army in the Civil War, but from the early-
18403 through the conclusion of the Ogden land dispute in 1857, he sympathized with
and provided critical legal knowledge for the Indians. Following Martindale's advice,
Parker and the Tonawanda leaders pursued reservation trespassers using an 1821 law.70
It was Martindale who argued the successful Blacksmith case, both in New York State
and in front of the United States Supreme Court.71 He along with Frederick Follett, also
visited Washington DC at a critical moment in the land dispute, and in 1857 helped
facilitate its ultimate conclusion, persuading President Buchanan and others to allow the
Tonawanda to use removal funds to purchase their land title from the Ogden Company.72
When Parker decided to reform Tonawanda governance in the aftermath of the land

dispute, it was Martindale, again, who provided guidance and helped lobby for necessary

 

70 Nicholson Parker to Ely S. Parker, 11 June 1846, Box 2 - 1846-1848, Ely S. Parker Papers,
APS; Memo by Nicholson Parker, 12 June 1846, Box 2 - 1846-1848, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS; W.P.
Angel to Ely S. Parker, 20 February 1848, Box 2 - 1846-1848, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS; Ely S. Parker to
William Parker, 14 April 1852, Box 3 - 1849-1852, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS; and Ely S. Parker to
Tonawanda Chiefs, 23 February 1853, Box 4 - 1853-1858, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS. See also
Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 21, 42-43.

7' Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 35, 58.

72 Tonawanda Chiefs, "Power of Attorney for John H. Martindale and Others," 16 June 1857, Box
4 - 1853-1858, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS; and Ely S. Parker, John H. Martindale, William G. Bryan and
FrederickFollett to J.W. Dewer, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 30 June 1857, Box 4 - 1853-1858, Ely S.
Parker Papers, APS; New York Herald, 6 July 1857; Ely S. Parker, Nicholson H. Parker, J.H. Martindale,
William G. Bryan and Frederick Follett to Charles E. Mix, 1 November 1857, Box 4 - 1853-1858, Ely S.
Parker Papers, APS; and Nicholson Parker to Ely S. Parker, 17 May, 1860, Box 5 - 1859-1885, Ely S.
Parker Papers, APS. See also Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 64-66.

63

legislation in New York State.73 The lawyer's efforts proved crucial to the Tonawanda
ﬁght against the Ogden Company, and in him Parker found a friend and ally.74
Experiences such as these on the local level, unlikely as one might assume, demonstrated
to the young Seneca leader that the Indians were not alone in their struggles and later in
his career he expected, much to his demise, to see similar Native/non-Native cooperation
in other arenas. Perhaps also unlikely, was the positive experience he and the Tonawanda
had with national, non-Native politicians.

When Parker and the Seneca delegates traveled to Washington DC, they often met
and interacted with prominent national politicians. These politicians believed that, in the
Ogden land dispute, company ofﬁcials committed great frauds, but that the federal
government did not have the power and authority to invalidate the treaties. Several of the
most revered statesmen in this era of American history sympathized with and pledged
support for the Tonawanda. During one trip to the capital, Parker remarked that
“Calhoun and Crittenden are with us, as well as other able and heavy men.”75 Later, in
his diary, the young Seneca described a Sunday evening meeting with Henry Clay.
During their discussion Clay stated that he supported the Tonawanda case, and that he
even once considered submitting an application to try their claim before the Supreme

Court of the United States.76 These national politicians could do little but sympathize

 

73 William Parker to Ely S. Parker, 11 January 1860, Box 5 - 1859-1885, Ely S. Parker Papers,
APS.

74 Tonawanda Chiefs to John H. Martindale, 9 November 1852, Box 3 - 1849-1852, Ely S. Parker
Papers, APS.

75 Ely S. Parker to Lewis H. Morgan, 13 February 1847, Folder 11 - Morgan Correspondence,
1847, Box 1 - Correpondence, l839-1854, Lewis H. Morgan Papers, RRL-UR.

76 "Diary Entry Written by Ely Parker," 16 January 1848, Box 2 - 1846-1 848, Ely 3. Parker
Papers, APS.

64

with Parker and his community, and the lack of legislative action led Parker to refer to his
efforts as “a miserable work.”77 Nevertheless, the politicians provided the
encouragement that helped sustain the Seneca leaders during this lengthy dispute.
Furthermore, their support indicated to Parker that if bureaucratic structures and legal
doctrines could be reformed, perhaps, federal policymakers could serve as a buffer for
Indian people against unscrupulous land speculators and state-level legislators.

Non-Native farmers, small producers, middle-class lawyers, businessmen,
fraternal organizations, national politicians, and public intellectuals all provided unlikely
alliances with and political support for the Tonawanda Seneca in western New York.
The petitions and memorials they drafted and signed, as well as the ethnographic and
legal expertise they supplied to Indian delegates bolstered the Seneca’s collective resolve
and contributed to the resistance campaign in important ways. In the aftermath of the
land dispute, but before he rose to national prominence, Parker helped reform

governmental structures in his Tonawanda community.

Reforming Tonawanda Governance
After almost two decades of struggle, the Ogden land dispute concluded in 1857.

In June and July of that year, Ely Parker, John Martindale, Frederick Follett, and William
G. Bryan met with federal officials and President Buchanan to protest a rumor that the
executive would immediately remove the Tonawanda Seneca from New York State.
Instead, these men negotiated a new program by which the Indians would relinquish their
rights to federal lands in the Kansas Territory and use federal funds to purchase title to all

or part of their reservation from the Ogden Land Company. In late-185 7, Indian and

 

77 Ely S. Parker to Lewis H. Morgan, 13 February 1847, Folder 11 - Morgan Correspondence,
1847, Box I - Correpondence, l839-l854, Lewis H. Morgan Papers, RRL-UR.

65

Ogden leaders met with BIA representative Charles E. Mix and signed a new treaty based
on the recently negotiated program.78 Under this plan, the Seneca purchased from the
Company, about three-ﬁfths of the land they had held prior to the Treaty of 1838.79
While they have lamented the land 1033, most scholars assert that the Tonawanda Seneca
fared as well or better than any of the other Seneca communities. The Buffalo Creek
Reservation no longer existed, its people were scattered across lands to the west and in
the Allegany and Cattaraugus communities. In 1848, social instability followed a
political revolution and a constitutional convention at the latter two reservations.
Throughout the 18503 chaos ensued. “[T]he Tonawandas' government remained
unchanged,” asserted Mary Conable, they “maintained an identity based on their
geographic location and their adherence to traditional forms of government.”80 Historian
Mark A. Nicholas suggested too, that the Tonawanda Seneca created a public image of

their community as the last true embodiment of traditional Seneca culture.81 With its

 

78 From the late-17003 through 1822, Indian affairs were managed at the federal level by the
Secretary of War’s ofﬁce and the Ofﬁce of Indian Trade. Congress abolished the Ofﬁce of Indian Trade in
1822 and in 1824, John Calhoun, acting in his capacity as the Secretary of War, established the Bureau of
Indian Affairs in the War Department. Congress informally recognized the BIA in 1832, when it
authorized the president to appoint a commissioner. In 1849, Congress moved the BIA to the Department
of the Interior where it currently remains. For most of the nineteenth century the BIA was referred to as the
“Indian Ofﬁce” or the “Ofﬁce of Indian Affairs.” The name “Bureau of Indian Affairs” was adopted
ofﬁcially in 1947. For more see Robert M. Kvasnicka and Herman J. Viola, eds., The Commissioners of
Indian Aﬂairs, [824-1977 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); and Stuart, The Indian Oﬂice.

79 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 64-66. See also "Notes regarding a meeting with the
Commissioner of Indian Affairs about Ogden Co." 26 June 1857, Folder 4: Non-Correspondence Legal and
Financial Business, Ely S. Parker Papers, UR-RRL; "Notes regarding a meeting with the Commissioner of
Indian Affairs about Ogden Co." 29 June 1857, Folder 4: Non-Correspondence Legal and Financial
Business, Ely S. Parker Papers, UR-RRL; "Notes regarding a meeting with the Commissioner of Indian
Affairs about Ogden Co." 30 June 1857, Folder 4: Non-Correspondence Legal and Financial Business, Ely
S. Parker Papers, UR-RRL.

80 Conable, "A Steady Enemy," 324.

81 Nicholas, dissertation, 248-249.

66

customary chiefs still in power in the late-18503, these statements adequately described
the situation in the immediate wake of the land dispute; however, events in the early-
18603 demonstrated that the land dispute crisis had ﬁmdamentally unsettled Tonawanda
society and politics.

After ratifying the new treaty, leaders of the Tonawanda community hoped to
encourage land improvements and agricultural development among their residents.
These two activities had not received particular attention during the land dispute because
people feared that they would lose their lands and the value of their work. Anxious to
make a proﬁt though, many Indians cut timber and extracted other resources from newly
secured common lands, against the wishes of the chiefs, and sold them cheaply to non-
Natives. The land dispute had once again disrupted customary notions of power and
authority, and in the post-dispute political environment chiefs fought against each other
and struggled to control events and actions within the community. Common Seneca
residents had witnessed the struggles of the land dispute, during which time their leaders
seemed weak. As William Parker wrote to his son in 1860, “[t]he Chiefs in a great
measure have lost their power, for in their annals, whatever they may pass, has no affect
in the least.” He asked Ely “to take some course of legal proceedings to clothe the Chiefs
with an additional power with which to rule the band.” 82 For the Tonawanda leaders
these problems proved embarrassing.83

The land dispute created factionalism and political instability among the other

Seneca communities as well and in many ways the developments at Allegany and

 

82 William Parker to Ely 3. Parker, 11 January 1860, Box 4 - 1859-1885, Ely 3. Parker Papers,
APS.

83 Tonawanda Chiefs to Ely S. Parker, 15 February 1860, Folder 1 - 1860-1909, Box I -
Correspondence, 1860-1952, Arthur C. Parker Papers, I860-l952, RRL-UR.

67

Cattaraugus set the stage for Parker’s 1861 political reforms at Tonawanda. Frustrated by
the proceedings of the Buffalo Creek Treaty of 1838 and the compromise treaty of 1842,
and suspicious of the process by which customary chiefs distributed treaty annuities to
individual families, a Seneca faction at Allegany and Cattaraugus, called a convention
and restructured governance at these reservations in 1848. The New Government Party,
as the revolutionaries became known, created an alliance with Hicksite Quakers and
successfully instituted a system of government based on annual elections rather than
hereditary and life-long leadership positions. The Old Chiefs Party allied itself with
Orthodox Quakers, but was unable to stem the revolutionary tide. Young Seneca men
and Hicksite Quakers appealed to federal ofﬁcials - men much more likely to support a
system of government based on the democratic principles of the United States over
ancient Seneca traditions - and argued that a ﬁrm majority of the Seneca supported the
changes. Tonawanda, as it had done since the 1842 treaty, maintained its autonomy as
factionalism intensiﬁed at the other two Seneca reservations.84
When the Allegany and Cattaraugus reservations declared themselves the “Seneca
Nation” and drafted an ofﬁcial constitution led by the revolutionaries in 1848, they
modeled their government very closely on that of the United States.85 They likened the

powers of chiefs to the power held by the British aristocracy at the time of the American

Revolution and replaced them with a three-branch, democratically-elected government.

 

84 Abler, "Friends, Factions, and the Seneca Revolution," 75-78.

85 See "Declaration of the Seneca Nation of Indian Changing their Form of Government and
Adopting a Constitutional Character," 4 December 1848. In this way, the Seneca Nation political
revolution and its new governmental structure resembled similar events among the Cherokee as they fought
against removal. See Nicholas, dissertation, 222 and Mary E. Young, " The Cherokee Nation: Mirror of the
Republic," American Quarterly 33 (l981):502-524.

68

It included a legislative council chosen annually, a president, treasurer, and clerk as
executive ofﬁcers, with a group of peacemakers serving as a judiciary. Any adult in the
general population could be elected to these positions. When Parker returned to
Tonawanda at the behest of his father and the other leaders on the reservation be carefully
distinguished his governmental reform plan from the sweeping changes at the Allegany
and Cattaraugus reservations and it is important to recognize these differences.

Parker, who at this point lived in Galena, Illinois and worked as an engineer for
the Treasury Department, returned to New York with a governmental reform agenda
designed to alleviate the problems at Tonawanda. Like his father, he also recognized that
the land dispute had upset Tonawanda notions of power and authority, and his plan for
reservation governance demonstrated his political acumen. Parker's new government
designated six elective ofﬁces: three peacemakers, a treasurer, a clerk, and a marshal.
These ofﬁcers would be elected exclusively from the ranks of the customary chiefs and
warriors of the Seneca, and all male residents, over the age of twenty, were eligible to
vote. The peacemakers held powers and responsibilities similar to justices of the peace in
non-Native society. They could pass judgment on any civil suit or property ease up to
one hundred dollars. The clerk was responsible for keeping records of all elections as
well as the proceedings of councils held by chiefs and peacemakers. The treasurer would
keep and disburse Band monies, and the marshal served as a constable.

In addition to these elective ofﬁces, the new Tonawanda governmental plan
outlined several legislative mandates. First, it prohibited Indians from selling to non-
Native people, timber and other natural resources held in common by the Tonawanda.

Second, it allowed Indians to select and occupy speciﬁc tracts of reservation land as long

69

as they obtained the consent of the chiefs. It also gave chiefs the power to plot and build
roads and fences throughout the reservation. Finally, it prohibited Indians from leasing
their lands to non-Native people or from allowing non-Natives to work Indian lands in
shares.86 Parker, again with the aid of John Martindale, traveled to Albany and had this
program ofﬁcially ratiﬁed by the state legislature in early-1861.

As a customary chief himself, it was not Parker's goal to usurp power and
authority from the traditional leadership of the community; rather, he sought to provide a
legal framework through which customary leaders could validate their policies in the face
of a changing social and political landscape on the reservation. “There were times in the
history of the [land] struggle,” he wrote, “when we seemed to be enveloped in utter
darkness, and our wise men were lost in doubt what to do.” The government at
Tonawanda had “no power to enforce or execute its will.” He reassured the community
that the new system did not abolish ancient Seneca governing structures, but that it
simply added vitality, efﬁciency, and impartiality so that the community could continue
to “exist and prosper?" Although Parker's goals involved ending factionalism on the
reservation, his new system of governance bore a striking resemblance to non-Native
governmental ideals. He claimed that this system did not usurp the power of customary
chiefs, but it did create a series of elections that would empower a small number of chiefs
over the other leaders, an idea that ran counter to the customary notions of Seneca
authority under which all leaders held an equal position within a system based on

unanimity. Whether he recognized it or not, the system of reform that Parker instituted

 

86 Ely S. Parker to Tonawanda Chiefs, 2 March 1861, reproduced as an appendix in Parker, The
Life of General Ely S. Parker, 287-288.

87 Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 289-290, 292.

70

on the Tonawanda Reservation did represent an important political transformation. It
was not, though, the same as the political revolution that had occurred earlier at the other
Seneca reservations.

Parker’s reforms differed from the political revolution at Allegany and
Cattaraugus in several important ways. First, Parker, as a customary chief, reformed
rather than replaced the structures of Tonawanda governance. Aided by Quakers, the
Allegany and Cattaraugus revolutionaries such as Peter Wilson existed outside customary
roles of power and authority. In fact, Wilson was not even a Seneca, but a Cayuga living
in the Seneca community.88 These men removed customary leaders or at least created the
legal and political means by which they could be removed. More importantly, Parker's
reforms sought to end factionalism on the Tonawanda reservation, while the revolution at
Allegany and Cattaraugus intensiﬁed factional struggles. Throughout the 18503 the New
Government and Old Chiefs parties staged political battles, protested reservation events
to state and federal ofﬁcials, and traded electoral victories and defeats. It was a complex
and chaotic period, during which the political future of the newly formed “Seneca
Nation” seemed in ﬂux. The Old Chiefs won elections in 1851, 1852, and 1854, and after
each victory, they attempted to abolish the new constitution, but were never successful.89

Parker recognized the intense factionalism caused by this political revolution. In
1858 he wrote to the Seneca President that the Indians’ land claims in the west were in

jeopardy, but if the Indians could “unite and agree upon some course,” Congress would

 

88 Abler, "Friends, Factions, and the Seneca Revolution," 75-78. Nicholas suggested that the men
most closely associated with the Seneca Declaration were not signiﬁcant property holders in any way. See
Nicholas, dissertation, 222.

89 Abler, "Friends, Factions, and the Seneca Revolution," 78-79.

71

assist them in receiving proper compensation. Revealing deep concerns over political
instability, though, he reiterated that “the concerted action of the NY. Indians is
necessary.”90 In an earlier letter to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Parker stated his concerns
more directly. “[T]he old system should be restored [at Allegheny and Cattaraugus]? he
wrote, the “new has made so much trouble, caused so much bitter and hard feeling among
our leading men. . .that by all measures the old should be restored and sustained.” A
drastic political revolution was not necessary for the future of the Seneca people, Parker
argued: “when the masses shall be properly educated the transposition of one state of
Gov[emment] to another would hardly be noticed.”91 Between the political revolution
and his own reform efforts at Tonawanda, Parker learned that while customary notions of
power and authority had been permanently disrupted by the land dispute, a focus on
education and limited political change could be much more effective and he therefore
modeled his governmental reforms at Tonawanda around these ideas. He would later
employ these lessons on the national level.

Although Parker restructured Tonawanda governance in an effort to help combat
factionalism — a direct function of the Ogden/Tonawanda land dispute - his work in this
period was also signiﬁcant because it represented the ﬁrst moment he put the lessons he
learned during the dispute into practice through govemmental reform. His program of
reform revealed a hybrid framework, one that drew from non-Native governmental ideals
and structures, but also maintained a focus on Indian sovereignty and an awareness of

customary social and cultural practices among Indian communities. Parker staked his

 

90 Ely S. Parker to "The President of the Seneca Nation of NY," 13 September 1858, Folder 6 -
Seneca Indian Papers, 1836-1858, Parker Family Papers, BECHS.

9' Ely 3. Parker to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, 25 March 1853, Folder 4 - 1853-1858, Ely 3. Parker
Papers, APS.

72

claim to power and authority in Seneca society on his education in the non-Native
settings of the Yates and Cayuga academies, his command of the English language, and
his ability to understand and negotiate non-Native political and legal doctrines. He
recognized non-Native governmental structures, such as democratically-elected ofﬁces
and the ease with which such leaders were able to exercise power and authority, as
innovations that could aid the Tonawanda signiﬁcantly. The realities of dispossession
and removal threats in early-nineteenth-century New York, especially at the hands of
unscrupulous land speculators, made some customary Seneca leadership practices, such
as the principle of unanimity, impractical or worse - perhaps even dangerous.
Factionalism, coupled with divergent individual interests, and an incomplete knowledge
of non-Native contract and treaty law slowed the pace of decision-making and, according
to Parker, threatened the Seneca future in the state. By instituting structures that more
closely resembled county government, while at the same time maintaining some elements
of customary Seneca practices, Parker’s Tonawanda reforms foreshadowed his work on

the national level.

Ely Parker rose to prominence in Tonawanda society as he attempted to shape a
resistance campaign that eventually led to a permanent title to their homeland on the
Tonawanda Creek. On many levels this outcome can be considered a success; however,
it came at a severe cost. Parker's actions ultimately conﬁned the Tonawanda to a
signiﬁcantly smaller land base. He acknowledged that the Indians' “happiness, security,
and probably their continued existence [were] powerful motives to them to cling to their

present homes,” but in doing so, they paid $165,000 for 7,540 acres of an original 12,800

73

acre tract, a signiﬁcant price to pay for one's own land.92 At the beginning of the Buffalo
Creek Treaty period, the New York Seneca had occupied roughly 110,000 acres, by the
controversy’s conclusion they were conﬁned to 60,547 acres.93 They expended a
signiﬁcant amount of political and actual capital to conclude the land dispute, and they
would not play a signiﬁcant political, economic, or social role again in New York State
until the late-tvventieth century.

The Ogden land dispute also exposed shifting notions of power and authority at
the Tonawanda Reservation. Customary chiefs, who were frustrated and unable to
negotiate increasingly complex Euro-American legal and political doctrines, lost their
inﬂuence among the reservation inhabitants. Young leaders, such as Ely Parker,
educated at Euro-American institutions, demonstrated a command of the English
language and a knowledge of non-Native society. These men claimed power and
authority based on these abilities, even though, according to Seneca cultural norms, they
were too young and inexperienced to occupy such positions. These developments
culminated in the 1848 political revolution at Allegany and Cattaraugus, and in Parker's
government reform at Tonawanda in 1861. At Tonawanda, Parker helped impose a
democratic framework over the ancient governmental structures. In so doing, he did not
fully usurp the power of customary chiefs, but he did acknowledge their weaknesses and

reveal his own belief in the efﬁciency of non-Native governmental structures. He also

 

92 Ely S. Parker, John Martindale, William G. Bryan, and Frederick Follett to J.W. Denver,
Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 30 June 1857, Folder 4 - 1853-1858, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS; and
Conable, "A Steady Enemy," 315-316. See also New York Herald, "The Tonawanda Indians of New York,
6 July 1857; "Draft of an agreement between the Tonawanda Band of Senecas and the Ogden Land
Company," 1 November 1857, Folder 4 - l853-1858, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS; New York Evening
Express, "New Treaty with the Senecas," 5 November 1857; and Ely S, Parker to NE. Matthews, 20
August 1858, Folder 4 - l853-l858, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

93 See Hauptman, A Conspiracy ofInterests, 147, 155; and Conable, "A Steady Enemy," 316.

74

called into question the customary Seneca notion of leadership authority through
unanimity by providing for the selection of a small number of chiefs to elective office.
Finally, by helping to create a government that more closely resembled Euro-American
structures, while at the same time honored some customary Seneca ideals, he began to act
as an innovative thinker and political reformer.

The Ogden land dispute provided a foundational political education for Ely Parker
and the lessons he learned would form the basis for his reform campaign on the national
level in the late-18603 and early-18703. From this early experience he learned that land
speculators and business interests posed signiﬁcant threats to Indian communities. The
Ogden Land Company used bribery, fraud, alcohol, threats, misinformation, and a
complete disregard of customary Indian political practices in an attempt to divest the
Seneca of their land. While Parker interacted with and appealed to sympathetic
politicians, he came to realize that these leaders could do little to protect them unless
bureaucratic structures of the federal government could be reformed. He learned that
dispossession and threats of removal disrupted customary notions of power and authority
as well as clan and kin solidarity within local communities. He also learned, though, that
within speciﬁc contexts, especially when their interests converged with those of Indian
leaders, non-Native people could be trusted and relied upon for help and support. Local
non-Native farmers, middle-class lawyers and professionals, fraternal brothers, national
politicians, and public intellectuals supported the Tonawanda in their resistance campaign
against the Ogden Company. This support proved to be very signiﬁcant in the land
dispute, but it emerged from a very speciﬁc historical context in western and central New

York. This experience conditioned Parker to expect some level of outside cooperation

75

and he made this a component of his later reform campaigns, without understanding the
drastic differences between the New York context and history, and that of the western
territories and states. Finally, the Ogden land dispute and the impact it had on the
Tonawanda community taught Parker that, if Native groups were to exist and succeed in
nineteenth-century America, they could not do so with political and social structures that
were insufﬁciently equipped to deal with increasingly complex Euro-American legal and
political doctrines. To combat this he helped restructure Tonawanda governance and
argued in support of education as a pathway to ease future governmental developments.

These would become two important features of his national level reform campaign.

76

Chapter 2

Donehogawa, Schenandoah, and the Little Snipe: Ethnographers,
Informants, and Nineteenth-Century Notions of Indianness

[Ely Parker] never really knew or thought much about his real self.
Arthur C. Parker, 19191
In an 1887 letter to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 59-year-old Ely Parker (or Donehogawa
the Wolf as he signed it) wrote that "There are so many sides to my nature that. . .I
sometimes fancy myself like a chameleon, ever changing color in thought with every

"2 This statement might be easily discounted as a fanciful self-

varying circumstance.
observation by a man of declining years. What it reveals, though, is more signiﬁcant.
The aging Parker came to understand that throughout his life he had been able to
maintain a keen engagement with popular notions and depictions of Indian people and at
various moments throughout the nineteenth century, he highlighted certain traits that
conveyed powerful meanings and directly related to his leadership skills in both Native
and non-Native societies. Perhaps more importantly, Parker's statement calls into
question the common scholarly interpretations that "the stamp of the white world on him
was unmistakable," or that he often questioned "whether he had done the right thing in

"3

abandoning his Indian ways. If Parker likened himself to a chameleon, then like the

chameleon he could impact the ways that other beings saw him, but he could not, and it is

 

' Parker, The Life ofGeneral Ely s. Parker, 162.

2 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 11 January 1887, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-1894,
MSS PA 1-126, Huntington Library, San Marino, California (Subsequent citation HL).

3 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Worlds, 174. This interpretation is often applied to other Indian

leaders who chose to work within non-Native contexts. Charles Eastman, Elias Boudinot, George Hunt are
other examples.

77

clear from his writings and actions that he did not wish, to fundamentally change who he
was. This chapter questions the interpretation that as Parker worked to reform Indian
policy and shape mainstream notions of Indian people and communities he suffered from
a conﬂicted identity through an examination of his friendships with two signiﬁcant
ethnographers of the period.

Scholars, politicians, and other interested parties often politicize the lives and
representations of prominent and public leaders, and this has been particularly true of
Indian leaders from the period of encounter through the present-day.4 Beginning early in
his life, as an interpreter and spokesperson for his Tonawanda community, and
increasingly as he aged, Parker was a well-known public ﬁgure. Examining how he
engaged with popular notions and depictions of Indians is particularly important because,
as a public ﬁgure whose actions were chronicled in newspapers across the nation, he was
particularly vulnerable to misrepresentations from members of mainstream society. His
life then, provides a lens through which to understand public articulations of the
appropriate roles for Indian people in the nineteenth-century United States.
Simultaneously, because he was a public ﬁgure, Parker was able to shape and highlight
particular traits that at various moments coalesced or conﬂicted with those projected by

the mainstream culture.

 

4 The list of Indian leaders whose lives were and continue to be politicized for various reasons is
long, but a few well-known examples includes Pocahontas, Metacom, Tecumseh, Blackhawk, Sitting Bull,
Red Cloud, Chief Joseph, Geronimo, and even Ward Churchill. For an example of a scholarly examination
of this phenomenon see Rayna Green, "The Pocahontas Perplex: Images of American Indian Women in
American Culture," The Massachussetts Review 16 (Autumn): 698-714, reprinted in Susan Lobo and Steve
Talbot, eds, Native American Voices: A Reader (New York: Longman, 1998). For an example of political
commentary on a more current example see Kirk Johnson, “Incendiary in Academia May Now Find
Himself Burned,” The New York Times 11 February 2005, 13.

78

While many scholars have interpreted Parker as a man torn between Native and
non-Native identities, this chapter examines the two relationships that bookended his life
— his friendship with Lewis Henry Morgan during his youth, and with Harriet Maxwell
Converse in his later years — to show how Parker established himself as a talented and
educated Indian man in nineteenth-century America. Parker was particularly attracted to
these ethnographers, because in their research, writings, and activism, they supported
Indian interests and opposed those who sought to dispossess and coercively assimilate
Native peoples. While these friendships framed his youth and old age, they differed in
subtle ways.

As a youth Parker met, befriended, and developed a long-term mentorship with
the lawyer and ethnographer, Lewis Henry Morgan. Their relationship was both
productive and symbiotic as each provided the other with access to information and
social networks. While Parker served as an informant in Morgan’s study of New York
Indian history and culture, as well as an entree into Seneca society, Morgan provided
Parker with access to educational opportunities, an entrée into the emerging middle-class
intelligentsia in the state, and an opportunity to engage with the developing "scientiﬁc
image" of the Indian. For several Indian men in the mid- to late-nineteenth century,
scientiﬁc pursuits seemingly offered opportunities for public acceptance and respect due
to the objective nature of the discipline, and although he did not pursue a career in this
ﬁeld, Parker used his connection to the prominent scientist to participate in this larger
network of scholars as an informant and purveyor of knowledge about Indian people.
Following his tenure as a policymaker in Washington DC, an episode that ended in

controversy, Parker settled in New York City where he met and developed a close

79

 

Figure 6: Lewis Henry Morgan, (1818-1881)
Source: William Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 40

8O

 

Figure 7: Harriet Maxwell Converse, (1836-1903)
Source: William Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 175

81

friendship with Harriet Maxwell Converse, a poet, ethnographer, political activist, and
supporter of New York Indian issues. By this period, the ﬂedgling ﬁeld of anthropology
had begun a split between Morganian cultural evolution and the beginnings of what
would become Boasian cultural determinism - a split that that would culminate in the
ascendance of universities over museums as the driving forces behind the ﬁeld.5
Converse and Parker favored the older paradigm because the newer anthropologists, for a
variety of reasons, allied themselves with coercive assimilationist reformers. In his
twilight years, a self-reﬂective Parker served as an informant to Converse and introduced
her to prominent New York Indian leaders. Through Converse, Parker met and interacted
with writers and activists in New York City literary circles, there he drew upon the
"literary image" of the Indian and highlighted elements of his public persona that were
both nostalgic for a simpler premodem life, yet “civilized,” and voluntarily assimilated to
mainstream society. This relationship helped Parker maintain a connection to both elite
New York City society and a wide network of Native people from the state.6

Studying processes of representation, not simply representations themselves, is a
relatively new analytical concept in the ﬁeld of American Indian studies. Earlier
scholarship focused on white images and stereotypes of Indian people in literature,

popular culture, and in the public mindset. For these scholars, such representations were

 

5 Regna Darnell, Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 33-39.

6 For both the “scientiﬁc” and “literary” image, see Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian:
Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
Berkhofer outlined how ethnographers and writers constructed varying images of Native people and his
text has inﬂuenced my thoughts in this chapter.

82

signiﬁcant for the impact they had on policy-making and in the social sciences.7 More
recent work, inﬂuenced by postcolonial critiques of ethnography, anthropology, and
history, focuses on the processes of representation in which Native people could and did
play signiﬁcant roles.8 It is important to note, however, that the process of representation
does not refer to the manufacture of identity, an idea which carries the negative
connotation of dishonesty; rather it is simply the process of "making present" to other
people, components of one's identity.9 Morgan and Converse relied upon their
connection with Parker to present themselves as experts on Indian culture and society.
This allowed Parker simultaneously to acquire educational opportunities, political
inﬂuence, and social acceptance in white society. It also provided the opportunity to

shape how the public understood him and Indian people. Parker was undoubtedly aware

 

7 For some of the most signiﬁcant examples of this scholarship see Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism
and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967);
Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian; Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of
America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon, 1975); William Sturtevant, "First
Visual Images of Native America," in First Images of America, vol. 1, ed. F. Chiapelli, M.J. Allen, and
R.L. Benson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976); and Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American:
White Attitudes and US. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982).

8 Current scholarship on Indian representation has been heavily inﬂuenced by post-structuralist
thinkers, postmodern literary critics, and post-colonial theorists, especially Foucault, Gramsci, Said,
Spivak, and Bakhtin. These studies differentiate between hegemonic and oppositional representations, and
focus on the power dynamics and representations of "otherness." For examples of this current scholarship,
see Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington
DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); Kerwin L. Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination:
Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, [890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997); Pauline T. Strong, Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial
American Captivity Narratives (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999); Peter Whiteley, Rethinking Hopi
Ethnography (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998); Mick Gidley, Edward S. Curtis and
the North American Indian, Incorporated (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Deloria, Playing
Indian; and Deloria, Indian in Unexpected Places.

9 In her contribution to A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians, Pauline Turner
Strong argued that current scholarship involving the concept of representation distinguishes itself from
earlier work that focused on the "image" of Indians by examining the relationships between relationship
among power, signiﬁcation, and representation. She also asserted that the concept of representational
practices denoted "making present," "standing for," and "speaking for." See Pauline Turner Strong,
"Representational Practices," in A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians ed. Thomas Biolsi
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), 345.

83

of popular misrepresentations of Native Americans that had been developed through the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To ﬁnd public acceptance though, Parker often
conﬁned his public persona to that which was expected or understood as appropriate for
an Indian man in nineteenth-century society, for example serving as an informant to
social scientists and visibly participating in middle-class society. However, he used these

opportunities to work on behalf of Indian people and Indian communities.10

The “Warrior in Two Worlds”
Ely Parker's life became a subject of popular interest in the early-19003, a scant

few years beyond his death. In 1919, Arthur C. Parker published a biography of his
great-uncle, entitled The Life of General Ely S. Parker: Last Grand Sachem of the
Iroquois and General Grant's Military Secretary. The biography framed Ely as an Indian
hero who suffered ﬁom a tragic crisis of identity stemming from his attempt to seek
success and adulation in two worlds — one Indian and one white. This narrative shaped
the subsequent interpretations of Ely’s life. Unfortunately, the underlying tension
between a Native and non-Native identity was the story of Arthur’s life, not his great-
uncle’s. Arthur Parker was the son of Frederick Parker, Ely’s nephew, and the grandson
of Ely's brother Nicholson. Arthur’s mother was Geneva Griswold, a Scots-English

woman and Nicholson had married a non-Native woman as well, thus making Arthur

 

'0 There is evidence of what might happen to an Indian leader of leader of mixed ancestry who
failed to understand and situate themselves within popular notions of Indian people. For example, both
Joseph Renville and Augustine Hamlin suffered from public presentations of their identities that made the
public skeptical and failed to account for the existence of colonial categories see Gary Anderson, "Joseph
Renville and the Ethos of Biculturalism," in Being and Becoming Indian: Biographical Studies of North
American Frontiers ed. James A. Clifton (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1989): 59-81; and James M. McClurken,
"Augustin Hamlin, jr.: Ottawa Identity and Politics of Ottawa Persistence" in Being and Becoming Indian:
Biographical Studies of North American Frontiers ed. James A. Clifton (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1989): 82-
Ill.

84

 

Figure 8: Frederick Ely Parker, 1912 (left); Arthur C. Parker, 1918
Source: Arthur C. Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 201

85

only one quarter Seneca on his father's side. Following the Seneca matrilineal system, he
was not eligible for full enrollment in the nation and lacked the kin and clan afﬁliations
that descended through the mother. 11 As his own biographer wrote, throughout his life
Arthur "worked to reconcile and manipulate the multiple loyalties and conﬂicting forces
that surrounded his plural heritage." '2 One of the ways that Parker tried to understand his
own identity was through the biography he constructed of his great-uncle.

In his professional life Arthur Parker found great success among non-Native and
Native people alike. As a youth he studied in reservation schools and then, the Dickinson
Seminary. Later he trained with Frederic Putnam at the American Museum in New York
City, and served as a State Archeologist of New York when he wrote The Life of General
Ely S. Parker. His work brought the New York State Museum and the Rochester
Museum and Science Center to national prominence. He served formally as the New
York commissioner on Indian Affairs, advised presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Coolidge,
Taft, and Wilson on Indian policy as a member of the Interior Department's Committee of
One Hundred, and was an executive committee member, secretary-treasurer, and
president of the Society of American Indians. He was also a freemason, a Republican,
and proponent of both democracy and citizenship for Indian peoples. '3 Arthur Parker

saw many similarities between his life and that of his great-uncle. For the younger

 

M Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, viii-ix.

‘2 Porter, To Be Indian, 4. Porter's biographical study draws heavily from Philip Deloria's Playing
Indian. She argued that Arthur Parker believed that to be taken seriously as a modern Indian in twentieth
century America, he would have to balance both a modern and stereotypical image.

[3 Porter, To Be Indian, 3. See also Maddox, Citizen Indians.

86

Parker, "Ely was an inspiring model of the successful, educated Indian, respected by
powerful and signiﬁcant whites and Indians alike?”
Arthur Parker selectively quoted from his uncle’s correspondence and depicted

Ely as a man who, "never really knew or thought much about his real self." '5 He was
particularly interested in the ways that Ely’s acceptance into and efforts to succeed within
mainstream society affected his identity. Arthur wrote:

The matter-of-fact world of civilization has a tendency to drive

from the mind the memories, the theories and longings of long ago,

and it was in the matter-of-fact world where General Parker lived,

toiling day by day for a livelihood. . .The mind of the Indian had

been turned into the channels of the white man and the Indian

thought of himself not as much, but simply as a man among a

million fellow-toilers, struggling for bread and dollars.
According to the Arthur Parker, it was not until he developed a friendship with Harriet
Maxwell Converse that Ely "felt himself an Indian again... [and] remembered his
boyhood."'6 Converse’s interest in and admiration for Ely Parker, wrote Arthur Parker,
inspired the aging sachem to re-explore his lost Indian heritage and through her, he was
redeemed. Converse also served as Arthur Parker’s mentor during his youth and early
adulthood, and his portrayal of her redemptive role was inﬂuenced by his own
admiration. In fact, Ely Parker’s work with and connection to Converse resembled his
earlier ﬁiendship with Lewis Henry Morgan in many signiﬁcant ways.

Arthur Parker's portrayal of Ely Parker as a man torn between two worlds has

inﬂuenced many later scholars. In 1974, when William Armstrong published a second

biography entitled Warrior in Two Camps: Ely S. Parker, Union General and Seneca

 

'4 Porter, To Be Indian, 46.
15 Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, I62.

'6 Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, I63.

87

Chief it drew heavily upon the foundation Arthur Parker laid several decades earlier. His
biography began with a dream Ely's mother had some months before his birth.
According to Armstrong's text, Parker's mother learned that her son would live his life as
"a white man as well as an Indian."17 Armstrong followed this trope throughout the text,
describing the ways that he struggled with his identity through various stages of his life.
His success in mainstream society came at a severe cost according to this biographer and
he related one poignant tale in which a young Seneca girl saw Parker later in his life and
"thought he was a white man." Armstrong, like Arthur Parker before him, also focused on
the relationship between Ely and Converse. The Parker he presented felt guilty for
abandoning his culture and heritage, but through Converse, the poet-ethnographer, he was
able to reclaim this lost identity just before he died. 18

In 2004, PBS released a documentary program about Ely Parker that also built
upon this trope, entitled Ely S. Parker: A Warrior in Two Worlds. In it, prominent
scholars and Native American leaders presented their thoughts and interpretations of
Parker's life. Their comments make clear the power of Arthur Parker's interpretation. G.
Peter Jemison, a Seneca man of the Heron clan and public historian, stated that "[Parker]
had the ability to do so many different things, but perhaps, in the end, the seductiveness
of the white mainstream drew him in." Jare Cardinal, an historian and archivist at the
Rochester Museum and Science Center warned that Parker's life reminds students "to be
careful when going out to be a bridge between two worlds, because if you don't step

carefully, you lose who you are, you lose who you can become." Historian John

 

‘7 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 14.

'8 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 174, 176-177.

88

Mohawk believed that Parker's ambitions in non-Native society "cost him in a sense. . .his
identity." And ﬁnally, historian and Tuscarora Beaver clan member Rick Hill Sr., stated
that Parker "was a traitor, because there was a betrayal to his people" and he saw in a
picture of Parker just before his death, "a guy with a broken heart." '9
This fundamental error in interpretation occurred with Arthur Parker. " Writing
Ely's biography," Joy Porter wrote, "offered [Arthur] Parker a unique chance to explore
the phenomenon of a dual heritage and the angst of assimilation."20 As he researched,
selected archival materials, and drafted the biography, Arthur Parker projected the
anxieties, fears, and emotions from his own life onto his great-uncle. As a mixed
ancestry man who fought for Indian rights in the late-allotrnent period, he viewed himself
as a "progressive Indian," but he understood that most Americans in this period thought
of Native people in the most stereotypical ways. He often lamented that to be recognized
as an Indian in mainstream society, one had to dress and act like the Plains Indian image
people had become familiar with through Wild West shows.21 Arthur's personal
dilemmas problematized his depiction of Ely Parker and reﬂected his own anxieties with

having a bi-cultural heritage. Ely though, was not a man of mixed ancestry and while he

sought success within and was admired by mainstream society, it is clear from his

 

19 Ely S. Parker: A Warrior in Two Camps, VHS, produced by Ann Spurling, directed by Richard
Young (Arlington, VA: Public Broadcasting Service, 2004). For complete transcripts of the historians’
comments see: http://www.pbs.org/warrior/noﬂash/index.html.

20 Porter, To Be Indian, 46.

21 On the back of a picture of himself dressed in Plains Indian garb at the 500th anniversary of the
founding the Iroquois confederacy, Arthur Parker wrote that for "Indians to be recognized as such must
'play' Indian." See Porter, To Be Indian, 242. For more on Wild West shows and ways in which they
shaped popular understandings of Indian people see L.G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of
American Indians, 1883-1933 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Paul Reddin, Wild
West Shows (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Larry McMurty, The Colonel and Little Missie:
Buﬂalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America (New York: Simon and
Shuster, 2005).

89

writings that he always identiﬁed himself as a Seneca Indian and member of the Wolf
Clan. In fact, even though Parker ceased to play an active role in Indian policy after the
18703, his correspondence reveals that he maintained a strong interest in the plight of the
Seneca and in policy decisions on the national level. No matter how sincerely Arthur
Parker may have believed that he and his great-uncle faced similar identity issues, the
evidence is insufﬁcient to support such a conclusion.

Some scholars have interpreted individual statements Parker made within speciﬁc
contexts as evidence that he attempted to disassociate himself from the Indians, that he
presented contradictory feelings, or perhaps believed that he occupied a position
somewhere between Native and non-Native societies due to his command of the
languages, norms, and intricacies of both societies. For example, some look to Parker's
early letters and suggest that he wished to remove himself from Tonawanda, or that he
had conﬂicted emotions about his Indian heritage. What these letters reveal, however, is
a young man who was tired, angry, depressed, or fatigued, especially in the letters and
journal entries he wrote during the Ogden Land dispute. As a Tonawanda spokesperson
who spent weeks at a time away from his home, factionalism and uneasiness weighed
heavily on Parker. In these moments he sometimes wrote melodramatic prose about the
fondness he felt for Tonawanda, as he did in a diary entry from 1846. "O howl do long
for my native woods," he wrote, "[t]his place [Washington DC] has no charms for me."22
At other times though, he expressed frustration and disdain for the contentious Seneca.

In a letter to Morgan, Parker revealed that he felt a general lack of support from his

community and had almost concluded to give up the ﬁght on their behalf. He wanted to

 

22 "Notes written by Ely S. Parker," 9 February 1846, Folder 3: Writings of Ely S. Parker, 1842-
1847, and undated, BECHS.

9O

" go home and tell the people to mind nothing about the Treaty, the law and the Company,
but to remain until driven out of their houses by force."23 Later, but struggling from the
same kind of ﬁ'ustration, he advised his brother Nicholson that it was not necessary for
him to remain among the Indians at Tonawanda. "I have positively been made poor in
serving them so faithfully. . .they have abused our family enough!“ When these
statements are understood within the larger context in which he wrote them though, they
simply indicate moments of frustration, depression, or a brief loss of conviction, rather
than a deeper crisis of identity or betrayal of his indigenous heritage.

Before he died in 1895, Ely Parker perhaps anticipated some of the myths about
his life and, at least in his correspondence with Harriet Maxwell Converse, denied any
faith in the emerging tales. In particular he took issue with the idea that his mother had a
dream prior to his birth that foretold his destiny. In the dream, as the Parker biographers
related it, Elizabeth Parker saw a rainbow that stretched from Tonawanda to the city of
Buffalo. When she sought out an Iroquois dream interpreter, he said that she would give
birth to a son who would "become a white man as well as an Indian... [and that] His sun
will rise on Indian land and set on the white man's land."25 Parker was more than
skeptical though and in a letter to Converse he wrote, "I must. . .right here, disclaim all

knowledge of my dear Mother's dream, or vision." He continued,

 

23 Ely S. Parker to Lewis Henry Morgan, 5 May 1846, Box 1: Correspondence, l839-l 854, Lewis
Henry Morgan Papers, 1839-1885, RRL-UR.

24 Ely S. Parker to Nicholson Parker, 21 June, 1846, Box 2 - 1846-1 848, Ely S. Parker Papers,
APS.

25 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, l4-15.

91

The 'rainbow’ business was rather an indiscreet interjection

at so early a period of my affairs, and its inﬂuences and effects

cannot with any degree of positiveness be explained or interpreted...

The vision was beautiful and heavenly divine, but the romance

...put into my life and attainments in consequence is too

incongruous and unhallowed. . .I mean no reﬂection on you or on

your convictions and beliefs for I only wish to express in the most

emphatic manner my disbelief in the doctrines of fatalism.26
It is interesting to note that even though Parker was so skeptical of the power or
signiﬁcance of this dream, Converse waited until after his death and then published the
story in the Buﬁ’alo Express. 27 Perhaps this story was so compelling that the poet-
ethnographer could not help but publicize it. It is possible as well, that because she also
worked as an activist for New York Indian issues, she believed that her connection to this
prominent and “prophesized” leader further legitimated her position among the Indians as
well as policymakers.

Studying Parker's statements and actions within the larger context of his life,
suggests that he did not question his identity or place within Native and non-Native
society, nor was he contradictory in his public persona. The rest of this chapter addresses
Parker’s relationships in his early and later life. The similarities and parallels between
these relationships and his involvement with the social networks they provided suggests
that, rather than being inconsistent or betraying his heritage, throughout his life, Parker
consistently maintained an engagement with popular depictions and notions about Indians

and simultaneously presented himself, depending upon the circumstances, as either the

embodiment of, or a challenge to these notions.

 

26 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 11 January 1887, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-1894,
MSS PA l-126, HL.

27 Harriet Maxwell Converse ﬁrst published this tale in a Buﬂalo Express article in 1897, two
years after Parker's death. See Harriet Maxwell Converse, "A Prophecy Fulﬁlled," Buffalo Express, 24
January 1897, Box 6 - 1886-1946 and (n.d.), Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

92

Parker and Morgan in the Early-Nineteenth Century
After their initial encounter in 1844, Ely Parker and Lewis Henry Morgan began a

working relationship and friendship that spanned several decades. During this time
Parker became a Seneca sachem, civil engineer, Civil War leader, and federal
policymaker, and Morgan rose to prominence as one of the nation's foremost experts on
Native American culture and society. Through their relationship both men articulated
public personas that were accepted in both Native and non-Native societies.

After 1844, Parker’s meteoric rise to prominence among the Seneca, as well as in
mainstream society, beneﬁtted greatly ﬁ-om Morgan’s support. Parker had been pursuing
an education at Yates Academy in Orleans County, New York, but shortly after his initial
meeting with Morgan, the budding ethnographer helped Parker enroll in Cayuga
Academy in Aurora to prepare for college. The Grand Order of the Iroquois, Morgan’s
fraternal organization, contributed funds for the young man’s education.28 His honorary
membership into the Grand Order also gave Parker access to an extended network of
public intellectuals and business leaders, which he used to gain admission into other
fraternal organizations, for support in the Tonawanda/Ogden Land Company dispute, and
for employment opportunities. Morgan once reminded Parker, as he transitioned into a
career, that he had "a good many friends, especially among the members of our Society,
who would be glad to aid you and keep you up." In fact, in many of Morgan's letters to
the Seneca youth, he followed his questions and directions for collecting ethnographic
data with promises of employment. "I asked him [Mr. Pomeroy, one of Morgan's friends]
if he could not make a place for you with him in the employ of the State," Morgan wrote

in 1848. Knowing that Parker was most interested in working in Indian Affairs though,

 

28 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 18-22.

93

he added that this position might "help you to an appointment to a clerkship in the Indian
Department."29

Morgan simultaneously maintained an intense interest in the education of both
Ely Parker and his siblings, especially in their use of the English language and their
penmanship. "I am glad to hear that you are attending diligently to your studies," he
wrote to Ely.30 At another point he wrote to Caroline Parker, Ely's younger sister,
encouraging her to continue her studies because "writing will be of great service to you as
it will enable you to use our language."31 He later praised her for her progress. Over the
course of several years, Morgan secured enrollment at the State Normal School in Albany
for three of the Parker children, Carrie, Nicholson, and Newton.32

It is clear that Morgan cared for the Parker family, especially the children, but in
his letters about educational and employment opportunities he never failed to request
additional services from them, usually translating Iroquois place names, stories, speeches,
and legends, or collecting and sending material artifacts. In the earlier correspondence
Morgan's requests were gently worded and provided little direction, leaving room for the

Parker children to decide which materials were most important. In the same letter that he

 

29 Lewis Henry Morgan to Ely S. Parker, 14 December 1848, Box 2 - 1846-1848, Ely S. Parker
Papers, APS.

30 Lewis Henry Morgan to Ely S. Parker, 14 November 1846, Box l-Folder 4 — Lewis Henry
Morgan to Ely S. Parker and his sister Caroline Parker, Photostats, 1844-1868, Arthur C. Parker Papers,
NYSL.

3] Lewis Henry Morgan to Caroline Parker, 28 May 1846, Box l-Folder 4 - Lewis Henry Morgan
to Ely S. Parker and his sister Caroline Parker, Photostats, 1844-1868, Arthur C. Parker Papers, NYSL. For
other examples of Morgan's interest in the Parker children's education see Lewis Henry Morgan to Caroline
Parker, 13 November 1849, Box 3 - l849-l852, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS; Lewis Henry Morgan to
Newton Parker, 19 December 1849, Box 3 - 1849-1852, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS; and Lewis Henry
Morgan to Newton Parker, 4 November 1851, Box 3 - 1849-1852, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

32 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 48.

94

 

Figure 9: Caroline G. Parker
Source: Arthur C. Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 89

95

encouraged Caroline Parker to work on her writing, Morgan wrote, "You may send me
the Indian names of some of our western villages, if you please, also of any river or creek
or lake which you are familiar with."33 As his research progressed though, Morgan began
to take a more active role in shaping the creation of the texts the young Seneca provided.
In 1848, when he could not travel to an upcoming Iroquois council, he told Ely Parker to

provide him "the entire speech of the wise man who ofﬁciates at the ceremony of Raising

 

up Sachems." And in an effort to control the amount of materials generated, Morgan
wrote that he would take at least ten pages of notes if he could attend, but from Parker he
would expect "at least 3 sheets." He also suggested that Parker should set up a meeting
for him with Jimmy Johnson, Handsome Lake's successor, so that he could obtain
complete accounts of other rituals. "One of these days," he reminded Parker, "I will do
you justice for your aid."34 Two years later, just prior to the publication of The League,
Morgan again wrote to Parker asking for materials. This time the ethnographer laid out
six speciﬁc questions concerning such Iroquois rituals as the maple dance, the strawberry
feast, and the green corn ceremony, as well as several corollary questions. He told
Parker, "give me full answers to all these inquiries," and he added "[w]hen you have
ﬁnished your answer I wish you would then read over this letter again and see if any

questions are passed over in your answer."35

 

33 Lewis Henry Morgan to Caroline Parker, 28 May 1846, Box l-Folder 4 - Lewis Henry Morgan
to Ely S. Parker and his sister Caroline Parker, Photostats, 1844-1868, Arthur C. Parker Papers, NYSL.

34 Lewis Henry Morgan to Ely S. Parker, 26 September 1848, Box 2 - 1846-1 848, Ely S. Parker
Papers, APS.

35 Letter transcribed in full in Fenton, "Tonawanda Longhouse Ceremonies,” 151-153. For other
examples of Morgan dictating the terms of Parker's ethnographic research, see Lewis Henry Morgan to Ely
S. Parker, 30 October 1848, Box 2 - 1846-1848, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS; Lewis Henry Morgan to Ely S.
Parker, 29 December 1848, Box 2 - 1846-1848, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS; and Lewis Henry Morgan to
Ely S. Parker, 2 August 1850, Box 3 - 1849-1852, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

96

A comparison between the Morgan/Parker siblings relationship and those of other
nineteenth-century ethnographers/anthropologists with their Indian informants reveals
several important similarities. While there were many such relationships, two stand out.
Beginning in 1882 and continuing through the end of her life in 1923, ethnologist Alice
Fletcher worked closely with Francis La F lesche, an Omaha man, whom she eventually
adopted. Almost simultaneously, anthropologist Franz Boas established a relationship
with George Hunt, a Tlingit man and an expert on Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonies, which
lasted into the twentieth century. Comparing these relationships to the Parker/Morgan
collaboration reveals the ways that, through their ethnographic work, non-Native social
scientists actively sought to portray their work as “authentic” and themselves as authority
ﬁgures in the study of culture and society.

In the same way that Morgan, who was interested in presenting Iroquois stories
and speeches in English, had to encourage the Parker children to read and write the
language, Boas, who was interested in Kwakwaka'wakw texts written in the native
language, had to teach Hunt how to write Kwakw'ala. In both cases the ethnographer, by
controlling the method of communication, imposed upon their informants’ "stylistic,
rhetorical, lexical, and semantic constraints" that effectively shaped the texts that they
created. Boas, also like Morgan, exchanged a lengthy correspondence with his informant
and plied him with "requests and speciﬁc questions" that affected which texts he
generated, in what order, and at what speed.36 While Morgan provided educational

opportunities for the Parkers, Boas provided Hunt with money and the work heightened

 

36 Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman, "'The Foundation of All Future Researches': Franz Boas,
George Hunt, Native American Texts, and the Construction of Modernity" American Quarterly 51, no. 3
(1999): 479-528, 490.

97

his status among the Kwakwaka'wakw. In return for his service as ﬁeld assistant and
interpreter, Alice Fletcher provided Francis La F lesche with preferential treatment in the
allotment process, an entrée into the Bureau of American Ethnology, and when she died,

she left him “a substantial estate.”37

While Ely Parker used his connection to Morgan to
engage with a larger network of public intellectuals and social scientists, but never
pursued a career in ethnography, La Flesche actually became the ﬁrst American Indian
professional anthropologist, contributed to several Smithsonian volumes, and published
The Middle Five (1900).38

Just as Morgan implored Parker to be methodical to make sure that he did not
pass over any of his questions, Boas wrote to Hunt, "1 hope you are reading over my
letters, and that you will try to answer one after another all the different questions. It
would be best if you scratched them out. . .after they have been answered, then we shall
know just where we are."39 As anthropologists Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman
argued, in the Boas/Hunt collaboration, the ethnographer sought not only to present the
Kwakwaka'wakw texts, but also to represent them as so authoritative as to be "the

foundation of all future researches," and himself as the nation's foremost expert on Indian

culture.40 Her work with La Flesche earned Alice Fletcher the reputation of “the best

 

37 Tom Holrn, The Great Confusion in Indian Aﬂairs: Native Americans and Whites in the
Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 107.

38 There is no lengthy biography of Francis La F lesche. For more on his life and work see Margot
Liberty, “Francis La Flesche: The Osage Odyssey” in American Indian Intellectuals ed. Margot Liberty (St.
Paul, MN: West Publishing Co., 1978): 45-60.

39 Franz Boas to George Hunt, 23 January 1918, APS, quoted in Briggs and Bauman, "The
Foundation of All Future Researches," 490.

40 Briggs and Bauman, "The Foundation of All Future Researches," 489.

98

ethnologist in the United States,” in 1903.41 Through his work with Parker several
decades earlier, Morgan worked to accomplish the same goals.

While he was still a student at the prestigious Cayuga Academy, a beneﬁt of his
connection to Morgan, Parker worked hard to challenge misrepresentations of Indian
people and demonstrate the pride he held in his indigenous heritage. There, his great-
grandnephew wrote, Parker sought "to live up to all the higher ideals men had of the red
race and to disprove all the current tales that the Indian was lazy, drunken, and inferior in
intellect."42 In an 1845 public debate that spanned more than a day, Parker and a non-
Native student discussed the ideals of savagery and civilization. In one reply Parker
stated that he "advocated the supremacy of the happiness of the savage in his wild state in
the deep, dense forest to that of the civilized in all his reﬁnement, pomp, and power. " He
afﬁrmed that he was "one of the remnants of that race of beings generally denominated
savages," and although he was seeking "the cultivation of the liberal arts and sciences and
the powers of the mind" if it proved true that there was more happiness to be found
among the Indians, then he would be happily "resume savage life in all its wildness."43 It
is clear that, even in a white world he would not abandon his heritage or attempt to
portray himself as something more or different than what he was. He was also willing to
concede to his opponent the potential truth of the common wisdom of the time, that held,
"do what you will an Indian will still be an Indian," and in so doing, revealed his pride in

his heritage. Parker did ultimately ﬁnd happiness at school and one former classmate,

 

41 Twenty-First Annual Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian, 1903, 79, quoted in
Holm, The Great Conﬁision, 107.

42 Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 76.

43 Ely S. Parker, "A Composition Read at Cayuga Academy... " 18 November 1845, Box I - 1794-
1845, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

99

Louise Bacheldor, later remembered that "No young man in school could compete with
him in oratory. . .He was truly a prodigy, springing from such a slow, indolent race."44 As
a young man, Parker excelled in writing, rhetoric, and oration, but in his public debate he
presented himself as an Indian who saw in Indian life, a level of happiness perhaps
unattainable in white society.

His education in non-Native society also led to success among the Tonawanda.
The lengthy and intense Ogden land dispute caused many profound changes within that
Seneca community. Signiﬁcantly, it led many at Tonawanda to question their customary
chiefs. Lacking a command of the English language or Euro-American legal and political
doctrines, customary leaders struggled to maintain community solidarity as the Ogden
Company sold land plots and resource rights to non-Native settlers. Parker though, on
the basis of his ability to communicate with and negotiate between various non-Native
politicians, jurists, and businessmen, claimed positions of power and authority previously
unavailable to young men within Seneca society. While his community struggled to
come to terms with the emerging younger generation of leaders, Parker’s inﬂuence as a
ﬁgure of authority among the Tonawanda and within non-Native society continued to
grow.45

Morgan also provided Parker with an entrée into a larger network of writers and
public intellectuals whose work and subject matter included Indian history and culture.

On the ﬁrst page of The League, Lewis Henry Morgan made a very public display of

Parker's importance to his work. "To Ha-so-no-an-da (Ely S. Parker), A Seneca Indian,"

 

44 Mrs. Louise Bacheldor, letter to the editor, Buﬂalo Express, March 24, 1915, Box 6 - 1886-
1946 and n.d., Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

45 For more, see Chapter One of this dissertation.

100

he wrote, "This Work, The Materials of which are the ﬁ'uit of our joint researches, Is
inscribed; In Acknowledgement of the Obligations and In Testimony of the Friendship of
The Author. "46 In the time period around the publication of Morgan's text, non-Native
citizens and writers from New York as well as other states began to send letters to Parker
asking a wide variety of questions relating to Indian culture, language, history, and
society. The poet Alfred B. Street, in an effort to complete his epic poem entitled
"Frontenac," wrote to Parker asking for clariﬁcation on many issues relating to Iroquois
language and identity, including the signiﬁcance of the term Atotarho and whether or not
it was appropriate to pluralize Hodenosaunee.47 In another letter, a woman named Mrs.
Pearsall asked if Parker knew some place names in the Uncowa language, a group native
to the Connecticut region.48 As he answered these inquiries Parker re-afﬁrmed and
solidiﬁed his authority and knowledge base, and the fact that the requests for information
continued to arrive was a testament to his success.

Lewis Henry Morgan's position as a public intellectual emerged in the early-
1840s after he completed his degree at Union College and passed the New York State
bar. He founded a secret fraternal organization called the Gordian Knot with the purpose
of bringing together bright, young, literary minds to create a native American literature

that could help deﬁne a national identity.49 Indian imagery and imagined Indians ﬁgured

 

46 Lewis Henry Morgan, The League of the Ho-De-No-Sau-Nee, or Iroquois (New York: Mark H.
Newman & Co., 185]).

47 Alfred Billings Street to Ely S. Parker, 5 November 1847, Alfred B. Street Letters, NYSL. See
also Alfred B. Street, Frontenac, A Poem (London: R. Bentley, 1849).

48 Ely S. Parker to Mrs. Pearsall, Folder 6, Vault Box, Ayer MS 674, Ely S. Parker Papers, NL.

49 Deloria, Playing Indian, 72.

101

heavily into this project and with his interest in this subject piqued, Morgan soon
reshaped the organization based on the ideas that since they lived in the area once
predominated by the now vanishing Iroquois (according to contemporary belief), he and
his compatriots should seek to understand and chronicle Indian history, culture, and
society, before it became impossible to do so. Drawing from a tradition that emerged
during the American Revolution, speciﬁcally that “Indians represented quintessential
American identities,” Morgan believed that as citizens of the young American nation, he
and his colleagues were heirs to the country’s indigenous heritage.50 He changed the
name of his organization to the Grand Order of the Iroquois in an effort to reﬂect its
evolving orientation.

Members of the restyled fraternity participated in "Inindianation" ceremonies in
which they came to embody deceased Cayuga warriors. Morgan represented himself as
"Schenandoah" and became, at least in his mind, a "modern" Iroquois. Upon
encountering Parker in the Albany bookstore, though, Morgan confronted an actual
modern Iroquois and in doing so rethought his literary approach the study of Indians.
With Parker's help, he adopted a more rigorous and methodical scientiﬁc approach based
on ﬁrst-hand observation and information supplied by informants from within the subject
culture.5 ' Morgan immediately admitted Parker into his Grand Order because he
recognized the authenticity, legitimacy, and authority Indian members provided. In

Morgan’s quest to become a recognized public intellectual, notions of authenticity and

 

50 Deloria, Playing Indian, 94.

51 Deloria, Playing Indian, 76-7 8, 83-85. For more on Lewis Henry Morgan's early life see
Resek, Lewis Henry Morgan; Stem, Lewis Henry Morgan: Social Evolutionist; Thomas Trautmann, Lewis
Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); and Elisabeth
Tooker, Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994).

102

authority held profound import. In the same 1844 letter that he congratulated Parker on
admission into the group, he also asked him to send a list of Seneca words for various

leadership positions such as "treasurer, general council," and "head-warrior or general."
It was clear from this early point, that Morgan would use his connection to Parker to
advance his own and his organization’s public presentation. "We [the Grand Order]
intend to adopt the Seneca tongue," he told the young Indian, "because through you we
can have the beneﬁt of it." He also asked if Parker had any Indian ﬁ'iends "of intelligence
and character," because he wanted to incorporate them into the fraternity as well. He
added that he would "prefer young men at or about your age and educated."52 Morgan's
search for authenticity and authority through Parker would not end with social
organizations, though, and he began to envision writing a scientiﬁc treatment of Indian
society and culture.53

Morgan was remarkably successful in articulating a public portrayal of himself as
an authority on Indian culture through his work and relationship with Ely Parker. Even
prior to the publication of the The League, Morgan wrote, "I have more in manuscript in
relation to the League of the Iroquois and the principles by which it was governed than
anyone else."54 After the book was published Parker wrote to other people suggesting

that they consult it to answer the questions they had about Indian cultures. He once wrote

that in The League, one could ﬁnd the "most complete and exhaustive analysis of the

 

52 Lewis Henry Morgan to Ely S. Parker, 8 May 1844, Box l-Folder 4 - Lewis Henry Morgan to
Ely S. Parker and his sister Caroline Parker, Photostats, 1844-1868, Arthur C. Parker Papers, NYSL.

53 In a letter to Parker, Morgan wrote, "I shall at some future time publish a book on your
government and institutions..." See Lewis Henry Morgan to Ely S. Parker, 26 September 1848, Box 2 -
1846-1848, Ely S. Parker Papers, APS.

5" Lewis Henry Morgan to Ely s. Parker, 26 September 1348, Box 2 - 1846-1848, Ely s. Parker
Papers, APS.

103

Indian clan or totemic system and from which one can obtain as clear and correct a
conception of Indian political and domestic economy, including heritable rights, as can

"55 When Morgan sought appointment as the Commissioner of Indian

possibly be given.
Affairs under Abraham Lincoln, Parker even sent a letter of recommendation on his
behalf. Parker, writing as "A Seneca Sachem of the Iroquois Confederacy," told the
president that through his relationship with Morgan he knew that "his intimate knowledge
of the Indian Affairs of this country, and the wants and interests of the Indians, eminently
qualify him for the position of Commissioner of Indian Affairs of these United States."56
Parker and Morgan developed a symbiotic relationship in the early nineteenth
century and through it, both men found success in Native and non-Native societies. In
particular, this relationship provided Parker with opportunities to engage with popular
notions and depictions of Indian people. Parker’s writings and actions from the period
suggest that while he sought a career and social acceptance in mainstream society, he
maintained an active interest in his Indian heritage and in shaping how Indian history,
culture, and communities were perceived by non-Native people. His meteoric rise in
Native and non-Native societies and widespread public acceptance culminated in a
prominent position as Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the post-Civil War era, but he
ran into controversies that ended with his ouster from federal policymaking and from

Washington society altogether. Following this period, which is the focus of the second

half of this dissertation, Parker settled ﬁrst in Fairﬁeld, Connecticut and then, in 1876, in

 

55 Ely S. Parker, " Draft for a lecture on Indian clans and naming practices, Oct. 10, 1885," Folder
3, Vault Box, Ayer MS 674, Ely S. Parker Papers, NL. This ﬁle is mislabeled. It is not a draft of a lecture,
but rather a draft of a letter to an unknown recipient.

56 Ely S. Parker to Abraham Lincoln, 21 February 1861, Folder 19 - Morgan Correspondence,
Feb. 21-28, 1861, Box 2 - Correspondence, 1855-1861, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, l839-1885, UR-RRL.

104

I mm ..““-~h. _ m- _..._. -

New York City. There he worked as a clerk for the police department and purchased a
house on Mulberry Street, only a few blocks from the residence of Harriet Maxwell

Converse. 5 7

Parker and Converse in the Late-Nineteenth Century

Despite his personal and public struggles in the 18708, Parker remained actively
engaged in Indian political issues, he frequently corresponded with Seneca leaders, and
he traveled to Tonawanda as often as his health and other responsibilities would allow.
He was no longer a public ofﬁcial and lived a quieter, more modest existence as a clerk
for the New York Police Department, but attended lectures and consulted political
activists whenever possible. During the 18803 and 18908 Parker developed a relationship
with Harriet Maxwell Converse that aided his continued engagement with popular
notions and depictions of Indian people. As these notions shifted in the late nineteenth
century, her literary talents inﬂuenced Parker to push at the boundaries of nineteenth-
century Indianness and in his public persona he highlighted traits that appealed to the
dual obsessions of popular society. To them he was simultaneously “authentic” and
“modern.”

Parker's relationship with Converse proved beneﬁcial on many levels. First, their

correspondence and her interest in Iroquois history, culture, and society as a creative

 

57 In Fairﬁeld, Connecticut, Parker engaged in business opportunities and stock market
speculation. He was quite successful at ﬁrst and amassed a small fortune. The Fairﬁeld community
embraced Parker and his young, non-Native wife Minnie, as they bred horses, hosted parties, and built a
wine cellar "unparalleled" in the region. They also employed a footman, a coachman, a "bodyguard and a
retinue of servants from the south." This success would not last, however, and by the end of the 1870s he
had lost money on many of his investments, especially after the failure of Jay Cooke and Company, and the
collapse of the Freedman's Bank in 1873 and 1874. In 1876 he moved to New York City to work as a clerk
for the police department and purchased a house on Mulberry Street, only a few blocks from the residence
of Harriet Maxwell and Franklin Converse. See Miscellaneous notes of James E. Kelly, and Ely S. Parker
to James E. Kelly, 4 November 1891, James E. Kelly Papers, New York Historical Society, New York,
NY, quoted in Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 164.

105

writer as well as an ethnographer, allowed Parker to play with representations of
Indianness. His letters to her revealed a playful, self-deprecating, and occasionally
sarcastic tone as he wrote about himself and his life. This tone, however, also revealed a
keen awareness of the ways popular expectations of Indians shifted in the late-nineteenth
century. In this time period, members of mainstream culture, responding to the rapidly
industrializing society, began to yearn for representations of a simpler, more natural,
premodem life and within this context became obsessed with “authentic” Indians.
Second, their relationship allowed him to maintain a connection to the elite social circles
to which he had become accustomed in Washington and F airﬁeld. Converse was a
wealthy woman and hosted salons, dinner parties, and other events to which Parker
certainly attended. Parker seized these opportunities to represent himself within the
conﬁnes of the other increasingly pervasive expectation of Indianness, as a “civilized”
and assimilated man who had a stake in the future of the nation.58 Finally, because she
was also a activist who shared Parker’s political agenda, Converse represented a
sounding-board as he expressed his ideas about Indian policy and reform. Even though
he had been pushed out of Washington DC, through Converse, Parker could once again
ﬁnd acceptance as an astute policy critic.

Born in 1836, in Elmira, New York, Harriet Maxwell Converse learned about
Indian culture and society ﬁrst from her father and grandfather. Both men held intense

interest in New York Indians and both had been adopted by the Seneca, who named her

 

58 For more on this emerging expectation of Indianness and these ways that Native intellectuals,
especially the Society of American Indians responded to it, see Maddox, Citizen Indians, 8-10. See also
Porter, To Be Indian.

106

grandfather, Guy Maxwell, T a-se-wa—ya-ee, which meant, "Honest Trader."59 Following
the death of her ﬁrst husband, Harriet married Franklin Converse, an experimental
musician who became known as the "father of the banjo" for his innovations to that
instrtunent.60 When she and Parker met, probably in 1881, Converse was an established
poet and writer, and although she had some interest in Indian history and folklore, she
had yet to explore these at length. From 1881 through the end of his life in 1895 their
ﬁ’iendship provided Parker with many tangible beneﬁts. Similar to the earlier ﬁiendship
he maintained with Morgan though, Parker provided for Converse a source of
information about and a connection to New York Indians that inspired her literary
pursuits and her work as a political activist throughout the last decades of her life.
Although Converse had already established herself as a poet and writer by the
time she and Parker met, the "knowledge he gave her brought with it the inspiration for a
deeper study of Indian life."61 She sought to follow in her grandfather’s and father’s
footsteps and become an authority on Indian life. Parker provided her with the
information necessary to do so. In 1885 and 1886 Converse worked hard in her literary
pursuits and maintained a steady correspondence with Parker, who thoroughly answered
her questions on Indian matters. In one letter he sent her a list of Seneca words for the
main characters in a story she had composed. He told her that it was "not possible in the

Indian language to combine in one name or word all the elements of character you

 

59 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 174. See also, William Fenton, "Harriet Maxwell
Converse," Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, vol. I (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1971): 375-377.

60 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 174-175.

6' Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 162. She had published several poems and essays in
18705. In 1882, shortly after meeting Parker she published Sheaves, a book of poetry. Fenton, "Harriet
Maxwell Converse," 375.

107

require," but he did make some suggestions for three characters, an "old man," a "rising
young man," and a "promising woman.”2 A few weeks later Converse wrote to Parker
that she had begun to revise her book, but needed some additional information about
wampum. Parker sent her a rough draft of a legend he transcribed that contained all she
needed to know "relating to wampum."63 In early January 1886, Converse became
curious about the idea of a New Year celebration among the Seneca and asked Parker to
elaborate. He wrote to her that he did not believe there was such a thing within his
community, but instead provided a lengthy description of the Iroquois puriﬁcation rituals
from the midwinter ceremony.64 A year later she sent him a rough draft of an
introductory "Ode" to a piece on Iroquois festivals and ﬁnding it to his liking, Parker
wrote that it "met his hearty and unqualiﬁed approval" and that because it was so well
done, "further comment is superﬂuous"65
Throughout the 18803 and early-18908 Converse published poems, stories, and

studies of Iroquois life, most signiﬁcantly "The Ho-den-no-sau-nee: the Confederacy of

the Iroquois," an ode written in the same meter as Longfellow's Hiawatha, in 1884."6

 

62 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 7 July 1885, Box 5 - 1859-1885, Ely S. Parker
Papers, APS. In a later letter he sent her a Seneca word for "big eagle" and included a phonetic
pronunciation so that she would be able to pronounce the word "as readily and correctly as any other
Seneca." See Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 3 January 1893, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-
1894, MSS PA 1-126, HL.

63 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 31 July 1885, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-1894,
MSS PA 1-126, HL.

64 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 8 January 1886, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-1894,
MSS PA 1-126, HL.

65 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 22 January 1887, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-1894,
MSS PA 1-126, HL.

66 Fenton, "Harriet Maxwell Converse," 376. For more on the divergent trends in anthropology
during this time period, see Ralph W. Dexter, “Putnam’s Problems Popularizing Anthropology,” American
Scientist 54, no. 3 (September, 1966): 315-332.

108

Aided in no small part by Ely Parker, Converse positioned herself as an authority on
Indians. Converse ﬁt within the divergent trends in the history of the ﬁeld of
anthropology as a proponent of the older, Morganian school of cultural evolution, but as a
creative writer as well as ethnographer she reﬂected the dual popular obsessions with
authentic Indianness and assimilated Indians. As Philip Deloria asserted in Playing
Indian, in the late-nineteenth century, “a new, modernist tradition” emerged that was
“characterized by an obsessive desire for authentic Indians far outside the temporal
bounds of modern society.”67 Parker found her approach to ethnography more appealing
than the newer anthropologists who allied with and supported coercive assimilationist
reformers. He not only aided Converse as an informant, he supported her overtly and
publicly. In an 1894 letter, Parker noted that even though the Iroquois had not yet "been
understood or ﬁllly comprehended," she had become "the best posted woman on Indian
lore in America. "68 Just prior to his death in 1895, Parker declared this publicly in a letter
published in the Buﬂalo Express. In it he wrote that he enjoyed reading the articles she
wrote about Indian people because she had "been among them," and because she knew
"their political beliefs and social organizations. . .their civil polity and religious beliefs
and customs." He then reiterated that this knowledge gave "authority to her statements"

which "no other writer" could match.69 Parker not only supplied her with information,

 

67 Deloria, Playing Indian, 94.

68 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 10 July 1894, Box 6 - 1886-1946 and (n.d.), Ely S.
Parker Pagers, APS.
Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 18 January 1895, published in Buﬂalo Express,
Folder AGO-449, BECHS.

109

but served as a conduit to a wide network of Native contacts in New York which greatly
helped Converse's public persona.

Throughout the 18805 Native people visited Parker in New York City, but as he
was a busy police department clerk, he often encouraged them to meet and interact with
Harriet Maxwell Converse. For her part, Converse developed these relationships and a
rapport with Indian people that resulted in an entrée and acceptance into Indian
communities, especially among the Seneca. In one letter Parker wrote that he was so
busy that every night he was "only too glad to enjoy a little rest." Due to his schedule he
sent a visiting delegation of "quite intelligent" Mohawks to the Converse residence and
was pleased to learn that she enjoyed the visit.70 These visits occurred so frequently that
some in New York City began to refer to the "colony" of Indian people headed by Parker
and Converse. They took it as their personal responsibility, according to one newspaper
article, to look after all "the Indians who come to New York and who are confused and
bewildered by the burly-burly and the great city." "By these good people," the reporter
continued, "the wants of the visitors are understood, their needs are supplied and they are

"7‘ These connections not only provided Converse with

sent on their way rejoicing.
additional informants and contacts for her work, but also contributed to her public

persona of a legitimate authority on Indian society and culture because she had “been

among them.”

 

70 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 11 March 1887, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-1894,
MSS PA 1-126, HL.

7' "Indians of New York City, A Colony with Two Interesting People at its Head," Unnamed
Newspaper Article, Ely S. Parker Scrapbook, vol. 1, Box 44, William Beauchamp Papers, NYSL.

110

In the 18803 and 18903, Converse traveled to and through Iroquois communities
in New York and Canada. Like her father and grandfather before her, the Seneca at
Cattaraugas adopted Converse as an honorary member of the Snipe clan in 1885. In 1888
she went to Onondaga to witness the midwinter ceremony in person and although Parker
offered his blessing for her travels, he also jokingly warned, "Don't do any dancing. . .It
will lower your dignity among the Indians."72 In the 18903, Converse became
increasingly involved in political activism for the New York Indians. She protested
against the 1891 Whipple Bill, an amendment to the allotment program which proposed
to break up and allot Seneca reservations in the state. Her effort to help defeat this bill
clearly demonstrated Parker’s inﬂuence, like him, she believed that Indian communities
should be protected as distinct entities until they could assimilate on their own terms.
The Whipple Bill failed. Between 1902 and 1904, she also helped defeat a federal bill
introduced by Representative Edward B. Vreeland. This bill would have forced the
Seneca to pay a considerable sum of money to the Ogden Land Company in an effort to
ﬁnally extinguish the company’s claims to Tonawanda land and allow for the federal
government to include the Seneca reservations in the allotment program. Christian
organizations, the Board of Indian Commissioners, and reformers of the Lake Mohonk
Conference supported the measure. Converse’s efforts once again revealed Parker’s
inﬂuence. She wrote many letters opposing the bill. Several of these letters were
published in newspapers across the nation and raised awareness about the action. With
the help of several sawy politicians and the public support create by Converse’s letters,

theVreeland Bill was defeated in 1904. In return for her work on their behalf, the Seneca

 

72 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 13 January 1888, Folder 13 - Parker, Ely 8., Box 5
- Subject File - Parker Family, Arthur C. Parker Papers, 1860-1952, UR-RRL.

111

Nation formally voted to adopt Converse and gave her the name, Gaiiwanoh, which
meant “The Watcher.” In 1892 they raised her to a sachemship in the Iroquois
confederacy, a very unusual honor for a non-Native woman to receive. The Seneca also
initiated her into the secret Little Water Medicine Society and entrusted her with a sacred
bundle.73 This was a particularly great distinction, historically uncommon, and revealed
the success of her public persona.

Through his correspondence with Converse, Parker maintained his engagement
with popular depictions of Indian people, but this personal relationship provided latitudes
previously unavailable to him. With Converse, Parker played with notions of Indianness
in a fanciful and occasionally sarcastic manner, but his letters also revealed an awareness
of the shifting desires of mainstream society for “traditional” Indian identities. After her
adoption into the Snipe Clan, Parker always addressed her as Gayaneshaoh, which meant
the "Little Snipe," or "Dear Cousin," referring to the connection between the Wolf and
Snipe clans. In one letter he poked fun at her using Indian imagery. He wrote, "I know
well that the snipe is a restless, harmless little bird," while "the wolf, real and
mythological. . .is yet a noble animal." He promised though, that "the restless, ﬂighty,
prodigal, but good little snipe, should receive nothing but kindness and protection from
the wild and ferocious, untamable wolf of North America, for it is very probable that the
two are cousins.”74 Later he expressed pleasure in the fact that "the drooping spirits of

the restful snipe has [sic] been revived, and that the smoldering embers of her lodge ﬁre

 

73 Fenton, "Harriet Maxwell Converse," 376; and Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 323-
324.

74 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 24 December 1885, Folder 13 - Parker, Ely 8., Box
5 - Subject File - Parker Family, Arthur C. Parker Papers, 1860-1952, UR-RRL.

112

has [sic] been reviviﬁed into a cheerful blaze by the ﬁtful glimpse of a prowling wolf
'down the distant valley.”75 When he planned a trip to western New York with his family
he told Converse that his "tribe will take up their march for the setting sun."76

Keenly aware of popular misrepresentations of Indian people, but perhaps hoping
to disempower them through sarcasm, Parker often referred, in his letters, to his
"untutored mind," his "nomadic, ethereal brain," and his "lack of education, reﬁnement,
and imagination." He also stated that he was a "poor, miserable sinner," and an
"uncivilized, unchristian, benighted savage."77 It is clear that Parker did not believe these
descriptions to be true, but Converse's literary inﬂuence and his own awareness of
shifting cultural expectations of Indianness allowed Parker to explore these stereotypes in
ways that were not possible in his previous positions within the federal government or
within the cultural frameworks of the earlier nineteenth century.

One of the most frequent topics of conversation in their correspondence, after
Indian matters of course, was the practice of receiving guests. Among elite society in the
late-nineteenth century, families opened‘their houses for several hours per week and sat

to chat with visitors or “callers.” As an elite woman, Converse participated in this

practice and she incorporated Parker into her social circles. After one visit Converse sent

 

75 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 7 December 1886, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-
1894, MSS PA 1-126, HL.

76 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 6 July 1886, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-1894, MSS
PA 1-126, HL.

77 See Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 7 December 1886, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-
1894, MSS PA 1-126, HL; Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 11 January 1887, Ely S. Parker
Papers, 1803-1894, MSS PA 1-126, HL; Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 5 December 1887,
Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-1894, MSS PA 1-126, HL; Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 1
January 1891, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-1894, MSS PA 1-126, HL; and Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell
Converse, ca. 1885, Folder 5, Ely S. Parker Papers, Ayer MS 674, NL.

113

Parker a letter "written in a spirit of vexation." He wondered if she was angry "[b]ecause
callers interfered with or interrupted the pleasant chat" they were having. He reminded
her though, that it "was all right and proper, for society has its demands upon its votaries
which cannot be avoided or evaded without offense."78 At Converse's salons Parker had
the opportunity to meet and interact with New York artists and intellectuals such as Mark
Raymond Harrington, future curator of the Southwest Museum, and Joseph Keppler, a
cartoonist and founder of Puck magazine.79 When Parker became ill in 1890, Converse
introduced him to Dr. J .H. Salisbury, another of her friends. After seeing the patient,
Salisbury wrote to Converse that "General Parker has Diabetes. . .I have requested him to
come in and see me often as a social patient - without charge."80 As he had in DC and
Fairﬁeld, Parker situated himself ﬁrmly in elite society.

Parker used these opportunities to portray himself as a man who was both
"civilized" and voluntarily assimilated but was also the authentic Indian who yearned for
simpler times. The men and women he met through Converse responded with interest,
curiosity, and acceptance. Arthur Parker wrote that he was "ever sought by cultured men
for his charming manner and interesting conversational ability."8' But that was not the
only reason elite society members sought out Parker's company. "[I]t was the fact that he

was an Indian that ﬁrst attracted me to him," wrote Parker's friend and New York City

 

78 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 27 August 1886, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-1894,
MSS PA 1-126, HL.

79 See Porter, To Be Indian, 22, 59-60. For the best treatment of Keppler, see Richard West,
Satire on Stone: The Political Cartoons of Joseph Keppler (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

80 J.H. Salisbury to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 8 March 1890, Box 6 - 1886-1946 and (n.d.), Ely
S. Parker Papers, APS. Salisbury invented a treatment for arthritis that involved eating a high protein diet

of shredded meat, cooked rare in patties. It would eventually become known as "Salisbury Steak."

3' Parker, The Life ofGeneral Ely s. Parker, 221.

114

police photographer, Jacob Riis. He also nostalgically revealed that it "was not General
Parker, however, but Donehogawa, Chief of the Senecas and the remnant of the once
powerful Six Nations, and guardian of the western door of the council lodge, that
appealed to me, who in my boyhood had lived with Leather—Stocking and with Uncas and
Chingachgook." Riis, like many other society members in New York, concluded from
Parker's persona that he was both an elite member of society and "a true son of the
forest."82
Parker’s relationship with Converse also provided an outlet for his ideas about
Indian policy and reform. Converse, an emerging political activist, followed state and
federal Indian issues, maintained connections with other local and national reformers, and
often queried Parker for his thoughts on policies and reform agendas. She provided open
ears and an interested intellect for the aging ex-policymaker. "Our wise legislators at
Washington, the Indian Aid and the Indian Rights Associations are all advocating with a
red hot zeal, the allotment and civilization schemes," he once responded to her in an 1885
letter. "Misguided Indian philanthropists," he continued, "tell us that absorption of the
aboriginal race into the great body politic is their only hope of salvation." He concluded,
though, that he saw "nothing in the experiment but an accelerated motor for the
absorption of the Indian race back into the bosom of the Mother Earth."83 He also

believed that Indian Affairs were no longer characterized by humanitarian efforts, but

that politics had invaded to a large degree. "[A]11 interested persons must treat and look

 

87' Jacob Riis, The Making ofan American (New York: Macmillan Co., 1966, rep. 1901), 157-158.

83 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, ca. 1885, Folder 5, Ely S. Parker Papers, Ayer MS
674, NL.

115

at it as such," he warned.84 In these letters he often criticized efforts to "Christianize"
Indian peoples and instead argued that education should be the ﬁrst goal of federal
policy-makers.85 Demonstrating his continued and consistent pride in his Seneca heritage
Parker once asserted that "[m]y sympathies, feelings, and every ﬁbre of my soul is for my
people."86 His relationship with Converse allowed Parker to continue expressing his
opinions on Indian policy and through these discussions he once again found acceptance
as an astute policy critic. There is no doubt that political debates dominated the salons in

the Converse residence.

While many scholars, inﬂuenced by Arthur Parker’s biography, have interpreted Parker
as a man torn between Native and non-Native identities, his relationships with prominent
ethnographers throughout the nineteenth century suggest otherwise. He maintained an
active engagement with popular notions and depictions of Indians and while he
highlighted certain characteristics or traits that reﬂected these notions as they shifted and
evolved, he also demonstrated a consistent public persona as a Seneca man. Both Lewis
Henry Morgan and Harriet Maxwell Converse supported Indian interests and in their
research, writing, and activism, they opposed those who sought to dispossess and

coercively assimilate Indian people. They shared in Parker’s political ideals and through

 

84 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 12 March 1886, Ely S. Parker Papers, l803-l894,
MSS PA 1-126, HL.

85 See Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 12 January 1886, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-
1894, MSS PA 1-126, HL; Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 4 October 1887, Ely S. Parker
Papers, l803-l894, MSS PA l-126, HL; and Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, ca. 1885, Folder
5, Ely S. Parker Papers, Ayer MS 674, NL.

86 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, 12 March 1886, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1803-1894,
MSS PA 1-126, HL.

116

the information and insights he provided, they positioned themselves as experts on Indian
history and culture in the nineteenth century. While Parker’s relationships with these two
ethnographers, separated by several decades, differed in subtle ways, they also revealed
his consistent effort to associate with individuals who supported Indian people and Indian
communities.

During his youth and later adulthood Parker found success and public acceptance,
at least in part, through his connections to prominent ethnographers, in the interim
though, as a young adult and a middle-aged man, his association with Union General US.
Grant and his marriage to a young, white socialite shaped his career path and
opportunities. In this interim period in the middle of the nineteenth-century, Parker
continued to engage with popular notions of Indian people, at times supporting
mainstream depictions, while at other times challenging them through rhetoric, reform,
and his own public persona. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Parker found,
in Washington DC, much success and a public audience that was, though curious, willing
to accept him. Controversies that surrounded his marriage, however, revealed the
prevalence and pervasiveness of evolving notions of Indianness within a society
inﬂuenced by evolving and shifting state structures focused on geographical expansion
and indigenous dispossession. Nonetheless, Parker and his young, white wife became
ﬁxtures in Washington DC society and he rose to become a signiﬁcant federal
policymaker. While to the DC public he came to epitomize the standards and ideals of

middle-class Victorian manhood, he continued to understand himself as a Seneca leader.

117

Chapter 3

“[Alll intent on seeing the white woman married to the red man:”
The Parker/Sackett Affair and the Public Spectacle of Intermarriage

“Some people thought I married the General because he was an Indian.
Now I don ’t care for Indians — I married the General because I loved him. ”
Minnie 0. Parker, 19041
On December 17, 1867, Ely Parker disappeared. The Seneca Sachem and aide-de-camp
to General US. Grant planned to wed a young, white, Washington DC socialite named
Minnie O. Sackett that morning, but his absence postponed the ceremony. Parker
reappeared on December 20 amidst a ﬁrestorm of public scrutiny, and over the course of
the next four days rumors and speculation about this curious and potentially controversial
tmion reached a fever pitch in some of the nation’s most signiﬁcant newspapers. Not
only were the events surrounding this wedding inherently fascinating, but they also raise
important questions about Indian/white intermarriage and nineteenth-century notions of
Indianness. In her foundational article on the subject, historian Peggy Pascoe postulated
that for “scholars interested in the social construction of race, gender, and culture, few

subjects are as potentially revealing as the history of interracial marriage.”2 More

 

I Minnie made this comment to New York artist, James E. Kelly, nine years after Ely’s death.
Miscellaneous notes of James E. Kelly, Kelly Papers, New York Historical Society, New York, New York,
quoted in Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 132.

2 Peggy Pascoe, “Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: The Case of Interracial Marriage,”
Frontiers 12, no. 1 (1991): 5-18, 5. Historian Nancy Cott has argued persuasively that, rather than simply
representing private choices, marriage was a public institution that reﬂected public perceptions about race,
class, and gender. Furthermore she argued that marriages laws, established the regulate labor and property
ownership, ultimately came to regulate race, gender, and citizenship, and as such deﬁned the nation. See
Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2000); and Nancy F. Cott, “Giving Character to our Whole Civil Polity: Marriage and the Public
Order in the Late Nineteenth Century” in US. History as Women ’3 History: New Feminist Essays, ed.
Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler—Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

118

recently, Katherine Ellinghaus noted that, while most historians have ignored
interrnarriages involving white women and men of color, “a small number of scholars
have begun to study [them]. . .as relationships in which issues of race, gender, and class
intersect in revealing ways.”3 This chapter uses the Parker/Sackett affair in post-Civil
War Washington DC as a case study to explore this discursive intersectionality, as well as
the contradictions apparent in it. It takes as its underlying assumption, the recent
contention of historian Linda Gordon, that although " gender is a vital analytic concept, in
real time the boundaries between it and class, race, or sexual identity are not ﬁxed or
given but always in every context interﬂowing."4

By 1867, his thirty-ninth year, Parker had constructed a hybrid public identity that
both utilized and transcended notions of race, class, and gender. In the 18403 and 18503
he aided his Tonawanda, New York community in their legal struggle against the Ogden
Land Company, he became one of the ﬁfty sachems of the Iroquois confederacy, and he
worked as a civil engineer for the United States Treasury department. More recently he

served General US. Grant as military secretary and drafted the surrender agreement at

 

Press, 1995), 107-124. For more general histories of the signiﬁcance of marriage and divorce in American
history see Candice Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce: From the
Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Hendrick
Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

3 Katherine Ellinghaus, “Reading the Personal as Political: The Assimilationist Views of a White
Woman Married to a Native American Man, 18803-19403,” Australasian Journal of A merican Studies 19,
no. 2 (1999): 23-42, 24. Patricia Collins also argued the family was a rich source for studying the
intersections of discourses on race, class, gender, and nation in her article. See Patricia Collins, “It’s All in
the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation,” Hypatia 13, no. 3 (1998): 62-82.

4 Linda Gordon, "Internal Colonialism and Gender," in Haunted by Empire: Geographies on
Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 427-
451, 430.

119

Appomattox.5 Less is known about his bride. Minnie Sackett was two years old when
Parker became a Seneca sachem in 1851, he was 23. Her stepfather, Lieutenant Colonel
William H. Sackett, was the commanding ofﬁcer of the Ninth New York Cavalry under
General Sheridan, and suffered a serious wound at Trevilian Station, Virginia, in 1864.
He died shortly after the battle. She was known in Washington DC as “gay and
lively. . .friendly and vivacious” as well as “a very beautiful, modest and accomplished
woman.” Ely and Mimrie most likely met in 1866 at one of the many social events they
both attended in the capital that year.6

On the morning of December 17, Minnie was at the Church of the Epiphany on G
Street along with many guests and dignitaries, most notably US. Grant, who would give
the bride away in place of her late stepfather. The guests and participants were prepared
to begin, but Parker never appeared. The initial newspaper reports stated that a few days
earlier he visited his soon-to-be mother-in-law outside the capital city and “exposure to
the severe weather brought on a violent cold.”7 They also reported that the bride was
inconsolable and her “mother in a passion.”8 However, the very reasonable explanation

of an illness soon gave way to wild speculation and rumors. The newspapers reported

 

5 For more on Parker’s life leading up to his marriage see Parker, The Life of General Ely S.
Parker, and Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps.

6 J.H. Wilson to S.H. Beckwith, 24 August 1904, Miscellaneous Correspondence of J.H. Wilson,
Bender Collection, Wyoming State Archives and Historical Department, quoted in Armstrong, Warrior in
Two Camps, 132.

7 “Illness of Col. Parker,” Washington DC Evening Star, December 18, 1867.

8 Horace Porter to J.H. Wilson, 18 December 1867, Bender Collection, Wyoming State Archives
and Historical Department, Cheyenne, WY, quoted in Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 132.

120

that Parker was seen in Baltimore on December 18‘", “that his body had been found under
the ice in the Potomac” or “that he was married to another person in Buffalo.”9
On December 18’", the New York Daily Tribune informed their readers that the

“great topic of conversation in Washington. . .to the exclusion of everything else in
politics, ﬁnance, reconstruction, or impeachment, is the disappointment of a fashionable
young lady who was to have been wedded this morning in the presence of the creme de la
creme of Washington society.” This reporter described the bride as “one of the most
beautiful women in the District, a bright blonde [meaning fair-skinned], with dark brown
hair.” In the same article he wrote that, it “may not generally be known that Col. Parker
is a full-blooded Indian; a near relative to the famous Red Jacket. . .He is about 5 feet 10
inches in hicht [sic], of strong, manly build, and of pure Indian complexion.” The author
also revealed that they would have married much sooner “had it not been for the
objections of Miss Sackett’s friends.”lo Two days later, the newspapers reported that
Parker had been found. They claimed that an Indian assailant, sent by the Six Nations,
drugged the bridegroom and held him captive for several days in an effort to stop the
marriage,

Parker’s friends think the Six Nations are opposed to his

marrying a white lady. . .A bride chosen for him among his

subjects, the Six Nations, stands ready to marry him, and

the tribes prefer that he should take her, and remain more closely

allied to his people than he would be if he took a wife from

another race. ”
Amidst all of these rumors Ely and Mimic rescheduled the ceremony.

 

9 “Mysterious Disappearance,” New York Times, December 18, 1867.

‘0 “A Wedding in High Life Unexpectedly Postponed,” New York Daily Tribune, December 18,
1867.

H New York Daily Tribune, December 20, 1867, p. 1.

121

 

 

Figure 10: General Ely S. Parker and Minnie O. Sackett
at the time of their wedding
Source: Arthur C. Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 147

122

On December 23'", the Washington DC Evening Star published a short
announcement that, for Parker and Sackett, “the knot will undoubtedly be ﬁrmly tied on
to-morrow noon.” It added that “the wedding affair creates great interest among the
elite.”12 On the day after the rescheduled ceremony the Tribune reported that “the female
portion of the community were exceedingly interested in the event, and . . . that not less
than 5,000 of the fair sex visited the church.”13 The New York Herald described the
scene as, “a very promiscuous and very silly assemblage. . .[including] misses in their
teens and youths with downy moustaches, to petriﬁed old maidenhood and grave and
reverend masculinity.” When the doors ﬁnally opened, the “ladies, all rosy, and smiling
with nervous expectation, jostled the gentlemen in the vestibule [while]. . .Great big
whiskered swells of the foreign legations and dapper looking dandies of the Treasury
Department were sandwiched between the fair expectants in the best seats.”14 The
National Republican estimated that “the church was pretty well ﬁlled, the majority being
ladies.” “There was a great desire to get ﬁont seats,” the reporter added. 15 Word quickly
spread through the crowd though, that the wedding was conducted privately the night
before. “The disappointment to the ladies cannot be described in words,” reported the
Herald. The article continued, “A repetition of the grand matrimonial and spectacular
drama of ‘Pocahontas,’ with the sexes reversed. . .Eli Parker, with his wanior’s sash,

plume and tribal trappings, leading his fair Caucasian bride to the alter, was a picture so

 

12 For this quote and the previous, see “To Be Married To-Morrow,” Washington DC Evening
Star, December 23, 1867.

‘3 The New York Daily Tribune, December 25, 1867, pg 1.
'4 “The Parker-Sackett Nuptials,” New York Herald, December 25, 1867.

‘5 “Married at Last,” Washington DC National Republican, December 25, 1867, pg 3.

123

seldom presented in these prosaic days that no wonder if sentimental fair ones in
Washington ﬂocked to witness the romantic event.”16

Among the many intriguing facets to this case, Parker’s disappearance on the eve
of the ﬁrst ceremony, the public’s fascination with the intermarriage itself, and the
rhetoric used by various newspapers to describe these events, provide the best
opportunities to examine the complex interplay of discourses across the ﬂuid boundaries
of race, class, and gender. Although Parker never explained his disappearance and it is
unlikely that we will ever know exactly what happened during those few days in
December, this chapter interrogates the existing narratives by examining the newspaper
coverage as well as similar experiences of other Native people. 17 Perhaps more
importantly, this disappearance provides a lens through which historians can examine the
extent of community and public pressures, motivated by notions of race, when
individuals chose to marry across racial boundaries. This event also allows for a broader
discussion of the signiﬁcance of Indian/white intermarriage in United States history and
the ways that this particular event reﬂected public notions of Indianness within the ﬂuid
and shifting nineteenth-century society.

While interpreting the public fascination with the union is almost as vexing as
trying to understand the disappearance itself, this intermarriage clearly represented

important issues for members of Washington DC society, as well for the readers of the

republic’s most important newspapers. This chapter draws on the work of anthropologist

 

'6 “The Parker-Sackett Nuptials,” New York Herald, December 25, 1867.

'7 Arthur C. Parker and William Armstrong both addressed the wedding controversies in their
studies, but neither fully addressed the signiﬁcance of the context in which these events occurred. Their
interpretations will be examined later in this essay.

124

and historian Ann Stoler who has suggested in Haunted by Empire that United States
history emerged within the context of global colonialisms and should be studied through
the prism of theoretical foundations in colonial/postcolonial studies. This case is
particularly illustrative of the ways race served "as a central colonial sorting technique"
and a mechanism of social and cultural conﬁnement for those designated as existing
outside of the dominant society. 18 While the Parker/Sackett union was not directly
affected by anti-miscegenation laws, it allowed the members of the DC community and
the journalists who commented upon it to operate within the context of a "consolidation
of colonial power" in the immediate post-Civil War era that began with Reconstruction
policies in the South and moved west across the continent, stretching across the Paciﬁc
Ocean to the Islands of Hawaii and to the Philippines by the end of the nineteenth
century.19 The rhetoric associated with the marriage reveals both the existence of
conﬁning colonial racial taxonomies and the permeability of those racial classiﬁcations

during this dynamic time period. That these boundaries of conﬁnement could be

 

18 Stoler, "Intimidations of Empire,” 2. Students of colonialism recognize this technique as
illustrative of the colonial project of distinguishing or categorizing people in an effort to either provide or
deny access to certain rights and privileges. In the case of Native American history these racial taxonomies
were signiﬁcant on several levels, from citizenship status and voting rights, to sovereignty and land rights,
and even to access to white women's bodies. The latter of course, was laden with cultural and social
notions of symbolic racial purity and superiority.

'9 Stoler noted that "matters of the intimate are critical sites for the consolidation of colonial
power, that management of those domains provides a strong impulse on how relations of empire are
exercised, and that affairs of the intimate are strategic for empire-driven states." Furthermore, she suggested
that "locating the boundaries [of race, class, gender, sexual identity, etc.]," was "not an abstract
administrative task," but rather, that it involved local communities and knowledge. See Stoler,
"Intimidations of Empire," 4 and 13 respectively. To the best of my knowledge, Washington DC never
passed an anti-miscegenation law restricting interracial marriages of any conﬁguration. If there was,
though, it certame was not enforced. There were prominent marriages between African Americans and
whites in the late-nineteenth century, most notably between Frederick Douglass and Helen Pitts in 1884. In
1915, Representatives from Texas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Florida proposed a set of "Anti-Intennarriage
Bills," but these died in committee. Maryland and Virginia, however, enforced such legislation through the
middle of the twentieth century. For more see Sister M. Annella, "Some Aspects of Interracial Marriage in
Washington DC," Journal of Negro Education 25, no. 4 (1956): 380-391. With appreciation to Dr.
Edward Jocque for pointing me in this direction.

125

transcended did not demonstrate the failure of colonial categories, but rather, it suggests
an alternate conception of empire that puts, "movement and oscillation at the center...
[and portrays] politics with protean rather than ﬁxed taxonomies." As Stoler asserted, the
"United States is not a phantom empire just because it was a ﬂexible one."20
Furthermore, this case suggests an interesting twist on the concept of white male
"colonial desire" for indigenous women. Although white women's sexuality was often
closely policed in the colonial context, in mid-nineteenth-century Washington DC it was
white women, rather than white men, who obsessed over and expressed colonial desire
toward an indigenous man. Elite white men seemingly allowed these actions to take
place, however, that this was exceptional or "out of the ordinary" indicates the
pervasiveness of colonial power dynamics.

This chapter reveals several assumptions gleaned from colonization/post-colonial
studies. First, the Parker/Sackett affair - understood as an example of colonial statecraft
through the "microphysics of daily lives" - calls attention to the interpretive signiﬁcance
of "minor" events in the historical record. In the past, an event like the Parker/Sackett
affair, which does not easily ﬁt with current historiographic assumptions, would have
been ignored as an anomaly. In a postcolonial framework its potential as a rich site of

analysis is fully realized. Second, it suggests, by engaging speculations and "potential

truths" in the newspaper rhetoric, that "uncertainties are not conceptual liabilities but

 

20 Stoler, "Intimidations of Empire," 4-10. Colonial desire is a concept employed by colonization
studies scholars to explain the ways in which colonists, primarily white men, resolved the contradictions
between discourses of superiority/inferiority and the opportunity for sexual interaction with indigenous
women. While different scholars describe this phenomenon in different ways, I use Robert Young’s term,
“colonial desire” for its brevity, but also because it accurately summarizes the thoughts and actions I
describe. See Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York:
Routledge, 1995). The reversal I allude to is that, in the Parker/Sackett affair, it was white women, a group
whose sexuality was most thoroughly policed in colonial relations, who expressed colonial desire openly
and passionately in this case.

126

entry points for analysis." And ﬁnally, as many scholars have come to understand,
studying intimate relations is not an effort to ignore broader structures of dominance; but
rather, it asks us to resituate the locations and forces of its production.”

The Washington DC public obsessed over the marriage of Ely Parker, and the
young Minnie Sackett. Even though this was a very public interracial marriage, at a
particularly tense historic moment, that could have motivated outrage and even violence
in the nation’s capital, this chapter argues that it was Parker’s public representation as a
war hero who personiﬁed middle-class ideals and standards of Victorian manhood that
made him an acceptable husband for a white woman. Furthermore, this chapter also
argues that through interwoven and competing public perceptions, Parker represented the
embodiment of a racialized, primitive masculinity, as an Indian man, and yet through
visible markers of class and gender, he was a non-threatening object of public fascination
for a sentimentalized, feminized, middle-class audience. Although the newspaper
reporters focused on the sensational and romanticized the union, they also demonstrated a
quiet acceptance of the marriage. The acceptance Parker found in Washington society, as
a product of his public persona, helps to explain how he, an Indian man, received the
opportunity to serve as federal policymaker in the mid-nineteenth century.

The majority of historical studies that focus on interracial marriage concern

African American and white unions, but a slowly developing and signiﬁcant body of

 

21 Stoler, "Intimidations of Empire," 7-13. Martha Hodes among others has demonstrated the far-
reaching signiﬁcance of the intimate in her study of illicit sex in the American South. See Martha Hodes,
White Women and Black Men: Illicit Sex in the I 9th-Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1997). For more examples see Martha Hodes ed., Sex, Love and Race: Crossing Boundaries in
North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

127

literature has emerged that focuses attention on Native Americans and Caucasians.22

This literature has generally fallen into two interpretive schools. In the ﬁrst, scholars
examined Native American intermarriage in the seventeenth through early-nineteenth
centuries and focused on unions between European or Euro-American explorers, settlers,
and traders in borderland regions where the inﬂuence of the state remained minimal and
was frequently unstable.23 More recently scholars of Indian/white intermarriage have

begun to focus on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and have examined

 

22 Margaret Jacobs, “The Eastrnans and the Luhans: Interracial Marriage between White Women
and Native American Men, 1875-1935,” Frontiers 23, no. 3 (2002): 30. Among the works that focus on
African American-white intermarriage and inﬂuenced much of the literature on Indian/white intermarriage,
see David Fowler, Northern Attitudes Towards Interracial Marriage: Legislation and Public Opinion in the
Middle Atlantic and the States of the Old Northwest, I 780-1930 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987);
Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham: Duke University Press,
1995); Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power
in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Martha Hodes, White Women,
Black Men; Rachel Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001 ); Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation Making Race in America
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); and Charles F. Robinson, Dangerous Liaisons: Sex
and Love in the Segregated South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003).

23 See Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 3-8; and Jennifer S.H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade
Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980). Van
Kirk's and Brown's innovative studies suggested new ways for scholars to approach issues of interracial
acceptance and the mixing of cultural values and expectations. That these books were published ﬁrst in
Canada and closely associated with Canadian historiography, English colonialism, and the northern fur
trade, limited their immediate impact on scholarship in the United States. For more recent work see
Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches; Ann Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in
Early New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); and Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and
French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2001). Jill Lepore made arguments, similar to Brown, about the importance of
Anglo-Indian interactions in the formation of English and later American identity and Jennifer Spear, like
Sleeper-Smith, also examined F rench-Indian relations in a frontier region and made similar arguments
about intermarriage in places lacking well-defmed state authority. For more see Jill Lepore, In the Name
of War: King Phillip 's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); and
Jennifer Spear, “’They Need Wives’: Metissage and the Regulation of Sexuality in French Louisiana, 1699-
1730” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York:
New York University Press, 1999), 35-59. A recent dissertation also demonstrates an innovative approach
to the study of Indian/white intermarriage in the revolutionary and early republic periods. It examines
white women writer’s portrayals of intermarriage as an alternative framework for race and gender
relationships. In it Deborah Evans argued that white women writers in the early-nineteenth century used
the idea of Indian/white interracial marriage as a vehicle for challenging white male supremacy, for
developing notions of racial tolerance, and for white women’s empowerment more generally. See Deborah
Evans, “The ‘Revolting’ Union: White/Indian Interrnarriage in Nineteenth Century American Women’s
Fiction” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2003).

128

the unions within the context of established federal assimilation policies.24 These
approaches, while interesting and important, do not help to explain Indian/white
intermarriage in the mid-nineteenth century. An examination of the Parker/Sackett
marriage demonstrates that class status played an important role in the public acceptance

or rejection of intermarriage.25 It also recognizes the discursive work that perceptions of

 

24 See David Smits, “’Squaw Men,’ Half-Breeds,’ and Amalgamators: Late Nineteenth-Century
Anglo-American Attitudes Toward Indian-White Race Mixing,” American Indian Culture and Research
Journal 15, no. 3 (1991): 29-61; Margaret Jacobs, “The Eastrnans and the Luhans”; and Katherine
Ellinghaus, “Assimilation by Marriage: White Women and Native American Men at Hampton Institute,
1878-1923,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 108, no. 3 (2000): 279-303. See also
Katherine Ellinghaus, “Margins of Acceptability: Class, Education, and Interracial Marriage in Australia
and North America,” Frontiers 23, no. 3 (2002): 55-75; and Katherine Ellinghaus, “Reading the Personal.”
Cathleen Cahill, in her recent dissertation, suggested arguments very similar to Ellinghaus’s. See Cathleen
Cahill, “’Only the Home Can Found a State.” Sylvia Van Kirk also recognized the changes in perceptions
and practices of intermarriage in the nineteenth century as well. She argued that, as the settler society in
Canada solidiﬁed, Indians “married-out” and lost their Indian status as part of an assimilation program.
See Sylvia Van Kirk, “From ‘Marrying-In’ to ‘Marrying-Out’: Changing Patterns of Aboriginal fNon-
Aboriginal Marriage in Colonial Canada,” Frontiers 23, no. 3 (2002): 1-1 1. One other recent study is
worthy of note. In her Ph.D dissertation, Tamara Jo Berg examined three late-nineteenth-century white
women writers and argued that they used imaginative or literal connections to the “Native American Other”
to make socially acceptable critiques of racial prejudice as well as to transgress and question the “socially-
constructed hierarchies of gender and sexuality” (8). While this is an interesting assertion, it would seem
that her actors, rather than representing the majority of women in this period were exceptional in their
thoughts and actions. See Tamara Jo Berg, “White Women Writing for their Lives: Ann Stephens, Elaine
Goodale Eastman, and Ruth Benedict vis-a-vis the Native American Other,” (PhD diss., Indiana University
at Bloomington, 2002).

25 In her new book, Katherine Ellinghaus argued that the "predominant focus in the United States
on cultural assimilation created a system of assimilation that allowed some Native Americans to obtain a
kind of middle-class status" and that this status made Native American men acceptable husbands for white
wives. Although Ellinghaus's conclusions are important, her focus on the signiﬁcance of assimilation
policies perhaps obscures the importance of class status itself. This phenomenon existed in marriages like
Parker's well before the ofﬁcial institution of assimilation programs and is examined fully in the following
sections. See Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and
Indigenous Men in the United States an Australia, [887-1937 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2006), xxxi. Also, in his recent study of cultural expectations pertaining to Indianness, Phil Deloria
questioned the portrayal of Indian man / white woman marriages in early twentieth century ﬁlms and
asserted that there were "in fact, readily visible examples of Indian people who had proceeded through the
educational system and who participated in contemporary middle-class life." However, he concluded that
while affairs of this kind might be alluring, these ﬁlms ultimately represented Indian man / white woman
interrnaniages as inherently ﬂawed because "even the most acculturated Indian had the potential to hear the
call of the wild . . . and leave the contemporary world for a return to the racialist blanket.” The following
sections question Deloria's conclusion and demonstrate the ways in which some Indian man / white woman
marriages could defy this cultural expectation and be deemed acceptable by mainstream society. See
Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 84-87.

129

colonial power dynamics performed as the role of the state shifted and evolved following
the conclusion of the Civil War.

The location or geographical context of this marriage may also have played a role
in the way events transpired. In her study of post-Civil War Washington DC society,
entitled Capital Elites, Kathryn A. Jacob argued that perhaps more than in any other city,
capital-dwellers had a democratized conception of social class in which one could rise to
an elite level quite ﬂuidly. Several powerful forces shaped this situation, she asserted,
including the loss of the Southern aristocratic presence, which provided opportunities for
a newer "ofﬁcial elite." This structure was "based on speciﬁc elected and appointed
offices, regardless of the pedigree or afﬂuence of their occupants." While it would be
impossible to prove decisively, this development could have aided in Parker's acceptance
into elite society and the public perception of his marriage.26

Finally, there is one additional layer of analysis in understanding why the
Parker/Sackett marriage failed to elicit public violence or outrage. At this historic
moment, in the early-Reconstruction era in Washington DC, as intellectuals and policy-
makers sought to re-articulate race-based legislation, the possibility for alternate racial
reconﬁgurations was perhaps stronger than at any other moment in the nineteenth
century. In her recent study of Cherokee intermarriage, historian Tiya Miles has
suggested that "the processes of family making and the state regulation of family units
can illuminate the values and dictates of the communities and nations in which families

live." Therefore, the family "can thus be read as a barometer for society, tracing and

 

26 Kathryn A. Jacobs, Capital Elites: High Society in Washington, D. C., after the Civil War
(Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 3.

130

reﬂecting the atrnospherics of social life and social change."27 Following this logic, the
Parker/Sackett affair and the public acceptance of and even fascination with the union
can be read as a reﬂection not only of the complexities of colonialism and racialization,
but also of the signiﬁcance of this moment as one of optimism and opportunity for racial
politics in which boundaries of conﬁnement could be transcended. Ultimately and

unfortunately, as several scholars note, this moment would not last.”

A "Mysterious Disappearance". . .

Although Ely Parker never publicly explained his absence from the ﬁrst wedding
ceremony, it is possible to use the newspaper reports to interrogate much of the racially
and historically charged rhetoric and to reach some tentative conclusions about the event
itself and the signiﬁcance of the reporters’ descriptions. Wading through the rumors and
speculations in the newspaper reports is no simple task, but, by discounting the obviously
false reports, it becomes clear that the newspaper coverage included varying levels of

truth or exaggeration.29 First, it is obvious that Parker did not die in the icy Potomac, nor

 

27 Tiya Miles, Ties that Bind: The Story of an A ﬁo-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 3.

28 . .
See Enc Foner, Reconstruction, among others.

29 In this section of analysis I have examined the rumors and speculations in the newspapers, not
simply as miscommunications, haphazard constructions, or baseless conjectures easily distinguishable from
"real news," but rather as a body of evidence with the potential to indicate how members of the DC
community and the nation more broadly understood colonial racial taxonomies. By taking this approach,
the actual "truth" of the events becomes less signiﬁcant than the "potential truths" or “truth claims” found
in the media. In other words, these reports serve as a critical (and perhaps otherwise non-existent) window
into the collective mindset of individuals and communities as they voiced, accepted, or, in various ways,
responded to opinions and aspirations related to race, class, gender, and colonialism. For more on this
approach see Steven Hahn, "‘Extravagant Expectations' of Freedom: Rumour, Political Struggle, and the
Christmas Insurrection Scare of 1865 in the American South," Past & Present 157 (1997): 122-158,
particularly 123-125.

131

did he marry another woman in Buffalo, as the Times reported.30 Although US. Army
Captain B.M. Reed and General Grant both conducted searches, Parker was not found
under the care of any doctors, nor had he escaped to nearby Baltimore.31 The other two
primary suggestions in the papers - that Minnie’s friends and family disapproved of the
union, or that members of the Six Nations attempted to stop the marriage - provide more
signiﬁcant interpretive material.

Many historians have argued that while marriages between white men and Native
women were often encouraged or at least tolerated in border regions, in part due to small
populations of white women, but more importantly perhaps, for the socioeconomic
capital the Indian women brought to the unions, the same cannot be said for marriages
between men of color and white women in metropolitan regions.32 These marriages
tended to upset patriarchal standards of order and racialized hierarchies, and many
territories and states ultimately codiﬁed these social mores into law.” During the
seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries many of the arguments against Native
men/white women unions focused on ideas of difference in terms of religion or culture,

and oftentimes non-Native people assumed that such relations were the result of capture

 

30 “Mysterious Disappearance,” New York Times, December 18, 1867.

3! “Failed to Put in His Appearance,” Washington DC National Republican, December 18, 1867,
and New York Tribune, December 20, 1867.

32 See Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties; Jennifer S.H. Brown, Strangers in Blood; Susan

”9

Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men; and Jennifer Spear, “’They Need Wives .

33 Peter Bardaglio has argued quite effectively, that in the nineteenth century the prevailing
attitude in mainstream society was that only white men had the privilege to legitimately marry white
women. See Peter Bardaglio, “’Shamefull Matches’: The Regulation of Interracial Sex and Marriage in
the South before 1900,” in Sex, Love, and Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, Martha
Hodes ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1999): 112-138.

132

and force by Indian villains.34 However, by the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth
centuries, new arguments emerged that were based solely on constructions of biological
and racial difference.35 While the Parker/Sackett marriage did not take place until 1867,
it is possible, since newspapers reported that the couple would have married much sooner
“had it not been for the objections of Miss Sackett’s friends,” that these racial
constructions which conﬁned men of color to a pool of potential marriage partners that
did not include white women continued to inform opinions about Indian/white
intermarriage.36

Parker may not have been entirely unfamiliar with this sort of reaction to intimate
relations across racial boundaries though, as revealed in a letter to the editor of the
Buﬂ'alo Express several years after Parker's death. The writer, Louise Bacheldor, was a
schoolmate of Parker's in 1845 and commented that although he "possessed many traits
that were commendable, he showed a lack of discretion by falling in love with one of his
fairest schoolmates, who, strange to say, seemed to reciprocate his feelings." "This
caused quite a stir, fumishing food for gossiping ones," Bacheldor stated. "In time it was
rumored that Parker was to take the young lady in question for a drive on the Fourth of

July," and while some believed the rumor to be true, many "thought she, belonging to one

 

34 Jacobs, “The Eastmans and the Luhans,” 33. See also Dippie, The Vanishing American, 257-
258.

35 For the hardening of racial ideologies see Robert Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, I820-
I880: The Early Years of American Ethnology (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986); John
Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientiﬁc Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, [859-1900 (Carbondale:
University of Southern Illinois Press, 1995); Curtis Hinsley, Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian
Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846-1910 (Washington DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1981); and Curtis Hinsley, The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a Moral
Anthropology of in Victorian American (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994).

36 “A Wedding in High Life Unexpectedly Postponed,” New York Daily Tribune, December 18,
1867.

133

of the most aristocratic families, would not disgrace her and her friends by riding out with
an Indian." Of course, after prying eyes spotted the young couple on their controversial,
yet patriotic, carriage ride, the "young lady soon went abroad for a long vacation."37

If Minnie’s friends and family objected to their union based upon conﬁning
notions of race, and Parker felt particularly pressured by their opinions, perhaps even
remembering this earlier controversy, his absence seems less mysterious. A close friend
of Parker’s from Galena, Illinois, William Rowley, questioned the newspaper explanation
for the disappearance though, when he inquired to another friend, “Have you caught and
bottled up the Indians that captured Parker [?],” insinuating that it was alcohol rather than
Indian captors that kept him from the ceremony. Horace Porter, a fellow army ofﬁcer,
stated very blatantly that, “Parker has disgraced us more than usual. He was to have been
married to Miss Minnie Sackett yesterday morning, but instead of appearing he went on
his habitual four days drunk, and has not yet turned up.”38 These statements reveal the
prevalent cultural expectation of Indian drunkenness in the nineteenth century, but
perhaps alcohol and absence were an effective way for Parker to deal with racial
prejudice.39

A comparison between the Parker/Sackett affair and other prominent nineteenth-

century intermarriages reveals several striking similarities. In the 18203, two educated,

Christian, Cherokee men, Elias Boudinot and John Ridge, who studied at the American

 

37 Mrs. Louise Bacheldor, letter to the editor, Buﬂalo Express, March 24, 1915, Box 6 - 1886-
1946 and n.d., Ely S. Parker Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA.

38 Horace Porter to J.H. Wilson, 18 December 1867, Bender Collection, Wyoming State Archives
and Historical Department, Cheyenne, WY; and W.R. Rowley to Adam Badeau, 30 December 1867,
Rowley Papers, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springﬁeld, 11., quoted in Armstrong, Warrior in
Two Camps, 133.

39 On “expectations,” see Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places.

134

Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions school in Cornwall, Connecticut, met and
married two young, white women. In the earlier case, John Ridge and Sarah Bird
Northrup, the daughter of Foreign Mission school steward, John Northrup, wed in 1824.
Like the Parker/Sackett affair 40 years later, this union caught the attention of newspaper
reporters, who described Northrup using terms remarkably similar to those used later to
describe Sackett. Around the time of the wedding, the Cartersville Courant referred to
her as “a beautiful blond [meaning fair-skinned] with blue eyes and auburn hair.”40
Newspaper reporters also noted several rumors surrounding this intermarriage. Many
commented that Mrs. Northrup had “an abnormal interest in mixed marriages” and

”4' There were also rumors that the wedding

“wooed the young Indian for her daughter.
had been held in secret and that Mr. Northrup lost his sanity and left his family.42
Other similarities abound. When they ﬁrst announced their engagement, both
Ridge’s and Northrup’s families and ﬁiends objected.43 Such was also the case in the
1891 marriage of Wahpeton Dakota, Charles Eastman, to the white teacher, Elaine
Goodale. In this union Goodale’s mother, uncle, aunt, and sister all disapproved. Her

biographer wrote that “Elaine ascribed her mother’s disapproval to the sacriﬁce of

literary aspirations that any marriage would entail. But there was much more to it than

 

40 Cartersville Courant (GA), March 19, 1885, pg I, quoted in Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 132.

41 Ralph Gabriel, Elias Boudinot, Cherokee & His America (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1941), 73, and Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 149.

'2 Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 149.

43 Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 132-134.

135

that. . .it was blatantly racist.”44 Elias Boudinot, the other Cherokee student in Cornwall
in the 18203, and his bride-to-be, Harriet Gold faced even more extreme objections.
After they announced their engagement in 1825, Gold’s brother threatened her life and
led a group of townspeople in a public demonstration that burned the betrothed in efﬁgy.
The Foreign Missions school closed because of the controversy.45

Signiﬁcantly, during his wedding controversy, Elias Boudinot experienced a
personal “crisis” very similar to Parker’s. Although Boudinot did not disappear like
Parker did, the objections expressed by the Cornwall community and his ﬁance’s family
caused him to become sullen and distraught. Jeremiah Evarts, the corresponding
secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions stated that
Boudinot “was very wretched & did not care what became of him.”46 In fact, Cherokee
historian Theda Perdue concluded that these events effected Boudinot on such a deep
level that he no longer blindly accepted the doctrines of assimilation that his northern,
Christian education represented. He instead began formulating ideas of Cherokee
equality through racial distinctiveness from mainstream society.47 The similarities
between the Parker/Sackett affair and other prominent nineteenth-century interrnarriages

suggest that conﬁning racial constructions played a crucial role in the Seneca sachem's

 

44 Theodore Sargent, The Life of Elaine Goodale Eastman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2005), 47.

45 Theresa Gaul, ed., To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriet Gold and Elias Boudinot in
Letters, 1823-1839 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 14. See also Theda Perdue,
Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), Marion
Starkey, The Cherokee Nation (North Dighton, MA: JG Press, 1995), and Gabriel, 66-92.

4" Jeremiah Evarts Letter, February 1826, quoted in Gaul, To Marry an Indian, 20.

'7 Perdue, Cherokee Editor, 10-1 1.

136

disappearance on the eve of his wedding, and that members of DC elite society
understood and responded to colonial racial taxonomies.

The other rumor, that the Six Nations were “opposed to. . .[Parker] marrying a
white lady, and that they sent an envoy to take care that the wedding should not take
place, or even to deprive him of his life” was perhaps more revealing yet.48 In the late-
18603, Parker was a well-known leader among the Seneca, and felt, in the pre-Civil War
era, that members of his community no longer appreciated his work on their behalf.
Parker wrote, however, that his commission in the Union Army “revived among the poor
Indians the idea that. . . [he] was after all a genius and great and powerful.”49 Parker
acknowledged that the Indians at Tonawanda respected his leadership and pleaded with
him not to leave, “but to remain as their counselor, adviser, and chief, and that they
would be powerless and lost without” his presence.50 This position of prominence and
esteem may have played a crucial role in Parker’s disappearance and provides some
insight into the often overlooked racialized notions held by this Indian community.

Handsome Lake, half-brother of esteemed Seneca sachem Complanter, was born
in a village along the Genesee River in 1735. He lived a rather unremarkable life,
distinguished only by his severe alcoholism. In 1799, he experienced a series of spiritual
visions, and between 1800 and 1815 Handsome Lake established a religious doctrine that,

according to Seneca scholar Arthur C. Parker, “did much to crystallize the Iroquois as a

 

'8 New York Daily Tribune, December 20, 1867, p. 1.

'9 “Writings of General Parker,” Proceedings ofthe Buﬂalo Historical Society VIII (1905): 520-
536, 525-526.

50 “Writings of General Parker,” 526.

137

distinct social group.”5 ' Handsome Lake developed a “social gospel” for his adherents to
follow that included among other things, temperance, prohibitions against divorce,
promiscuity, and domestic abuse, instructions for land retention, peace and unity, as well
as cautions about acculturation, intermarriage, and interactions with non-Native people.52
Although Handsome Lake’s code revitalized many older Iroquois spiritual traditions, it
also tolerated and even incorporated elements of Christianity. This development divided
the Iroquois community between those who followed older ways and those who followed
Handsome Lake, and eventually individuals in the older group split to follow either
Christian teachings or the Handsome Lake code. By the 18603, these were the two main
religious factions among the Seneca.53
Although the Tribune reporter did not mention Handsome Lake speciﬁcally, if his

assessment was accurate, the Seneca envoy that allegedly drugged and kidnapped Parker
may well have been a Handsome Lake follower. In his League of the Ho-De-No-Sau-Nee
or Iroquois, Lewis Henry Morgan summarized one of Handsome Lake’s maxims in this
way,

Listen further to what the Great Spirit has been pleased to

communicate to us: — He has made us, as a race, separate

and distinct from the pale-face. It is a great sin to interrnarry,

and interrningle the blood of the two races. Let none be
guilty of this transgression.54

 

51 Arthur C. Parker, “Book Two: The Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet,” in Parker on
the Iroquois, ed. William F enton (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968), 10.

52 Wallace, Death and Rebirth, 277-235.

53 Parker, "Book Two," 13. Some of Ely Parker’s siblings, though Christian, also accepted some
of Handsome Lake’s teaching. Arthur Parker stated that when it came to alcohol, Nicholson, Ely’s brother,
was “a true ‘son of the prophet.”’ See Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 191.

54 Lewis Henry Morgan, The League of the Ho-De-No-Sau-Nee or Iroquois vol. 1 (Rochester,
NY: Sage, 1851; New York: Burt Franklin, 1966), 24]. Citations are to the Burt Franklin edition.

138

As ethnohistorian Anthony Wallace wrote, Handsome Lake wanted the Iroquois “ethnic
identity. . .to remain Indian.”55 Parker's Indian assailant may have been motivated by
these racialized notions.56
The alleged assailant may have found additional motivation in the social systems
that structured Iroquois society. The matrilineal focus of the Seneca meant that kin and
clan afﬁliations descended through women. As one Seneca man testiﬁed before a
legislative committee, “we go by the mother’s side of the old custom; the mother’s side
carries the day — she rules; my children are not related to me. . .they are her children, and
the children are of the same clan with the mother.”57 If Parker, a signiﬁcant and well-
respected leader married a non-Native woman, their children would lack any Seneca
connection according to this worldview. Technically they would not be Seneca. Morgan
recognized some of these problems and wrote that the “case of white women married to

Indians and of their offspring is a particularly hard one, for after the death of the husband

and father the widow and children have no rights in his property, or even to remain on the

 

55 Wallace, The League of the Ho-De-No-Sau-Nee, 282.

56 There is an interesting irony in this evidence that emerges from debates among historians and
literary scholars about the role that Ely Parker played in the construction of the Morgan’s League of the
Ho-De-No-Sau-Nee or Iroquois. Arthur C. Parker and William Armstrong both noted that Ely Parker
contributed substantially to the creation of the text, Armstrong even suggested that Morgan used Parker’s
writings verbatim. Morgan himself dedicated the book to Parker stating “This Work, the materials of
which are the ﬁuit of our joint researches, is inscribed in acknowledgement of the obligations, and in
testimony of the friendship of the author.” However, Morgan’s biographers, Carl Resek and Bernhard
Stern both downplayed his role. Literary scholars Scott Michaelsen and Maureen Konkle both assert that
Parker played a signiﬁcant role, especially in the translations he provided of Jimmy Johnson’s speeches
relating Handsome Lake’s code. Essentially, it is very possible that Parker actually translated and wrote
the passages that could have motivated his assailants. For more on the Parker-Morgan collaboration see
Scott Michaelsen, The Limits of Multiculturalism: Interrogating the Origins of American Anthropology
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 86-87; and Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations:
Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 182 7-1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2004), 259-260.

57 Morgan, The League vol. 2, 275.

139

reservation.”58 These factors may have motivated Tonawanda community members to
take the drastic actions outlined in the newspaper report.

It is useful once again, to return to the comparisons between this case and that of
the prominent Cherokee interrnarriages of the 18203. Like the Seneca, Cherokee kinship
and clan relations descended through the mother’s line. It makes sense then, that when
John Ridge and Elias Boudinot married Sarah Northrup and Harriet Gold in Cornwall,
many in the Cherokee community worried that their children would have “no clan
affiliations and thus no standing within the nation.”59 Rules of descent clearly played a
signiﬁcant role in creating these anxieties. However, rather than kidnap, and attempted
murder, as was alleged in the Seneca case, the Cherokee passed a law in 1825 granting
citizenship to children born of Cherokee men and white women. Much like Parker’s
1861 governmental reform campaign at Tonawanda, this Cherokee law can be seen as an
element of indirect colonialism as well. It undercut older Cherokee practices of
matrilineality, disrupted the social order and clan system, and sanctioned the
development of patriarchal family structures}50

It is also possible though, that the Tribune reporter projected colonial notions of
racial difference and pre-existing aversion to intermarriage ﬁ'om mainstream society onto

the Six Nations. In this sense he could have applied the potential anxieties of the DC

 

58 Morgan, The League vol. 2, 271.
59 Gaul, To Marry an Indian, 16.

60 Gaul, To Marry an Indian, 16. See also Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture
Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), I47.

140

elite onto the Seneca leaders to fabricate this story.6| In his interesting and persuasive
book The Newspaper Indian, historian John Coward argued that the issue of Indian
man/white woman intermarriage revealed contradictions in public discourse. In this case,
while many reporters propagated the stereotype of the noble savage, newspaper coverage
of Indian/white intermarriage demonstrated that it “was one thing to praise an Indian in
nature or in the abstract, but it was quite another to actually accept an Indian as a
marriage partner, in effect admitting Indian equality with whites.”62 Though the Tribune
reporter did not overtly state there was a fundamental problem with marriage across
racial boundaries, if he was projecting these anxieties onto the DC community, perhaps
he was suggesting just that.

There was one additional explanation for Parker’s disappearance. It was not
commented on in the newspapers, but passed down through Parker family lore. Arthur C.
Parker, Ely’s great-grandnephew, wrote that Ely was, in fact, drugged on December 17,
but his assailant was not a member of the Six Nations. Rather, “one of his friends was his
rival” and he acted “in hopes that it would not only spoil the wedding, but change the
mind of the bride.” In an even more shocking revelation Arthur Parker suggested that

there were threats of violence if the rescheduled ceremony took place. “Then later came

 

61 In “Lacan and Narration,” literary scholar Robert Davis demonstrated that in a Lacanian textual
analysis, “manifest content id 3 product of the unconscious discourse that is both the precondition of of
narration and the site of its appearance.” In other words, “the Lacanian text is deﬁnitely there, but it is
exclusively text-as-textual-production. See Robert Davis, “Introduction: Lacan and Narration,”
Comparative Literature vol. 98, no. 5 (1983): 848-859. See also Gayatri Spivak, “The Letter as Cutting
Edge,” Yale French Studies vol. 55/56 (1977): 208-226.

62 John Coward, The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press, [820-1890
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 51. In Indians in Unexpected Places, Philip Deloria also noted
that in the cases of Indian man/white woman marriages, there was a prevalent underlying concern that
“even the most acculturated Indian had the potential to hear the call of the wild and ...leave the
contemporary world for a return to the racialist blanket.” (87)

141

a more sinister threat neatly veiled,” he wrote, “[n]o one knows what might have
happened if there had been a wedding at the Church of the Epiphany.”63 This fanciful yet
intriguing explanation reminds us of the human drama of historical phenomena. It is also
very possible, however, that this story was created within the Parker family, perhaps by
Ely himself, to mask the signiﬁcant role prevailing notions of Indianness played in the

events surrounding the wedding.

. . . and a Public Obsession

Despite the highly derogatory comments by contemporary standards, the
newspaper coverage generally indicated a tacit approval of the marriage. There were no
riots, threats of violence, or other scenes of outrage like those surrounding the Cherokee
men in Cornwall. Some scholars have argued there was a shift in attitudes about
Indian/white intermarriage in the second half of the nineteenth century as reform groups
like the Women’s National Indian Association championed the idea that marriage
between white women and Indian men could serve as a positive inﬂuence in the
assimilation process. Furthermore, by condoning these marriages, reformers rewarded or
recognized individual Indian men for their progress toward assimilation.64 As a civil
engineer and Civil War leader, Ely Parker distinguished himself in mainstream society.
Thus, he may have ultimately seemed tolerable, to some, as a husband to a white wife,

and perhaps a forerunner to the later trend.65

 

63 Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, I46.

64 See Jacobs, “The Eastmans and the Luhans;” Ellinghaus, “Assimilation by Marriage;” and
“Reading the Personal as Political;” and Cahill, “Only the Home can Found a State.”

65 Martha Hodes suggested the concept of "toleration" as a way to understand the perceptions,
among whites, of sexual liaisons between white women and black men in the slave South. She deﬁned this

142

Although none of the newspaper reporters condemned the marriage, the more
intriguing fact was that, according to published reports, several thousand strangers
appeared at the church for the second wedding ceremony. 66 An examination of the
public fascination with this marriage demonstrates that Parker’s fame as an associate of
General Grant and his public presence at elite social events shaped the public perceptions
of the Seneca sachem in such a way that essentially neutralized anxieties about any threat
he might pose to the racial order. By examining Parker as a product of the complex and
shifting mid-nineteenth-century society and calling attention to several features of his life
and work, it becomes clear that the Seneca leader, consciously or not, situated himself as
middle class. While still an “elusive” social group, a consensus does exist among
scholars that middle class identity cannot be described through a one dimensional
analysis of occupation or profession, wealth and/or income, education, behavior and/or

manners, religious affiliation, or consumerism.67

 

concept as "forbearance for that which is not approved." This is a very useful analytical construct for her
argument; however, it does not work as well here. The evidence in this case demonstrates that the
Washington DC public, although perhaps hesitant or at least tacitly suspicious of the Parker/Sackett union,
gave no real indication that it did not approve of this marriage.

66 New York Daily Tribune, December 25, 1867, p. l.

67 For a discussion of the problems in deﬁning an emerging middle class see Burton Bledstein,
“Introduction: Storytellers of the Middle Class,” in The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the
American Middle Class, eds. Burton Bledstein and Robert Johnston (New York: Routledge, 2001), 1-27. It
would be impossible to note all of the relevant texts in the lengthy historiography of middle class
emergence, but several of the most important include C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle
Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An
Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955);
Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher
Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976); Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper ’s Millennium: Society and
Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Paul Boyer, Urban
Masses and Moral Order in America: [820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Mary
Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, I 790-1865 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1981); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Stuay of
Middle Class Culture in America, 1830—1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Christine
Stansall, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986); and Stuart

143

At the time of his marriage Parker was a relatively well-known public ﬁgure in
Washington DC. As a Seneca representative he made several trips to meet with
prominent senators, like John Calhoun and Henry Clay, as well as various presidents.
Polk was especially impressed with the young leader.68 Parker’s role as an elite Seneca
statesman may have played a role in the perceptions of his public persona in the capital,
but other factors also contributed signiﬁcantly as well. When the Civil War ended,
Parker stayed in DC as Grant’s aide-de-camp and attended many social events with the
General.69 As a prominent member of Grant’s inner circle, Parker shared in the celebrity
that the victorious general attained in the late-18603. In fact, almost every article that
addressed the Parker/Sackett affair noted that Parker was “of General Grant’s staff,” and
many went so faras to describe Grant’s thoughts and actions during the events of the
disappearance.70 The newspapers also frequently used terms like “the gallant Colonel” to
describe Parker, or at the very least referred to his military ranking, as in the Tribune
article that clariﬁed, “his position in the army is that of First Lieutenant in the Second
Regiment of Cavalry, transferred to staff duty with the brevut [sic] rank of Colonel?"
Parker’s connection to Grant and his role in the Civil War helped the Indian leader
further situate himself as a middle-class member of Washington DC society in the 18603.

Signiﬁcantly, his role as a Civil War military leader also contributed to the other

 

Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1 760-1900 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

68 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 28-34.
69 Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 145.
70 “Matrimonial,” Washington DC Daily Morning Chronicle, December 25, 1867, p. 5.

7' New York Daily Tribune, December 25, 1867, p. l and “A Wedding in High Life Unexpectedly
Postponed,” New York Daily Tribune, December 18, 1867.

144

important facet of this public persona: his embodiment of standards of Victorian
manhood, an issue that is addressed below.

In Playing Indian, Phil Deloria noted that Parker was "the ultimate Indian player,"
and although "he had no control over the history that had positioned him in the social and
cultural borderlands between Indian and American. . .he nonetheless made himself into a

"72 This intersection

new person, drawing power from Indianness and Americanness.
between notions of race, class, and gender might be best described as a process of mutual
racialization and deracination and calls to mind Stoler's argument that "blurred genres”
do not represent “empires in distress but imperial politics in active realignment and
reformation."73 As Deloria concluded, when "Parker wore his suit and tie. . . [he] played
with the boundaries of selﬂrood and meaning, simultaneously breaking down and creating
cultural difference."74

While Parker always maintained a strong connection to his Seneca heritage and
culture, his education, career, and consumption patterns epitomized the ideals of white
Victorian society and together created a public image of an “assimilated” Indian. As a
young man he made an connection that shaped his life in signiﬁcant ways. At sixteen,
when Parker served as an interpreter for a Seneca political delegation in New York state,
he met Lewis Henry Morgan, the lawyer and founder of the literary fraternal

organization, the Grand Order of the Iroquois. Morgan approached the young man in a

book store during his search for ethnographic literature concerning the Seneca,

 

72 Deloria, Playing Indian, 188.
73 Stoler, "Intimidations of Empire," 9.

74 Deloria, Playing Indian, 188.

145

information upon which he could model new rituals and initiation rites. Parker and
Morgan became ﬁiends and partners in Morgan’s quest for knowledge about New York’s
indigenous population.75 Morgan laid claim to Parker's Indian identity and used it to
advance his own career in writing and politics. He also "laid claim" to the actual bodies
of Parker's siblings, whom he used as models for the ethnographic drawings he included
in The League. Parker in turn, was aided by Morgan's connections and parlayed their
ﬁiendship into an enrollment at the Cayuga Academy in Aurora, and an honorary
membership in the Grand Order, the ﬁrst of many fraternal groups he joined.76 While
Parker's involvement in Tonawanda political affairs kept him from attending college, his
early educational experiences and the aid he received from Morgan’s professional
connections allowed him to pursue two career paths typical of pre-Civil War middle-class
men: law and engineering. As an Indian, Parker lacked citizenship and was therefore
denied entrance to the bar, but he found success and adulation as a canal engineer, ﬁrst in
New York, then in Virginia and Illinois, where he met a local store clerk and Mexican
War veteran, Ulysses S. Grant.77 In a letter to one of his former school teachers, Parker
demonstrated considerable pride in his professional accomplishments, especially his work
as a Resident Engineer on the Erie Canal, about which he wrote, “I had . . . 35 young men

under me, and I had charge of about $5,000,000 worth of work.”78

 

75 Deloria saw this relationship as one that "inaugurated a paradoxical mode of Indian--non-lndian
interaction based not upon military or political conﬂict, but upon the idea of playing Indian itself." See
Deloria, Playing Indian, 187.

76 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 13. See also, Deloria, Playing Indian, 3, 140, 137-139.
77 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, Chapter 4: “A Lawyer and an Engineer.”

78 Ely S. Parker to Benjamin Wilcox, former teacher, Yates Academy, September 10, 1860,
Folder 2 - Correspondence, 1855-1890, Ely S. Parker Papers, 1846-1924, RRL-UR.

146

Parker also participated in the emerging consumer culture, and his purchases
helped demonstrate his adherence to middle class ideals. While in school he used money
supplied by the federal government to Indian students to purchase a “ﬁne frock coat.”79
He also, as Arthur Parker noted, had a “love for ﬁne horses” and “never was without a
ﬁne span of dashing colts.”80 The newspapers even noted the quality of Parker’s horse
stable and commented that at a carnival celebration in Washington, he “drove leisurely
along with a pair of ﬁne blacks.”8| “In ﬁnancial affairs” after the Civil War, wrote
Arthur Parker, he was “successﬁrl and. . .had a comfortable fortune.”82

Parker’s professional accomplishments and public behaviors eased any anxieties
elite members of Washington DC society may have had concerning potential disruptions
to the racial order in the capital. Historian Katherine Ellinghaus found a very similar
phenomenon in the interracial marriages at the Hampton Institute and in the Eastrnan—
Goodale union later in the nineteenth century. She argued that, “despite the prejudices of
the day,” when white “women selected [Indian] men who had outwardly proven
themselves not only to have absorbed white culture, but to have become successful within
it” there were no repercussions from mainstream society.” Ellinghaus could easily have

added the term middle class to her description of white culture and indeed later asserted

that, although, “interracial marriages crossed racial ethnic boundaries, it was only when

 

79 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 22.

8° Parker, The Life ofGeneral Ely s. Parker, 196-197.

8] “Grand Exhibition of Fashionable Tumouts,” New York Herald, February 21, 1871.
82 Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 145.

83 Ellinghaus, “Assimilation by Marriage,” 293-302.

147

marriages of white women and indigenous men did not transgress ideas of class that they
were able to ﬁnd a place. . .in the society in which they lived.”84

Returning once again to a previous comparison may help to illuminate further the
signiﬁcance of class in the analysis of intermarriages. When John Ridge married Sarah
Bird Northrup in Cornwall, community members initially demonstrated outrage at this
affront to the racial order. When they learned, however, that “John Ridge’s father, Major
Ridge. . .was a Cherokee war hero and political leader” they recognized the younger
Ridge as “something of a prince. . .thus redeeming Sarah for white womanhood.”85 This
issue became even clearer to the Cornwall community because the Ridges owned many
slaves, which at the time was a marker of class. “Possessing a bevy of slaves to wait on
her made Sarah’s life with an Indian husband acceptable and even enviable,” argued
historian Tiya Miles.86 Cherokee scholar Thurman Wilkins concurred and wrote that the
“townspeople even came to think of Sarah Northrup Ridge as a kind of princess who
dressed in silk every day and had ﬁfty servants to wait on her.”87 As public perceptions
of Parker’s class status would a generation later, Ridgc’s calmed the racialized storm and
redeemed the purity of his white bride in the eyes of her community.

It is very possible though, that the reporters recognized a potential for outrage and

controversy around the time of the Parker/Sackett marriage and because of his outward

middle-class appearance, perhaps felt it necessary to explore Parker’s heritage and racial

 

3" Ellinghaus, “Margins of Acceptability,” 69.
85 Miles, Ties that Bind, 23.
86 Miles, Ties that Bind,, 23-24.

87 Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 153.

148

identity to either explain how he could have attained such a class status, or to demonstrate
that in one way or another that he was not “completely” Indian. Interestingly, the New
York Daily Tribune published an article several days after the rescheduled ceremony that
identiﬁed Parker as a person of mixed, Indian and white, ancestry. The article stated that
“the family of Col. Ely Parker. . .had its origin in the connection of a French ofﬁcer who
was stationed at Fort Du Quesne (now Erie) when that post was occupied by the French,
with a Seneca Woman.”88 Although this story was false, it suggested that to the
reporters, perhaps only a person with at least some European heritage could become so
thoroughly middle class.

To the Washington DC public Parker was not simply an individual who had
attained the trappings of middle class though, he also personiﬁed Victorian standards of
manhood. As Anthony Rotundo argued in his vast study of gender identity, American
Manhood, the ideal of the self-made man rose to prominence in the early nineteenth
century along with important social, political, and economic changes like the
development of a republican government, the market revolution, and the emergence of
the middle class itself. “At the root of these changes was an economic and a political life
based on the free play of individual interests. . .a man took his identity and his social

status from his own achievements, not from the accident of his birth” he wrote.89 Ely

 

88 “C01. Parker’s Ancestry,” New York Daily Tribune, December 28, 1867.

89 Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to
the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 3. The study of American manhood emerged as a
response to the development of women’s history in the 19703 and 19803. Several scholars argued that
gender as a category of analysis had to include an understanding of historical signiﬁcance of masculinity as
well as femininity. This point has been well-received by scholars and more recent literature much more
efﬁciently incorporates both men and women into their analyses. For more on the development of men’s
studies see J .A. Mangan and James Walvin eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in
Britain and America, 1800—1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); and Michael Kimmel,
Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996).

149

Parker, by his own description, was a man “born of poor, but honest Indian parents,” who
became a successful civil engineer, Civil War leader, a friend to every president from
Polk through Grant, and ultimately a federal policymaker in the Department of the
Interior. Surely, he epitomized the ideals of the self-made man.90
Parker’s career choices adhered to Victorian standards of manhood and this fact
would have been easily recognizable to the DC elites that might have chosen to protest
his marriage. Pursuing ﬁrst a career in law, which, in the pre-Civil War era was
increasingly identiﬁed as a masculine endeavor, Parker demonstrated many of the ideals
that came to be valued in the legal profession, including story-telling skills, an intense
competitive edge, and a general conviviality.91 It was his convivial nature that endeared
the young Parker to many members of Washington society. He “was entertained in their
homes,” “spent New Year’s Day. . .in the home of Dolly Madison,” and “Mrs. Polk once
took him for a drive in her carriage.”92 Also, according to Arthur C. Parker, his “polished
speech and effective arguments attracted the attention of many statesmen.”93 Perhaps

more importantly, though, the development of the masculine ideal in law reﬂected a

growing societal value that men should be able to “solve the practical problems of the

 

90 Ely S. Parker, “Draft for lecture containing autobiographical notes, notes on the history of
Indian-white relations and on religion,” [ca. 1878], MS 674, Folder 2, NL.

91 Michael Grossberg, “Institutionalizing Masculinity: The Law as a Masculine Profession,” in
Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, eds. Mark C. Carnes and
Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 133-151, 139.

92 Arthur Parker, “Ely S. Parker — Man and Mason,” Freemasons, New York (State) Grand
Lodge, American Lodge of Research, Transactions 8, no. 2, (Jan.-Dec., 1961): 229-247, 233-234.

93 Parker, “Ely S. Parker - Man and Mason,”, 233.

150

”94 When Parker was denied entrance to the bar, he sought a career in

growing society.
engineering, and in a most visible way, by creating canals and buildings; he worked to
solve practical problems in the growing society.95 Furthermore, as a member of Grant’s
personal staff during the Civil War, and in the post-war era, he held a very visible
position as a ranking military ofﬁcial and a mid-level bureaucrat. Parker moved up the
military hierarchy very quickly in the post-war period, from Second Lieutenant of US.
Cavalry in the regular Army, to First Lieutenant, and received brevets of Captain, Major,
Lieutenant, ant-Colonel, Colonel, and Brigadier-General, all in 1867. He also toured
with General Grant after the war, and many of the photographs from that trip "show him
at Grant's side."96 As a leader in the victorious Union Army, and through his public
connection with the famous General, Parker represented, to the DC elite, a masculine
ideal in military service and the willingness to sacriﬁce his life to ﬁght disunion that
drove the romanticization of the Civil War in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

Parker also participated in many fraternal organizations, another important marker
of nineteenth-century manhood. Between the 1840s and 1860s Parker sought initiation

into, received honors, and held ofﬁces in many fraternal lodges and masonic chapters.

He frequently read Masonic literature, joined lodges in New York, Illinois, and Iowa, and

 

94 Parker, “Ely S. Parker- Man and Mason,”, 136.

95 In his recent book, Michael Adas argued that colonial officials and reformers in the US. "have
rather consistently assumed that the adoption of American technologies (and material culture more broadly)
would also entail the incorporation of American values, ways of thinking, and modes of organizing
everything." As a civil engineer, and in a sense, a master of new American technologies (at least in terms
of construction and transportation) Parker's career choice and excellence in this facet of his life contributed
signiﬁcantly to his public persona and the ease with which he was accepted into Washington DC society.
See Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperative and A merica’s C ivilizing Mission
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 12.

96 Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 143.

151

even gave a well-known address at a Masonic convention in Chicago in 1859, in which
he stated that, if the Indian race were to vanish, he would “knock at the door of
MASONRY” for refuge.97 He continued, describing the signiﬁcance of fraternal
organizations in his life,

I knocked at the door of the Blue Lodge, and found

brotherhood around its alter. I knelt before the Great Light

in the Chapter, and found companionship beneath the Royal Arch.

I entered the Encampment, and found valiant Sir Knights willing

to shield me there without regard to race or nation.98
Historian Mark Cames argued that fraternal rituals helped young men shiﬂ from a
domestic, feminized childhood to a public manhood that valued power and commercial
activity by fostering connections to other professional men. He stated that the groups
provided “guidance during the young men’s troubled passage into manhood.”99 Parker
not only participated in these organizations, but excelled as a Mason, and like his
professional pursuits, received recognition for his accomplishments in the form of
acceptance into mainstream society. In fact, at the time of his death in 1895, several
members of fraternal organizations attended and performed rituals at his burial.loo

Although the newspaper reporters never overtly stated that Parker epitomized the

standards and ideals of middle-class Victorian manhood, the tacit approval of his

marriage demonstrated that although Parker was a Seneca, for all intents and purposes, he

 

97 “The Indian Craftsman,” The Masonic Review vol. 23, no. 1 (1860): 16-17. See also Parker,
“Ely S. Parker — Man and Mason,” 243 and Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 70.

98 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 70.
99 Mark Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1989), 14. See also Mark Carnes, “Middle-Class Men and the Solace of Fraternal Ritual” in

Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, eds. Mark C. Carnes and
Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 37-60.

100 “Gen. Parker’s Funeral,” Batavia Daily News (NY), September 7, 1985. and “Marking the
Grave of Do-Ne-Ho-Geh-Weh,” Proceedings of the Buﬂalo Historical Society VIII (1905): 51 1-519.

152

was a middle-class man in mainstream society as far as the Washington DC public was
concerned. ’0' In her article "Tense and Tender Ties," Ann Stoler asserted that
"[e]laborate codes of conduct that afﬁrmed manliness and virility arose from colonial
cultures of fear - white men making unfounded claims to legitimate rule saw their
manhood bolstered by equally unfounded claims to racial superiority."102 Parker's public
persona and the role it played in this case as traversing these boundaries and taxonomies
afﬁrms her contention. Parker may have looked like an Indian, but, to the viewing
public, he certainly did not act like what they expected from one. While the reporters
would continue to capitalize on and romanticize his Indian identity the tone of their
rhetoric was such that it was clear he posed no real threat to the racial hierarchy. Parker’s
public identity neutralized the anxieties that DC elites might have felt about the potential
disruption of the racial order represented by his marriage.

Parker's public presence also facilitated the open expression of fascination and

even “colonial desire” on the part of elite, Victorian white women, a group whose

 

[01 In a recent article, Law Professor Ariela J. Gross found that in the antebellum society and

especially in courtrooms, the performance of whiteness factored heavily into legal deﬁnitions of race for
African Americans. In fact, the “evidence” of racialized whiteness in this context, she argued, was often
articulated through the performance of acts of citizenship like serving in a militia or becoming involved in
political or legal matters such as voting or sitting on a jury. Although separated by time and space, my
understanding of Parker’s public persona reafﬁrms her conclusions. See Ariela J. Gross, “Litigating
Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South,” The Yale Law Journal 108,
no. 1 (Oct., 1998): 109-188. The evolving whiteness studies literature has begun to address similar issues
among “white ethnics” later in the nineteenth century. Both Matthew Frye Jacobson and David Roediger
demonstrated that constructions of race have changed dramatically between the nineteenth century and
today, and Roediger in particular showed how it was possible for “non-whites” to live “in-between” racial
binaries in their time period. Although he focused on later time period, I believe that Parker’s career and
marriage demonstrate that he occupied this “in-between” role at mid-century. See Matthew Frye Jacobson,
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999); and David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants
Became White, The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

'02 Ann Laura Stoler, "Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American
History and (Post) Colonial Studies" in Haunted by Empire: Geographies on Intimacy in North American
History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 37.

153

sexuality was oﬁen closely monitored and stiﬂed. The intersecting ideologies of race,
class, and gender at the site of this intermarriage perhaps even helped to intensify the
curiosity the union invoked. Reportedly, no less than several thousand women attended
the second scheduled ceremony, “all intent on seeing the white woman married to the red
man.”103 The Washington DC Evening Star reported that “there was a large crowd at the
Epiphany Church. . .all being strangers to both Col. Parker and his lady, but who were
attracted there from curiosity alone.”104 The New York Herald stated that the “ladies
were in ecstasies, and hurried up preparations to see the interesting spectacle” and the
Tribune estimated that “not less than 5,000 of the fair sex visited the church.”105 The
reporter from the Herald, who described an idealized romantic scene where Parker “with
his warrior’s sash, plume and tribal trappings,” led “his fair Caucasian bride to the altar”
may have been correct; a scene such as this was perhaps too compelling for elite
Washington women to miss. '06
Many colonization studies scholars have asserted that in colonial or other

hegemonic settings members of the dominant society eroticized or fetishized the “other.”

In his interesting and persuasive study entitled Colonial Desire, Robert Young argued

 

'03 New York Daily Tribune, December 25, 1867.

104 “Marriage of Col. Ely S. Parker and Miss Sackett,” Washington DC Evening Star, December
24, 1867.
105 “The Parker-Sackett Nuptials,” New York Herald, December 24, 1867; and New York Tribune,
December 25, 1867.

106 The ideas in this section owe an intellectual debt to literary scholar Paul Gilmore, who argued
that nineteenth-century cultural amusements “produced blacks and Indians simultaneously as primitive
embodiments of unruly masculinized behavior and as safe, sentimentalized commodities for a feminized
middle-class audience.” Thus, it is clear that Parker’s dual appeal, as both an exoticized “other” and a non-
threatening member of mainstream society, would have been something recognizable to the elite
Washington DC public. For more see Paul Gilmore, The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and
American Literary Manhood (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 6.

154

that in 18603 British writings about “race-mixing,” there was a recognition of interracial
attraction between white men and women of color.107 Ann Stoler demonstrated that in
colonial regions European women were not the objects of male desire, rather they were
either paragons of virtue or parasitic inﬂuences. Indigenous women thus became the
objects of desire in these situations, she asserted.108 For this reason, white women’s
sexuality was often closely policed; however, while it is less apparent in this literature,
white women also participated in the practices of colonial desire along with white men.
Young demonstrated that there was a fear that white women were attracted to men of
color, but this idea also served as a fantasy in colonial settings because, as he wrote,
“disgust always bears the imprint of desire.” He used as an example, Louis Agassiz’s
wife, who was unable to stop watching the “ﬁne-looking athletic negroes” in West
Africa, and the fact that Agassiz himself wrote frequently about this in his journals.109
Anne McClintock also argued that colonial women, although in a disadvantaged and
frustrating position compared to that of colonial men, did occupy “positions of decided —
if borrowed — power, not only over colonized women but also over colonized men.”l '0

These assertions from colonization studies literature can help us understand the

Parker/Sackett union, and the ways that the public obsession with the event itself

 

107 Young, Colonial Desire, 149-150. See also Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; and
Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Ehibitions: Representations of the “Native " and the Making of
European Identities (London: Leicester University Press, 1999).

108 Ann Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender and Morality in the Making of
Race,” in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, ed. Ann Stoler
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 41-78.

109 Young, Colonial Desire, 149.

HO Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New
York: Routledge, 1995), 6.

155

suggested an expression of colonial desire on the part of white women. Even Minnie
once said that “people thought I married the General because he was an Indian.” Though
she cryptically added, “[n]ow I don’t care for Indians — I married the General because I
loved him.”l ” It is clear that Parker was often an object of female attention. Louise
Bacheldor, in her letter to the Buffalo Express editor, enthusiastically described the young
Parker as having "a noble, commanding form, tall, erect, broad-shouldered . . . [with]
straight, coal-black hair, high cheekbones and copper-colored complexion." And when
discussing the rumored affair he had with one of his white schoolmates and their storied
July Fourth carriage ride at Yates academy, she outlined a scene that was not unlike the
one at the Church of the Epiphany 22 years later. She wrote that "[v]erandas were ﬁlled
with people and even the street comers . . . [as] many were on the alert to know if the
rumor was really true."112 Later in life Parker described himself as a “savage Jack
Falstaff of 200 weight,” but a description from a Masonic meeting he attended referred to
him as the “valiant Batchelor [sic] Chief” and revealed that “the ladies vied with the
brethren” for his attention.113 To compare Parker to other prominent nineteenth-century

Indian men reveals striking similarities. Although their marriage generated extreme

 

111 Miscellaneous notes of James E. Kelly, Kelly Papers, New York Historical Society, New
York, New York, quoted in Armstrong, 132, emphasis added.

“2 Mrs. Louise Bacheldor, letter to the editor, Buﬂalo Express, 24 March 1915, Box 6 - 1886-
1946 and n.d., Ely S. Parker Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA. In her 2006
presentation at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, historian Christine Skwiot also
recognized the signiﬁcance of colonial desire when she discussed the Hawaiian tourism industry in the
early-twentieth century. There she found that tourism boosters promoted the fantasy of "torrid affairs"
between white women and Polynesian beach boys. "Building on the myths of the sensuous and sexually
available Polynesian woman that had informed Western fantasies. . .they reversed the gender roles to make
erotic encounters with Polynesian men available to white women," she wrote. See Christine Skwiot,
"Sexual License as Imperial Discipline: Miscegenation and Hawai'i, 1819-1959" (paper presented at the
120th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Philadelphia, PA, January, 2006), 24-25.

“3 “An Indian Craftsman,” The Masonic Review 19 (1858): 364.

156

outrage, when Elias Boudinot and Harriet Gold announced their engagement, her sister
noted that she “never appeared more interesting than she does at present.”1 M Perhaps she
was alluding to Boudinot’s appeal as an exoticized “other.” Furthermore, Charles
Eastman, the Santee Sioux who married Elaine Goodale, was often described as being

”5 The newspaper reporters at the time of the

much sought after by white women.
Parker/Sackett wedding most likely fed these fantasies when they described Parker as
having “a strong, manly build . . . of pure Indian complexion.” They drew on racialized
historical symbolism, invoking the image of “the grand matrimonial and spectacular
drama of ‘Pocahontas’” and they referred to Parker using his Seneca name, “Do-ne-ho-
ga-wa.”116

Despite the fact that white women’s sexuality was often closely monitored, the
elite women of Washington DC society very openly expressed their curiosity and interest
in interracial affairs at the time of the Parker/Sackett marriage. Like the marriage itself
though, this failed to create any kind of controversy. In fact, the newspaper reporters
took a jovial, almost playful tone when describing the white women’s actions and rather
than indicating any disapproval, they used language that expressed or at least supported
colonial fascination. It is clear that Parker’s public identity and fulﬁllment of middle-

class Victorian ideals of manhood facilitated this open expression. As a Seneca sachem,

"near relative to the famous Red Jacket," and Civil War hero he provided material for

 

”4 Mary B. Church, “Elias Boudinot,” Magazine oinstory 17 (1913): 209-219, 214.
”5 Sargent, The Life of Elaine Goodale Eastman, 45, 50.

“6 “The Parker-Sackett Nuptials,” New York Herald, December 25, I867.

157

romantic fantasies as an exoticized “other." I '7 But through his public identity, he was
also the civil engineer, military secretary, and dear friend to US. Grant, and as such, he
appeared as a non-threatening object of fascination for a sentimentalized, feminized

audience.

Arthur C. Parker wrote that Ely was “devoted to his wife, whom he frequently described

9”

to friends as ‘the one woman in all the world for me. “He was with her in sickness and
in health,” he continued, “always kind, patient and courteous.”1 '8 William Armstrong
also concluded that the Parkers had a long and happy union. For a marriage that began
under such mysterious and intriguing circumstances, it seems strange that issues related
to shifting and evolving notions of race, class, gender, and colonialism would cease to
play a role so quickly.

There are hints though, in the historical records that suggest such complications
continued to impact the Parkers’ lives. After Ely's ouster from the Bureau of Indian
Affairs in the early-18708, his one-time ﬁ'iend, but more recent rival, William Welsh, the
Episcopal missionary, wrote a letter to Lewis Henry Morgan in which he stated that
“Parker meant well but conviviality and a fashionable wife made him the prey of astute

and polished augers.”1 ‘9 Welsh, who previously made comments about Parker’s racial

identity, may have been suggesting that, as an Indian man, his attentions were focused

 

”7 “A Wedding in High Life Unexpectedly Postponed,” New York Daily Tribune, December 18,
1867.

“8 Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 22].

”9 William Welsh to Lewis Henry Morgan, 20 March, 1873, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, RRL-
UR.

158

too closely on maintaining his middle class status and his relationship with a white
woman, than on his work as a policymaker.

Throughout his life and career Parker wrote hundreds of letters, luckily many of
these still exist in archives and libraries spread across the United States. Among all of
these letters, however, none exist that he exchanged with his wife, Minnie. Furthermore,
Parker only mentioned his wife a few times in all of his correspondence, and these were
only ﬂeeting. In one letter he mentioned that “Mrs. P. and I have spent three days at
Manhattan Beach and found it charming,” but in another, “Mrs. Parker has changed her
mind and . . . has gone back from Western New York to Denver, to stay until she changes
her mind to come home to me.”120 While it is impossible to know exactly what caused
Minnie's stress, the general silence in the historical record speaks volumes. Perhaps the
pressures placed on these two individuals who married across racial boundaries caused
Parker to downplay their relationship in his correspondence.

Parker’s relationship with the poet and ethnographer, Harriet Maxwell Converse,
may also reveal the signiﬁcant role that racial identities played throughout this marriage.
In the 18803 Parker began a frequent correspondence with Converse that would continue
through the end of his life, and their letters demonstrated the importance of his Seneca
heritage to the aging sachem. While Parker may not have been able to share this part of
his identity with Minnie, “[n]ow I don’t care for Indians” she once said, Converse
understood and appreciated Seneca history and culture, and this fact may explain their
ﬁiendship. The Seneca even adopted Converse and bestowed upon her an honorary clan

membership. In their letters Parker addressed her by her Seneca name, Gayaneshaoh, or

 

120 Ely S. Parker to Harreit Maxwell Converse, 23 June, 1891, quoted in Parker, I78; Ely S.
Parker to Harreit Maxwell Converse, 10 July, 1894, quoted in Parker, I80.

159

“The Little Snipe.” Although mainstream society may have seen a Victorian middle—
class man when they looked at Parker, Converse saw and appreciated Parker as an Indian.

The Washington DC public obsessed over the marriage of Ely Parker and Minnie
Sackett. This chapter illustrated that even though this union could have motivated
outrage and even violence in the nation’s capital, it was Parker’s fame as a Civil War
hero and his fulﬁllment of middle-class ideals and standards of Victorian manhood that
made him an acceptable husband for a white woman. Furthermore, this case study
showed that through the interwoven discourses of race, class, and gender, an Indian
leader like Parker could represent the embodiment of primitive masculinity to some,
while at the same time be a non-threatening object of public fascination for a
sentimentalized, feminized, middle-class audience. The vast newspaper coverage in
Washington DC and New York, of the events surrounding the Parker/Sackett affair,
commented upon, scrutinized, and even invented a constellation of issues, but by taking
these articles as its primary source of evidence, this chapter has suggested some of the
signiﬁcant ways that discourse shaped actions around colonial racial boundaries, but also
revealed the ﬂuidity of racial identities.

The Parker/Sackett affair is signiﬁcant for the study of Indian/white intermarriage
in several capacities. First, it calls into question the assertion that it was simply
assimilation policies in the late-nineteenth century that made Indian man/white woman
interrnarriages acceptable. Assimilation policies clearly factored into the increasing
visibility of intermarriages in this period, but the existence of marriages like Parker’s
prior to the institutionalization of these colonial policies demonstrates that other issues

played equally important roles. In particular, unions such as Ridge and Northrup's,

160

Boudinot and Gold's, and Parker and Sackett's demonstrated that notions of class and
gender impacted public acceptance in ways that precluded federal policies. Perhaps it is
more accurate to assert that assimilation policies in the late-nineteenth century provided
additional Opportunities for Indian men to achieve class and gender statuses, and that
those statuses made their marriages acceptable or at least tolerable to mainstream society.
Additionally, by focusing on an interracial marriage that took place in the seat of
national, colonial power, rather than in a peripheral or borderland region where the role
of the colonial state was unstable, this analysis demonstrated the pervasiveness of ﬂuid
and insecure boundaries between public perceptions of colonial identity markers. One
might be inclined to dismiss these events if they took place in a less visible locale, but
that they happened in the capital makes them even more signiﬁcant.

By demonstrating the applicability of insights from colonization/postcolonial
studies to the examination of intimate relations across racialized boundaries in United
States history, this chapter lends support to Ann Stoler's recent contentions in Haunted by
Empire among others. While some might disagree with the assertion that the elite white
women attending the Parker/Sackett wedding were participating in the act of colonial
desire, or that Parker's ability to transcend racial taxonomies actually demonstrated the
existence of the taxonomies themselves, it is difﬁcult, if not impossible, to argue against
the fact that these insights provoke us to ask new questions and search for new and better
explanations for the workings of race, class, and gender in the nineteenth century.
Furthermore, understanding the perceptions of this marriage as “a barometer for society,”

the Parker/Sackett affair indicates the signiﬁcance of the early Reconstruction years as a

161

time of potential (though often unrealized) for racial reconﬁgurations in the capital, but
also in the nation more broadly.

Intermarriages like the Parker/Sackett affair, which captured the public’s
attention, are particularly signiﬁcant for their interpretive value. These unions provided
sites at which notions of race, class, and gender, within an evolving colonial context,
intersected, and as such allow for multi-layered analyses that historians can use to
demonstrate the rigidity and permeability of racial taxonomies, as well as the signiﬁcance
of social constructions of class and gender, and the ways these notions and classiﬁcations
shifted and interacted as state and society evolved and changed. While in the past, an
anomalous event such as the Parker/Sackett affair may have been easily ignored, this
study suggests that it is exactly these kinds of events that scholars should interrogate
further. These anomalous moments can push us to consider alternate understandings of
the role of the state in the post-Civil War era, as well as the ways in which colonial
imperatives manifested themselves within the actions of individuals and communities.
Finally, by bridging multiple interpretive frameworks, this study demonstrates the need
for the development of alternate and increasingly sophisticated examinations of Indian-
white intermarriage in the nineteenth-century United States.

Parker’s role as a federal policymaker in the middle of the nineteenth century
might also appear as anomalous for an Indian man. It was his public acceptance,
however, that helped provide him this opportunity. The next chapter examines Parker’s
efforts to shape the development and administration of the federal Peace Policy of the
late-18603 and early-18703 in order to understand more fully the position of Indian

people in the evolving state structures of the nineteenth-century United States. In

162

particular, it seeks to connect the legacy of the Ogden land dispute, a localized pre-Civil
War event, with the national-level Indian policy reform campaign in the post-Civil War
era, by examining how Parker attempted to apply the lessons he learned at Tonawanda to

the federal bureaucracy.

163

CONFINING INDIANS: POWER, AUTHORITY, AND THE
COLONIALIST IDEOLOGIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY REFORMERS

VOLUME TWO
By

C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of History

2008

Chapter 4
"[F]or the establishment of a permanent and perpetual peace":
Ely Parker's role in the Early Peace Policy

"This project, at ﬁrst blush, may seem to be devised on too extensive a scale, and
involving too much expense for an experiment. I cannot regard it so... "

Ely 3. Parker, 1867'
The Peace Policy in the late-18603 and early-18703 exists in the historical literature as a
complex and paradoxical phenomenon fraught with internal contradictions. This chapter
examines the policy’s development within the context of an earlier local controversy,
namely the Ogden/Tonawanda land dispute, and as a part of the evolution of Indian
affairs within the nineteenth-century state and seeks to provide coherence to these
scholarly interpretations. I focus on Ely Parker, the ﬁrst Indian Commissioner of Indian
Affairs, as an integral character in federal policymaking in the late-18603 and early-
18703, and I contend that his political education in western New York profoundly shaped
the reform programs that led to the Peace Policy. While some have characterized this
period in Indian affairs as "a mere hodge-podge," examining Parker’s role in the early
Peace Policy suggests that there was a consistent movement toward an increasingly
efﬁcient, effective, and impartial bureaucratization. It was also this process of
bureaucratization, though, that facilitated the increasing physical, economic, and social

conﬁnement of Indian communities and Indian people.2

 

1 "Letter from the Secretary of War, Addressed to Mr. Schenck, Chairman of the Committee on
Military Affairs, Transmitting a Report by Colonel Parker on Indian Affairs," US. Congress, House Misc.
Doc. No. 37, 39th Cong., 2nd Sess., 7.

2 See Richard Levine, "Indian Fighters and Indian Reformers: Grant's Indian Peace Policy and the
Conservative Consensus," Civil War History 31, no. 4 (1985): 329-352.

164

The Peace Policy, according to historian Francis Prucha, "was a state of mind, a
determination that since the old ways of dealing with Indians had not worked, new ways
which emphasized kindness and justice must be tried." "Because states of mind do not
begin and end abruptly," he continued, "the peace policy cannot be precisely dated nor
can it be rigidly deﬁned."3 Other historians have taken a more pragmatic approach to the
study of the Peace Policy and tend to deﬁne it by focusing on one or more of the
following developments: Ely S. Parker's appointment as Commissioner of Indian Affairs,
the creation of the Board of Indian Commissioners, the attempt to transfer the Bureau of
Indian Affairs from the Department of the Interior back to the War Department (it was
originally in the War Department, but was transferred to the Department of the Interior in
1849), religious organizations’ responsibility of nominating reservation agents, the
increasing concentration of Native communities on reservations, and the expanded
program of government appropriations for subsistence and agricultural goods and
supplies, and educational staff and facilities.4

Throughout his early life and career, Parker situated himself as a man who
publicly adhered to middle-class, Victorian ideals, and through his friendship with US.
Grant and his work in Indian affairs in the 18603, he got the opportunity to apply his
reform agenda through the Peace Policy. And although various scholars have attempted
to characterize it as an exclusively religious, military or humanitarian movement, the one
key element that united all of the disparate parts of the policy was its attempt to end
corruption and mismanagement through the development of an efﬁcient and impartial

bureaucracy and public oversight. These were innovations that emerged out of Parker's

 

3 Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis, 30-31.

4 For speciﬁc discussions of the Peace Policy historiography, see below.

165

previous experience as a Seneca spokesman in the Ogden/Tonawanda land dispute, and
careers in both civilian and military branches of the federal government, and ﬁrst
surfaced in his 1861 reform of reservation governance at Tonawanda. Furthermore,
Parker's underlying political philosophy which argued that protecting community
cohesiveness, providing adequate compensation for dispossession, and educational
opportunities for Native peoples would allow the "Indian Problem" to cease being a
problem on its own represented the initiation of a signiﬁcant tradition of dissent within
mainstream systems of governance. Although oppositional reformers defeated Parker in
these policy debates, it is intentionality that I am most concerned with, and the
communitarian and compensatory intentions that drove his programs would emerge again
in the work of later Native and non-Native reformers at the end of the nineteenth century
and again in the twentieth century. These policy innovations can also be seen as
forerunners to larger social policy reform efforts at the end of the nineteenth century and
in the early twentieth century.

The historical literature on the Peace Policy generally focuses on the religious
organizations that administered the policy on the local level, the non-Native reformers
who sponsored, approved of, and directed those religious organizations, or the military
component of these reforms. Taken singularly or together, these studies do not provide
an overall interpretation of this time period in Indian affairs. As historian Richard Levine
noted, this literature has not "suggested a single ideological ﬁamework within which to

ﬁt all the disparate elements of the Grant Indian policy."5 Furthermore, the existing

 

5 Levine, "Indian Fighters and Indian Reformers,” 330.

166

 

 

literature does not address Ely Parker’s role as a strong Indian voice in policy reform, nor
does it adequately reﬂect the signiﬁcant BIA conﬂicts in this period.

"The demand of religiously motivated men and women for reform in Indian
affairs could not be disregarded," wrote Francis Prucha in his seminal two-volume study
of the entire course of United States/Indian relations, entitled The Great Father.6 "The
governmental structures that marked the peace policy were a remarkable manifestation of
reliance of the 'Christian nation' on professedly Christian men and principles," he
continued.7 Prucha's work represents one of the most signiﬁcant trends in the Peace
Policy literature and his interpretations established the frameworks within which most
subsequent scholars situated their studies. Prucha’s interest in and devotion to the power
of the religious convictions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans proved to
be very inﬂuential and few scholars questioned his assertions about the harmony between
reformers and the linear progression of post-Civil War Indian policy.

Some historians, though, have questioned the intentions of the religious
organizations and in various ways engaged with Prucha’s earlier work. These scholars
presented interpretations that attributed the failures of the Peace Policy to internal
divisions within or among the religious organizations themselves, particularly focusing
upon the doctrinal, dogmatic, or sectarian divides. Others focused on the inability of the

missionaries to reconcile or cooperate with private companies and land speculators who

 

6 Prucha, The Great Father vol. 1, 501.

7 Prucha, The Great Father vol. 1, 501. See also Carol Higham, Noble, Wretched, and
Redeemable: Protestant Missionaries to the Indian in Canada and the United States, l820-l 900
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000). Higharn's comparative study also demonstrates
this obsession with the religious component of the development of nineteenth-century Indian affairs, as
well as the tendency of this type of literature to cloud other important nuances in interpretation. She argued
that despite the differences between the United States and Canada, the Protestant missionaries shared
remarkably similar attitudes toward their charges.

167

proﬁted from Indian conﬁnement, as well as their inability to persuade the federal
government to remove these contractors and “whiskey hucksters” completely. Still other
historians, simply following Prucha’s lead, present the development of this period as the
positive result of the harmonious Christian orientation of the participants involved.
Clyde Milner's study of the Hicksite Quakers who worked with the Pawnees, Otos, and
Omahas, entitled With Good Intentions, argued that although the religious men meant
well, they actually demonstrated many of the same prejudices and expectations about
Indian communities as other non-Native reformers. Furthermore, he asserted that they
allowed ethnocentrism to drive their actions, and ultimately did more harm than good
among the Native communities with which they worked.8 Similarly, Robert Keller's
American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 1869-1882 came to the
pessimistic conclusion that no matter how altruistic or idealistic the goals of the
government or the religious organizations, real-life interests, particularly the western
drive for land, Indian removal, and concentration on reservations, superseded any
philosophical orientation.9 In "New Hope for the Indians, " Norman Bender found that in
New Mexico, the Peace Policy was not a successful reform effort due to the divisions

within the Presbyterian Church, as well as personnel issues and ethnocentrism. '0

 

8 Milner, With Good Intentions, xi-xiii. See also Robert Trennert, "John H. Stout and the Grant
Peace Policy Among the Pimas," Arizona and the West, 28, no. 1 (1986): 45-68.

9 Keller, American Protestantism, xi-xii. See also Robert Keller, "Episcopal Reformers and
Affairs at Red Cloud Agency, l870-I876," Nebraska History, 68, no. 3 (1987): 116-126, and Joseph E.
Illick, "'Some of Our Best Indians are Friends. . .': Quaker Attitudes and Actions regarding the Western
Indians during the Grant Administration," Western Historical Quarterly, 2, no. 3 (1971): 283-294. lllick
concluded that "Land hunger on the frontier, which had always poisoned Indian-white relations, played a
part in undermining Quaker efforts"(293).

10 Norman Bender, "New Hope for the Indians: The Grant Peace Policy and the Navajos in the
I870s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1989). See also Cary Collins, "A Fall from Grace:
Sectarianism and the Grant Peace Policy in Western Washington Territory, 1869-1882," Paciﬁc Northwest

168

Other scholars have reached less pessimistic conclusions. For example, T. Ashley
Zwink argued that Lawrie Tatum, the Quaker agent selected to administer BIA policy on
the Kiowa agency, found success in his efforts to encourage self-sufﬁcient agriculture
there and "pioneered in the government's efforts to civilize and Christianize the
Indians."ll Similarly, Henry Waltmann argued that although the Presbyterian
administrator John Lowrie advocated "justice for the Indians, he did not think in terms of
comprehensive equality for their race." Nonetheless, "much good had been done for the
Indians in an era when the very existence of the red race was in jeopardy."12 In his book
American Indian Policy in Crisis, Francis Prucha argued that the Christian humanitarians
were "sincere, religious-minded men and women who believed intensely that only one
solution was possible for the problem they saw facing the United States in its relations
with the Indians." Furthermore, he wrote, "they were closely united both in outlook and
in goals, and they were supported by government ofﬁcials of like mind."13

Another group of historians have examined the non-Native reformers and
government ofﬁcials of the Peace Policy era. "The sponsors of Indian reform in the years

following the Civil War deserve praise for their work," wrote Loring Benson Priest in his

 

Forum, 8, no. 2 (1995): 55-77; and Henry Stamm, "The Peace Policy at Wind River: The James Irwin
Years, 1871-1 877," Montana 41, no. 3: 56-69. Stamm concluded that Irwin's failures reﬂected those of the
larger Peace Policy, in that "the dominant culture failed to include the voices of the minority in any real
way" (69).

11 T. Ashley Zwink, "On the White Man's Road: Lawrie Tatum and the Formative Years of the
Kiowa Agency, 1869-I873," Chronicles of Oklahoma 56, no. 4 (1978-1979): 431-441, 441. See also
Martha Bunin, "The Quaker Agents of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita Indian Reservation," Chronicles
of Oklahoma, 10, no.2 (1932); and Lee Cutler, "Lawrie Tatum and the Kiowa Agency, 1869-I873,"
Arizona and the West, 13, no. 3 (1971): 221-244.

12 Henry Waltrnann, "John C. Lowrie and Presbyterian Indian Administration, l870-1882,"
Journal of Presbyterian History, 54, no. 2 (1976): 259-277, 272-273.

13 Francis Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis, vi.

169

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book Uncle Sam's Stepchildren. "The failure resulting was unfortunate; but
misapplication by administrators rather than the evil intent of legislators was responsible
for the disastrous history of America's ﬁrst systematic effort to provide for Indian
welfare," he continued.l4 In his attempt to understand and characterize the reformers,
Henry Fritz wrote that for the most part these individuals were not "Eastern
sentimentalists," but rather men and women "who had moved to the western frontier."
He also asserted that all the reformers "had one characteristic in common: a genuine
sympathy for all humanity motivated by a deep-rooted Christian philosophy." '5 He
concluded that, the shortcomings of the policy had nothing to do with the reformers or
administrators themselves, rather that it was "the fault of Congress, which did not
appropriate enough funds." '6 Robert Mardock argued that the reformers were
Republican, middle-class, "social-gospel Christian humanists" and that their Christian
beliefs drastically shaped their understandings of race and Indian-white relations.” He
found that the reformers were perhaps motivated by over-zealous, idealistic principles,

that they failed to adequately study the problems they sought to correct, and that their

 

'4 Loring Benson Priest, Uncle Sam's Stepchildren: The Reformation of United States Indian
Policy, I 865—1887 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1942), 252. See also Robert Utley, "The
Celebrated Peace Policy of General Grant," North Dakota History 20, (1953): 121-142. Of course, the
work of Francis Prucha could also factor into this discussion, although since he focused on the Christian
orientation of the non-Native reformers, I chose to place his work in the earlier section.

'5 Henry Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation, l860-l890 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 34. See also Henry Fritz, "The Making of Grant's Peace Policy," Chronicles of
Oklahoma 37, (1959-1960): 411-432.

'6 Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 220.

17 Robert Mardock, The Reformer and the American Indian (Columbia: University of Missouri

Press, 1971), 3. See also Robert Mardock, "The Anti-Slavery Humanitarians and Indian Policy Reform,"
Western Humanities Review 12, (I958).

170

reforms were not necessarily practical.18 These scholars, though successful in
demonstrating the complexities in Indian policy reform in the post-Civil War period, did
not recognize the signiﬁcant role Ely Parker played, as a strong Indian voice, in the
creation and administration of Indian policy.

A ﬁnal, though less signiﬁcant trend in the literature on the Peace Policy
examined the role of the military as an active agent of policy creation and administration,
some of these scholars also focused particularly on President Grant. Robert Wooster
argued that the "army's role in implementing policy should not be ignored."l9 Much like
the historians who studied the religious organizations and the non-Native reformers,
Wooster found it difﬁcult to apply an overall framework to the history of military
interaction with Indian peoples in the west. Rather, he concluded, there was no "strategic
doctrine" when it came to the army's Indian policy, and that any successes can only be
attributed to "a commander's personal experiences in the West, his perceptions of Indians
and the natural environment, the abilities of his subordinates, and simple good fortune."20
Other scholars, who focused attention on the role that US. Grant himself played in the
creation and administration of Indian policy, argued that the President was a sympathetic

sponsor of Indian rights. Biographers and mythmakers assert that he was concerned with

Native communities in the Paciﬁc Northwest in the 18503 and that when he was elected

 

18 Mardock, The Reformer and the American Indian, 228.

’9 Robert Wooster, The Military and United States Indian Policy, [865-1903 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1988), 211.

20 Wooster, The Military and United States Indian Policy, 213. See also Utley, Frontier Regulars.
Judith St. Pierre's dissertation attempts to ﬁnd some over-arching philosophy in military strategy by
studying the life and career of one General who was involved in both the administration of Reconstruction
and Indian policies. See Judith St. Pierre, "General 0.0. Howard and Grant's Peace Policy," (PhD. diss,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1990).

171

 

in 1868, he sought to use his authority to provide a more humane and justiﬁed Indian
policy.21 This idea is most clear in the fact that the Peace Policy itself is often referred to
as "Grant's Peace Policy." However, "when the story of the Peace Policy is examined
critically, though, it becomes obvious that Grant's inﬂuence, rather than being decisive
and salutary, was in fact more circumstantial."22 Thus, neither the military's approach,
nor Grant's individual orientation, provides a general framework for interpreting this
period.

Historians have not yet rectiﬁed the competing and conﬂicting developments in
Indian affairs during this era. The focus on the religious element of the reform effort has
tended to mask the fundamental conﬂicts over the relationship of the BIA to Indian
communities and to the larger state itself. Historians have rarely recognized the
signiﬁcant role that Ely Parker played in the creation of this reform agenda. Parker
intended the BIA to serve as a compensatory agency that could provide protection,
supplies, and educational opportunities for dispossessed Native groups. He also
suggested that the federal government should work to maintain Indian communities and
indigenousness distinctiveness. By examining the inﬂuence of Parker's early career and
his involvement with the Grant administration, this chapter seeks to illuminate the
signiﬁcance of the Indian voice in nineteenth-century policy reform. It also seeks to

demonstrate that the conﬂicts between and among the various religious and secular

 

2! See Elsie Rushmore, The Indian Policy During Grant's Administration (New York: Marion
Press, 1914); William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1981); and Jean Smith, Grant
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). In Cigars, Whiskey, and Winning, Al Kaltman, in an effort to
celebrate all of Grant's accomplishments, listed his appointment of a Native American as the Commissioner
of Indian Affairs as one of his top ten positive actions as President. See Al Kaltman, Cigars, Whiskey, and
Winning: Leadership Lessons ﬁ'om General Ulysses S. Grant (Paramus, NJ: Prentice Hall Press, 1998).

22 Henry Waltmann, "Circumstantial Reformer: President Grant and the Indian Problem," Arizona
and the West, 13, no. 4 (1971): 323-342, 323.

172

reformers represented larger issues concerning the role and responsibilities of the BIA

and the nineteenth-century state.

Public Debates and Indian Policy(ies)
The Civil War represented the complete and total break-down of civil society, it

exposed the inability of the federal govemment to solve fundamental issues of racial
equality and regional differences, and it allowed humanitarians such as anti-slavery and
abolitionist groups to gain a foothold in federal policymaking. The question remains
though: how and why did these developments manifest themselves in a period of drastic
and intense Indian policy reform? In an effort to answer this question, one must examine
Indian policy during Lincoln's administration, developments along the borderlands of
Indian-white contact during the Civil War, and the larger impact of the war on society
and the government.

While Indian affairs seemingly received little attention during Abraham Lincoln's
presidency, Lincoln himself and several other individuals considered reform in the BIA
to be an important priority, of course, sectional conﬂict and the administration of the war
effort often superseded any other actions. Historian David Nichols contended that the
Bureau of Indian Affairs was already a corrupt agency when Lincoln took ofﬁce, and that
the Civil War, differences of opinion between Congressmen, and the President's focus on
white western settlement impeded any efforts at reform.23 Edmund Danziger Jr., in his

book Indians and Bureaucrats argued that the problems of the Indian Bureau in the 18603

 

23 See David Nichols, Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 197 8). For an alternate and more nuanced study of Lincoln and his efforts to
reform political institutions and practices see J. David Greenstone, The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking
American Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

173

were directly related to larger developments in 18503, including, "accelerated territorial
expansion, the nation's preoccupation with the slavery question, the 'Indian Ring,‘
whiskey hucksters, fraudulent records, disagreements with the war department, cultural
clash, race hatreds and the political power of frontiersmen in Indian matters."24 Danziger
also excused Lincoln from any kind of blame because of his devotion to Civil War issues.
However, several developments during the Civil War caused concerned citizens and
others to turn their attentions directly to Indian affairs.

The 1862 United States-Dakota War in Minnesota thrust Indian affairs into the
public eye. Throughout a six week period, between August 18 and September 26 of that
year, starving Dakota community members, particularly Mdewakanton and Wahpekute
band members, attacked local white settlers around the Lower Sioux Agency near St.
Paul, Minnesota.25 While the cause of the attack remains an issue of interpretation, most
agree that the failure of the federal government to provide annuities stipulated by a series
of treaties in 1851 intensiﬁed a situation already made volatile by dispossession, non-
Native settlement, and continuing colonialism.26 The Dakota warriors moved south
toward New Ulm and north along the Missouri River destroying farms and homesteads,
killing settlers, and capturing immigrants and mixed-race men, women, and children.
Estimates of these events place the death toll at approximately 500 whites along with an

unknown number of Native people, while roughly 269 white and mixed-race men,

 

24 Danziger Jr., Indians and Bureaucrats, 12.

25 The majority of the Sissetons and Wahpetons opposed the war, but some of them did
participate. See Marouf Hasian, “Cultural Amnesia and Legal Rhetoric: Remembering the 1862 United
States-Dakota War and the Need for Military Commissions,” American Indian Culture and Research
Journal 27, no. I (2003): 91-117, 99.

26 At the time there were rumors that the Indians had been whipped into a frenzy by “rebel
emissaries,” although there is little evidence to support these claims. See Hasain, “Cultural Amnesia,” 95.

I74

women, and children were held captive at the hands of Dakota warriors. The United
States military, led by Major General John Pope, commander of the newly created
Department of the Northwest, with the help of the Minnesota volunteer militia gained
control of the situation by the end of September. Brigadier-General Henry Hastings
Sibley established a military tribunal at Fort Release (which was later moved to nearby
Fort Snelling), and in a gross violation of due process rights, tried and convicted 303 of
393 of the Dakota "hostiles." The tribunal condemned all 303 men to execution, but
Abraham Lincoln pardoned 264 of them. On December 26, 1862, only a few days prior
to the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the United States military hung 38
Dakotas in the largest mass execution in its history.27

The events of the United States-Dakota War received some public attention.
Most commentators, especially those in Minnesota supported the actions of the military
and militia, some even criticized Lincoln’s leniency. Other outspoken critics, though,
took this opportunity to argue for the need to reform Indian policy and the Bureau of
Indian Affairs. Episcopal Bishop Benjamin Whipple asserted in a letter to Lincoln, that
the president needed to ﬁnd honest Indian agents, reform treaty-making practices,
provide legal representation for Sioux peoples, and control the liquor trade.
Commissioner of Indian Affairs William Dole argued that the problems in Minnesota

emerged from an inability to control non-Native settlers and that this problem would

 

27 For more see Chester Oehler, The Great Sioux Uprising (New York: Oxford University Press,
1959); Duane Schultz, Over the Earth I Come: The Great Sioux Uprising of 1862 (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1992); June Namias ed., Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees: A Narrative of Indian Captivity (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); Michael Clodfelter, The Dakota War: The United States Army
Versus the Sioux, 1 862-1865 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1998); Jerry Keenan, The Great
Sioux Uprising: Rebellion on the Plains, August-September, 1862 (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2003); and
Kurt D. Bergemann, Brackett ’s Battalion: Minnesota Cavalry in the Civil War and Dakota War (St. Paul:
Borealis Books, 2004).

175

 

likely be seen elsewhere as Native peoples came into increasingly close contact with non-
Natives. One of the women who was held captive by the Dakota, Sarah Wakeﬁeld, even
published a short book entitled Six Weeks in the Sioux T epees, in which she criticized the
govemment’s policies. She stated that the Dakota had only fought for what was
rightfully theirs and that they had suffered greatly. I “listened to their tales of suffering
and distress until my heart bled for them,” she wrote, “I pray God they may for the future
be more mercifully dealt with by those that are in authority over them.”28 As the Civil
War raged, events like those in Minnesota in 1862 began to capture public notice and
draw attention to Indian policy reform.

Two years later, on November 29, 1864, Colonel John M. Chivington led more
than 700 volunteer US. soldiers into a village of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians
in southeastern Colorado. The Cheyenne and Arapaho, led by Black Kettle and Left
Hand, had assembled along Sand Creek to distinguish themselves from the other Indians
in the region who were actively pursuing military engagements with the United States.
Attacking at dawn, Chivington and his volunteers ﬂushed the Indians from their village
and even though Black Kettle, a proponent of peace, raised a United States ﬂag and white
surrender ﬂag above his lodge, the soldiers relentlessly pursued the ﬂeeing Cheyenne and
Arapaho. They pinned the Indians in the dry streambed, an area several hundred yards
wide containing sandy soil. There, the noncombatant women, children, elderly, and
weak, struggled, but could not escape the soldiers’ small arms and howitzer ﬁre. More

than 150 Indian people lost their lives along with 9 non-Natives. 29

 

28 Namais, ed., Six Weeks, 110.

29 For more on Sand Creek see Stan Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1961); David Svaldi, Sand Creek and the Rhetoric of Extermination: A Case Study in

176

This massacre brought the ineffectiveness of federal Indian policy into the public
view and coupled with the earlier events in Minnesota, inspired reformers and journalists
across the nation. As Francis Prucha wrote, the massacre "became a cause célébre, a
never-to-be-forgotten symbol of what was wrong with United States treatment of the
Indians, which reformers would never let fade from view."30 The New York Times
argued, in 1865, that “civilization was not working, and extermination was not
civilized.”3 ' Frank Leslie ’s Illustrated Newspaper asserted that the massacre was the
government’s fault, particularly the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian
Affairs. Military actions against Indians meant lucrative contracts for the private
companies that supplied war materials, and agents and ofﬁcials grew rich from bribes for
preferential treatment.32 The Times also argued that because “Indian matters. . .have been
horribly bungled” under civilian control, they should “turn over the Indian affairs to the
army.”33 Throughout 1867, the Times ran editorials and concluded that not only was
Indian policy in its current form incredibly costly to the government, but also that it

9934

resulted in “frightﬁrl wrongs to the Indians. These articles and the public discourse

 

Indian- White Relations (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, I989);Thom Hatch, Black Kettle: The
Cheyenne Chief who Sought Peace but Found War (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2004); and Jerome
Greene and Douglas Scott, Finding Sand Creek: History, Archeology, and the I 864 Massacre Site
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004).

30 Prucha, American Indian Policy, 13.
3] New York Times, 29 July 1865, 1, cited in Patricia Curtin, “From Pity to Necessity: How
National Events Shaped Coverage of the Plains Indian War,” American Journalism 12, no. 1 (winter 1995):

3-21, 7.

32 Frank Leslie ’3 Illustrated Newspaper, 1 February 1868, 306, in Curtin, “From Pity to
Necessity,” 10.

33 New York Times, 19 January 1867, 2, cited in Curtin, “From Pity to Necessity,” 10.

34 New York Times, 10 January 1867. See also New York Times, 23 April 1867, and New York
Times, 28 April 1867.

I77

that surrounded the Minnesota and Colorado events resulted in increasing pressure for
federal reform and in important ways, paved the way for Parker’s programs in the late-
18603. In the short term, the federal government formed two separate commissions to
examine Indian policymaking, the Doolittle Commission, led by Senator James Doolittle
of Wisconsin, which found that Chivington and his volunteers conducted a needless
massacre, and the Peace Commission of 1867, which worked to ease tensions along the
Bozeman Trail.35
The Civil War experience itself also helped motivate post-war reform initiatives.
Government ofﬁcials, military leaders, and civilians alike sought peace and a return to
normalcy after 4 long years of war. As public and governmental attention focused on
western expansion and settlement (especially as a safeguard against the rebirth of north-
south sectional tensions), peaceful interaction with, or at least the peaceful removal of
Native American groups, became a driving ideology.36 The expansion of federal power
and the general reformist orientation of the government during the Reconstruction Era
also provided a major factor in the development of this period of reform in Indian affairs.
During and after the war, the federal bureaucracy expanded and local and national

governments became more integrated.37 These developments combined to provide the

mechanisms and the motivations for individuals concerned with Indian reform.

 

35 Prucha, American Indian Policy, l4-l9.

36 For more on this idea see Brooks Simpson, Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the
Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861-I868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

37 Foner, Reconstruction, xv-xvi. See also, William Nelson, The Roots of American Bureaucracy,
I 830-] 900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Bensel, Yankee Leviathan; and Daniel Carpenter,
The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive
Agencies, 1862-I928 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

178

Parker’s Political Education
One of these individuals was the Seneca leader Ely S. Parker. He had led a

distinguished career as a statesman on the local level in the 18403 and 18503 on behalf of
his Tonawanda community in western New York, spent his youth and early adulthood
traveling to Albany and Washington DC, and helped negotiate, in 1857, an agreement
with the federal government that allowed the Tonawanda Seneca to buy the permanent
title to some of their reservation lands from the Ogden Land Company.38 During the
Civil War though, Parker, who became a commissioned ofﬁcer with the help of his friend
from Galena, Ulysses Grant, got the opportunity to demonstrate his knowledge and
insight on the federal level. While the Union army bogged down at City Point in 1864,
President Lincoln visited the encampment. Parker took this opportunity to speak with the
President about Indian affairs and found Lincoln to be "sympathetic to the Indians' plight
and hopeful that the nation would someday make amends for the injustices done to
them."39 In 1865 Parker served as part of a commission that negotiated with the southern
Indian communities who had joined with the Confederacy. This service was particularly
signiﬁcant because it demonstrated to other policymakers, the importance of including
Native opinions in their work. The Choctaw and Chickasaw representatives at the
September councils held at Fort Smith that year stated that "the fact that the United States
Government have seen ﬁt to include a member of an Indian tribe with its commissioners,

has inspired us with conﬁdence as to its designs and desires. . .we are anxious to have the

 

38 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 66.

39 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 107.

179

beneﬁt of his presence and counsel in any deliberations or interviews."40 In 1866 the
Bureau of Indian Affairs employed Parker sporadically to help negotiate treaties with
other southern Indian groups, and later that year, he began to serve as a personal advisor
to General Grant on Indian matters as they related to military affairs.41 Parker's
accomplishments in the 18603 had a direct and immediate consequence in his
appointment as Commissioner of Indian Affairs by US. Grant in 1869. To understand
how he developed his reform agenda, and the signiﬁcance of his dissenting position
within the mainstream system of governance, however, it is important to examine his
previous work for the Indian communities of New York State and his previous
experience with federal bureaucracy.

When Parker entered the Bureau of Indian Affairs as Commissioner in 1869, his
experience working on behalf of Indian communities played a major role in his ideas and
efforts at policy reform.42 As a young man he served as an interpreter and spokesman for
Tonawanda leaders in Albany and Washington DC. He witnessed cooperation between
communities in western New York, as local non-Natives, outraged by the land company's
treatment of the Seneca, signed petitions and advocated on their behalf. In his
experience, when private corporations outside the jurisdiction of government regulations,
such as land companies or transportation agencies, appealed to state policymakers and

inﬂuenced colonial action, Native people faced injustice, dishonesty, greed, and

 

40 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1865), 479-522, quoted in Armstrong,
Warrior in Two Camps, 115-116.

4] Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 188-119.

42 Parker's appointment as Commissioner of Indian Affairs was covered in many newspapers, for
example, see "Nominations Sent to the Senate," New York Herald, 14 April 1869, 5, and "Nominations
Conﬁrmed," New York Herald, 17 April 1869, 3.

180

dispossession. Also, as a civil engineer, he came to understand the importance of an
efﬁcient and impartial bureaucratic structure. He received praise and acclaim for the
customhouses he built, and his ability to organize, work within a budget, and complete
tasks according to a schedule, served as a testament to his faith in bureaucracy. These
experiences gave Parker the conﬁdence to assume that a Native leader could institute a
successful reform agenda on the federal level, that the federal government was a useful
entity for his efforts to provide compensatory opportunities for Native communities, and
that a well-developed bureaucratic structure would help end corruption and
mismanagement in Indian affairs.

Beginning in 1844, Ely Parker served as an interpreter for Tonawanda leaders in
their legal battle against the Ogden Land Company. The Tonawanda community was in a
precarious position as the result of the Buffalo Creek Treaty of 1838 and the compromise
treaty of 1842, which sustained the Cattaraugus and Alleghany Reservations, but allowed
for the sale of the Tonawanda and Buffalo Creek reservations to the Ogden Land
Company.43 Because the leaders at Tonawanda objected and refused to sign the treaty,
they argued that it was unenforceable on their reservation. Even though he was only

sixteen at the time, Tonawanda leaders recognized Parker's talents with the English

 

43 The 1842 treaty was the government's response to a four year battle on the part of the Iroquois
to have overturned the 1838 Buffalo Creek Treaty, which on scholar referred to a "one of the major frauds
in American Indian history" (Hauptman, 176). In that treaty, as the result of bribery, forgery, and alcohol
consumption, the Iroquois agreed to cede all of their New York lands except for a small strip known as the
Oil Spring Reservation, as well as the lands purchased for them by the federal government in Wisconsin, in
exchange for a plot of land in Kansas. See "Treaty with the New York Indians, 1838," in Indian Aﬂairs:
Laws and Treaties, vol. 2, edited by Charles Kappler (Washington DC: Government Printing Ofﬁce,
1904), 502-516, and "Treaty with the Seneca, 1842," in Indian Aﬂairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2, edited by
Charles Kappler (Washington DC: Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1904), 537-542. For more on this series
of events see Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests, particularly Chapter 1 1: "The Bucktails Stop Here,"
Manley, "Buying Buffalo from the Indians," and Francis Prucha, American Indian Treaties: The History of
a Political Anomaly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

181

language and employed his services from that point through the Civil War. As he grew
older, Parker took a more active role in the affairs of his community.44 These experiences
proved very signiﬁcant in the young man's development, and in a letter later in his life, he
wrote about the ways non-Native politicians received him. He stated that,

For many years I was a visitor at the State and Federal

capitals either seeking legislative relief or in attendance at State

and Federal courts. Being only a mere lad, the pale-faced ofﬁcials,

with whom I came in contact, ﬂattered me and declared that one

so young must be extraordinarily endowed to be charged with the

conduct of such weighty affairs. I pleased my people in eventually

bringing their troubles to a successful and satisfactory termination. I

prepared and had approved by the proper authorities a code of laws

and rules for the conduct of affairs among themselves and settled

them for all time. . . 45
The praise he received at a young age was sustained throughout his career, up to and
beyond the Civil War, and gave him the conﬁdence to believe that policy makers in
mainstream systems of governance would help him work toward his policy goals.

During the Buffalo Creek Treaty period in western New York, Parker and the
Seneca received considerable aid from non-Native citizens in their ﬁght against the
Ogden Land Company. That experience, as well as his acceptance in mainstream
fraternal organizations profoundly shaped his approach to policy reform. When he
became Lewis Henry Morgan's research partner and informant, Parker gained entry into a
large network of non-Native people interested in Indian history and cultures. As he
worked to build the case against the land company, Parker exploited these connections,
sought, and received advice, council, and direct intervention. In a May 1846 letter he

asked the noted ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who was also a member of

Morgan's Grand Order, if he could provide some data and historical references for their

 

44 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 48.

45 “Writings of General Parker,” Proceedings of the Buffalo Historical Society VIII (I905): 525.
l 82

case. In particular Parker wanted to use Schoolcraft’s response, as well as his reputation
as an “expert” on Indian societies, to provide legitimacy to his argument that the Iroquois
had historically operated on the principle of unanimity when making decisions for the
confederacy, and that the concept of majority rule was a foreign one to them. He assured
Schoolcraft that if he could offer assistance, it would " greatly oblige the friends of the
Indians and do much to further the cause of justice and humanity."46 Five days later
Schoolcraft replied with the answers and details Parker needed.47 In January 1848 Parker
again wrote to Schoolcraft in DC and this time asked that he "keep an eye out upon the
Tonawanda case. Should any one attempt to move the matter in the Senate you will
oblige me very much to give notice of the fact."48
Perhaps even more signiﬁcantly though, Lewis Henry Morgan and other non-
Native citizens drafted and distributed petitions to the non-Native residents of western
New York in an effort to demonstrate a broad appeal on behalf of the Seneca. In an 1846
letter to Morgan, Parker wrote that "we [the Seneca delegation] want our friends to
circulate more petitions throughout the entire state," he continued, we "have here good
ﬁ'iends but I am afraid they will be ear-wigged by the company and [we will] be thrown

on our backs."49 One of the widely distributed petitions read, "The undersigned

citizens. . .humbly represent that we believe that great injustice is about to be done to the

 

46 Ely S. Parker to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, May 2, 1846, Box I — Correspondence, l839-1854,
Folder 8 — Morgan Correspondence, May 1846, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, 1839, UR-RRL.

47 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft to Ely S. Parker, May 7, 1846, Box I -— Correspondence, 1839-1854,
Folder 8 — Morgan Correspondence, May 1846, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, 1839, UR-RRL.

48 Ely S. Parker to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, January 23, 1848, Box I — Correspondence, 1839-
1854, Folder 12 — Morgan Correspondence, 1848, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, 1839, UR-RRL.

49 Ely S. Parker to Lewis Henry Morgan, April 2, 1846, Box I — Correspondence, 1.839-1854,
Folder 7 — Morgan Correspondence, I839-l854, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, 1839, UR-RRL.

183

Tonewanda [sic] band of the Seneca Indians, by the execution of the Treaty of 1842. . .we
hmnbly and earnestly petition your honorable body to except the Tonewanda [sic] band
of Indians from the execution of the treaty."50 Another stated that,

The Treaties themselves are of questionable validity —

the government has never sought to execute them and the deep

frauds and bribery upon which they rest, demand a reinvestigation,

and the release of the Tonawanda’s upon such terms will be

consistent with the obligations of the Government to both parties

respectively.

There is universal sentiment abroad that these Indians

have been unmercifully defrauded; and upon the facts, we as

sitizens [sic] of this section of the State, feel called upon to

petition for their relief.51
The aid and support that Lewis Henry Morgan, his colleagues, and the other citizens of
New York State provided suggested to Parker that cooperation between Native and non-
Native people was possible and could be very effective. When he entered into Indian
affairs on the federal level, then, his reforms reﬂected this history and relied upon the
idea of peaceful and purposeful interactions across racial boundaries.52 Parker, however,
overlooked the fact that the history of Native/non-Native relations in western New York

was unique and particular. Relations between Indians and settlers across the Mississippi

River had been volatile and tense in the pre-Civil War era and became increasingly more

 

50 Manuscript Draft of Petition by Morgan, Box 24 — Mss of Articles, etc. 108-130, Folder 1 IO -
Seneca Indians at Tonawanda. Petitions on their behalf, 1840’s (copies and typescript summaries), Lewis
Henry Morgan Papers, 1839-1885, UR-RRL.

51 Printed Copy of Petition to the Senate of the United States, Box 24 — Mss of Articles, etc. 108-

130, Folder 109 — Seneca Indians at T onawanda, Petitions, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, I839-I 885, UR-
RRL.

52 For some historical perspective on the Native / non-Native connections and issues in the New
York borderlands, see Christrnan, Tin Horns and Calico; Alan Taylor, William Cooper's Town: Power and
Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); and
Summerhill, Harvest of Dissent.

I84

so in the post-Civil War period, many times erupting into violence and warfare. In this
way, his previous experiences actually established in Parker’s reform program, a false
expectation of harmony and peace.

Parker learned another important lesson in the Ogden/Tonawanda land dispute
that he brought to the federal level: the distrust of land speculators, private corporations,
and business interests. In a petition he helped write and interpret, which Tonawanda
leaders submitted to the governor of New York in 1846 stated that,

for many years past a number of your citizens, known as the

Ogden Land Company . . . have been actively engaged in attempting

to despoil and rob us of our homes and lands . . . they have presumed

to dispossess us of large quantities of our forest lands, and they

have so far trampled on our just rights, as to dispossess us of

improvements actually made by our own hands."53
As noted historian of Iroquois history, Laurence Hauptman argued, "Indian dispossession
was not merely an unfortunate consequence or unexpected result of state transportation,
land settlement, or defense policies, but an integral part of those policies."54 The Ogden
Company’s dispossession of Seneca peoples and threats of removal unsettled the
Tonawanda community, disrupted customary notions of power and authority, fractured
clan and kinship allegiances, and almost ended the existence of the Seneca as a distinct
group. Parker recognized that it was private interests such as the Ogden Company that
posed the real threat to Indian communities and he sought to apply this to the federal

level by safeguarding the BIA against the inﬂuence of such land speculators and

corporations.

 

53 "Petition from Tonawanda Leaders to the Governor of New York, 1846," Folder 12842, Ely S.
Parker Papers, NYSL.

54 Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests, xvii.

185

Parker’s careers as an engineer for the Department of the Treasury and as a
commissioned ofﬁcer in the military during the Civil War provided him positive
experiences with the federal bureaucracy. In both of these cases he had to ﬁght to receive
and maintain the positions he held, but it is clear that he always distinguished himself.

As a civil engineer in Galena, Illinois, Parker worked within the bureaucratic framework
of the Treasury Department and successfully petitioned to have stone stripped from
Nauvoo, 240 miles away, because the stone in the local area was not suitable for
construction. Although he was frustrated by the amount of paperwork and bureaucratic
maneuvering this entailed, he learned and understood the mechanisms well, and in fact,
the customs house that he built was referred to as "the most perfect structure."55 Parker,
"by strict attention, impartiality, and perfect knowledge of every branch of work,
contributed in a very great measure, to the successful completion of the building."56 As a
military man, Parker demonstrated his abilities to understand and maneuver through
bureaucratic mechanisms to such an extent, that General Grant promoted him from
assistant adjutant general of volunteers, to his personal military secretary very quickly.57
This knowledge and understanding of bureaucracy would play an important role in the

nature and character of Parker's reform agenda.

 

55 Weekly Northwestern Gazette, June 28, 1859, quoted in Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps,
71.

56 Galena Daily Advertiser, July 8, 1859, quoted in Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 7 l.

57 See Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, "Chapter 9: Military Secretary."

186

Parker and the Peace Policy
In the aftermath of the Ogden/Tonawanda land dispute, Seneca community

leaders called upon Parker to reform their structures of governance. While they initially
rejoiced in the fact that they had maintained part of their homeland and hoped to
encourage land improvements and agricultural development among their residents - two
activities that had not received particular attention due to reasonable fears of land 1033 -
many Seneca cut timber and extracted other resources from newly secured common
lands, against the wishes of the chiefs, and looking to make an easy and quick proﬁt, sold
them to non-Natives at a minimum. The land dispute had disrupted customary notions of
power and authority, though, and in the post-dispute political environment chiefs fought
against each other and struggled to shape events within the community. Parker even
commented that these developments had created “bitter and hard feeling among our
leading men.”58 In an effort to alleviate these problems in 1861, Parker, with the help of
the non-Native attorney John Martindale, instituted a bureaucratized system of elective
ofﬁces, designed to provide efﬁcient and impartial governance, and a series of legislative
mandates that outlawed unauthorized timber and resource sales to non-Native people.
This action represented a transitory moment for Parker as he began to see himself as an
innovative thinker and policymaker. It was also in this moment that Parker ﬁrst applied
the lessons he learned throughout the land dispute, lessons that in the late-18603 provided
the foundation for his national level reform agenda.

Historian Robert Keller, in his book American Protestantism and United States
Indian Policy, 1869-1882, referred to the Peace Policy as "the most radical bureaucratic

and ideological reform in the history of United States Indian administration," because it

 

’8 Ely 3. Parker to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, 25 March 1853, Folder 4 - 1853-1858, Ely 3. Parker
Papers, APS.

187

sought to create a hybrid, public and private framework in Indian affairs and rather than
focusing solely on Indian removal or conﬁnement, it sought to assimilate Indian people
through a variety of “civilizing” programs — many led by missionaries and church
leaders.59 Among the most important facets to this reform period, he noted the
appointment of Ely Parker as Commissioner of Indian Affairs as one of the most
signiﬁcant. However, he proceeded, curiously enough, to downplay Parker's role in the
creation and development of the policy itself. According to Keller, the Peace Policy was
born out of "Grant's radical innovations in 1869 and 1870."60 He stated that the president
"removed all Indian agents and in their place appointed army ofﬁcers and Quakers," he
then "created the Board of Indian Commissioners," and ﬁnally, that Grant "promised the
churches that his administration would do everything in its power to support Indian
missions morally and ﬁnancially." Keller also made the assumption that "the basic
outlines of the Peace Policy were suggested to Grant by Whipple, Welsh, and Hallowell
delegation," but concluded that, "Grant's motives and inspiration for his Peace Policy
seemed mysterious." 6' Keller's interpretation of the Peace Policy era suffers from an
incomplete discussion of the signiﬁcance of competing voices in the development of
Indian policy reform. Had he addressed Parker's and Grant's friendship, the president’s
interest in policy reform would appear less "mysterious." Parker's contributions to the

development of the Peace Policy, both the elements of his agenda that became policy

 

59 Keller, American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy l.
60 Keller, American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 17.
61 Keller, American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 22, 18. "Whipple, Welsh, and

Hallowell" refers to the Episcopalian and Quaker philanthropist groups that sought to be involved in Indian
policy reform.

I88

directives as well as those that, for one reason or another, never moved beyond the
proposal stage, also demonstrates the level to which conﬂicts between reformers
characterized this era.

In 1867, General Grant asked Parker, who had served informally as his advisor on
Indian affairs, to develop a plan for the reform of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The letter
Parker submitted in response reﬂected his earlier experiences and political education and
proposed a four point plan for "the establishment of a permanent and perpetual peace, and
for the settling of all matters of difference between the United States and the various

"62 This lofty statement represented the idea shared by many non-Native

Indian tribes.
policy makers and ofﬁcials at the time - that such a goal was not only possible, but could
be achieved expeditiously. In the letter Parker outlined several of the main facets of his
reform agenda. And while these early suggestions helped establish Parker as a leading
voice in policy reform, he also developed and pushed for other innovations during his
short tenure as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. His ideas focused on public oversight of
policy administration by both Native and non-Native individuals, the establishment and
protection of speciﬁc land rights for Native communities, and bureaucratization through
the transfer of the BIA back to the War Department, in an effort to end corruption and to
protect the BIA from land speculators and business interests outside the government to
drive policymaking. Parker also believed that the government should provide money,
goods, services, and new opportunities for Native people, particularly in the form of

education, in an effort to compensate for dispossession and the history of colonization.

Two of Parker's primary suggestions in his 1867 letter involved the creation of oversight

 

62 "Letter from the Secretary of War, Addressed to Mr. Schenck, chairman of the Committee on
Military Affairs, transmitting a report by Colonel Parker on Indian Affairs," US. Congress, House Misc.
Doc. No. 37, 39th Congress, 2nd Session, 1.

189

 

Figure l l: Ulysses S. Grant on Inauguration Day, March 4, 1869
Source: Jean Edward Smith, Grant

I90

committees comprised of individuals with no other ofﬁcial governmental afﬁliation. He
wanted to appoint an inspection board to monitor the acquisition and disbursal of goods
and rations as outlined in the numerous treaties between the federal government and
Indian nation, to “see that every cent due the Indians is paid to them promptly as may be
promised in treaties, and that proper and suitable goods and implements of agriculture are
delivered to them." Parker believed that this would instill conﬁdence in Indian people
and help ease tensions between them and local non-Natives. He argued that such a
commission "would be a most convincing proof to the Indians' mind that the government
was disposed to deal honestly and fairly by them."63 Parker envisioned that this
commission's work would only last as long as it took to develop the internal bureaucratic
systems of the Indian Ofﬁce, systems that could monitor appropriations, acquisitions, and
disbursements impartially. Once these systems were established, the oversight committee
could be disbanded.

Parker also suggested the appointment of a separate and "permanent Indian
commission" to be "composed of such white men as possessed in large degree the
conﬁdence of their country, and a number of the reputable educated Indians, selected
from different tribes." He wanted this group to meet with all of the Indian communities
in the United States, to hold talks with them, and demonstrate the importance of peaceful
relations, as well as the "earnestness, sincerity, and humanity of the government." As he
did throughout his life, Parker used this opportunity to challenge popular misconceptions
about Indian people. In regards to putting Indians on the committee, Parker assured his

superiors in the military, that as "members of the great human family, they know and feel

 

63 “Letter from the Secretary of War,” 4-5.

191

that they are endowed with certain rights. They possess fair intellectual faculties. They
entertain the most ardent love for the largest liberty and independence." He also asserted
that because "they are familiar with the best modes of communicating with the tribes...
[they] would add greatly to the conﬁdence of the tribes."64

Beyond simply assuring Native people "that the white man does not want the
Indian exterminated from the face of the earth," Parker wanted this “mixed” commission
to serve as a liaison between Indian leaders and the federal government. It would be their
responsibility to mediate disagreements and ﬁnd equitable solutions to Indian concerns.65
He argued that "nothing could occur that would tend more strongly to advance the
happiness of the Indians, and attach them ﬁrmly to the United States government, than
the realization of the beneﬁts of an impartial dispensation of justice." Parker recognized
that there might be some negative reaction to his suggestions for oversight committees
and sought to head off any such criticism stating, this "project, at ﬁrst blush, may seem to
be devised on too extensive a scale, involving too much expense for an experiment. I
cannot regard it. On the contrary, I believe it to be more economical than any other plan
that could be suggested."66 Parker intended this commission, comprised of both Native
and non-Native members, to be an important ﬁrst step in facilitating communication and
fostering a more effective system of conﬂict resolution.

Between Parker's letter in 1867 and legislative action, the character and

foundation of the oversight commission plan changed considerably. Congress

 

64 “Letter from the Secretary of War,” 5-7.
65 “Letter from the Secretary of War,” 6-7.

66 “Letter from the Secretary of War,” 7.

192

established the Board of Indian Commissioners on April 10, 1869, and called for the
selection of "men eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy, to serve without
pecuniary compensation," but left out any mention that the group should be composed of
Native and non-Native people alike.67 Furthermore, that the men were not to be paid
assured that only elite members of society, those with the leisure time to devote to
philanthropic causes, would agree to participate in such a committee. Although this was
clearly not the oversight committee that Parker initially envisioned, and should have
demonstrated that perhaps his reform agenda would face stiffer criticism and create more
controversy than he had originally envisioned, in his ﬁrst annual report, he stated that the
Board of Indian Commissioner's suggestions should be "deemed to be of great
importance, and . . . should receive careful consideration."68
The next proposal in Parker's letter clearly reﬂected his efforts to protect Indian
communities as distinct entities within the United States. He suggested that the federal
government create "a plan of territorial government for the Indians. . . [that] should remain
upon the statute books as the permanent and settled policy of the government."69 He
argued that the boundaries of Indian territories had to be well-deﬁned and that the federal
government needed to work to maintain these regions for Indian settlement only. This
was a signiﬁcant point in Parker's reform agenda and reﬂected his previous experience

working on behalf of the Tonawanda community. While the Ogden Land Company

sought to displace and disrupt the Seneca community, Parker fought against them for two

 

67 16 United States Statutes 4o, quoted in Prucha, The Great Father, 503.
68 Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1870, 446.

69 Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1870, 4.

193

decades and succeeded in securing permanent title to a portion of the Seneca homeland
along the Tonawanda Creek. On the federal level then, he sought to apply this
experience and argued that maintaining and protecting Indian communities was one of
the most crucial elements in developing peaceful relations and just policies for Indian
peoples.

Providing a permanent and well-deﬁned land base for Native people and funding
for subsistence and agricultural development demonstrated Parker's interest in federal
compensation for dispossession and the history of colonialism in several ways. In his
ﬁrst annual report Parker argued that there needed to be clear and permanent lands
devoted to the settlement of many Indian groups in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and
California. Furthermore, he stated that "it will be necessary that Congress, by appropriate
legislation, provide for their wants, until they become capable of taking care of
themselves."70 Later in the same report Parker again raised the issue of compensatory
legislation and urged Congress to appropriate "a large contingent ﬁmd" to help supply
food and supplies to the Native communities "not provided for by treaty stipulations,
whose precarious condition requires that something should be done for their relief. "7' Of
all Parker's reform innovations, it can be argued that this funding allocation was the most
successful. Although Congress did not incorporate this suggestion into legislation to the
extent that Parker hoped, they did, in 1869, allocate $2 million for the BIA to provide for
Indian communities' "necessities, and encourage their efforts at self-support." Parker

reported that the money was used to relieve suffering, and helped Indian communities

 

70 Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1870, 445.

71 Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1870, 447.

I94

"who otherwise, by force of circumstances [i.e. dispossession], would have been led into
difﬁculties and extreme want." In addition, Parker asserted that due to "the timely
supplies of subsistence and clothing. . .the tribes from whom the greatest trouble was
apprehended have been comparatively quiet, and some advance, it is to be hoped, made
in the direction of their permanent settlement in the localities assigned to them, and their
entering upon a new course of life."72

The ﬁnal major suggestion that Parker made in his 1867 letter was to transfer the
Bureau of Indian Affairs from the Department of the Interior to the War Department. He
argued that the civil agents currently working in Indian affairs sought "generally to avoid
all trouble and responsibility, and to make as much money as possible out of their
ofﬁces." While the military ofﬁcer's "honor and interest is at stake, and impels him to
discharge his duty honestly and faithfully." 73 He also suggested that the practice of
employing outside traders to supply Indian agencies be ended, and instead that the
military assume these responsibilities, work which the Army Commissary Department
had carried out well during the Civil War. Finally, Parker asserted that Native leaders
would more likely listen to the advice and councils of military ofﬁcials, rather than the
civil agents who had mistreated or lied to Indians, or mismanaged affairs in the past.

A critical analysis of Parker's ideas for the transfer of the BIA to the War
Department demonstrates that this facet of his reform program reﬂected most clearly his

interest in creating an efﬁcient, effective, and impartial bureaucracy. At the end of the

Civil War, the War Department housed the most complex and well-developed

 

72 Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1870, 446-447.

73 Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1870, 2.

195

bureaucratic system of any of the executive agencies. Furthermore, it was arguably the
most smoothly running department. Roughly 2,213,000 men fought in the Union army.
Starting in 1863 the War Department began administering the conscription act, which
applied to men between the ages of 20 and 44, and involved conducting the draft,
accepting commutation payments, or accepting substitutions.74 This was a signiﬁcant
expansion beyond the bureaucratic developments necessary to carry out the war effort on
a more limited scale.75 Parker was not the only individual advocating for the transfer of
the BIA, Grant and many of his generals, including Phillip Sheridan also made arguments
in favor, but Parker’s support clearly addressed issues of bureaucratization that the other's
did not. In his ﬁrst annual report he stated that in a break from the previous complex and
confusing relationship, there was "now a perfect understanding between the officers of
this department [Interior] and those of the military, with respect to their relative duties
and responsibilities in reference to Indian affairs.“5 Parker also circulated a statement of
proper protocol for the administration of Indian affairs to the members of the Interior
department and asked that similar orders be issued by military leaders. The result of this,

Parker reported, was a "harmony of action between the two departments" with "no

 

74 Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the
United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 103. See also Eugene Murdock, One Million
Men: The Civil War Draft in the North (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971) and James
Geary, We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991).
For more on the expansion of the military bureaucracy see Robert Angevine, The Railroad and the State:
War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

75 For more on the signiﬁcance of the development of the War Department during the Civil War,
see Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1 859-18 77
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially Chapter 3: "War Mobilization and State
Formation in the Northern Union and Southern Confederacy." See also Marvin Kreidberg and Merton
Henry, History of Military Mobilization in the United States Army, 1 775-1945 (Washington DC: US.
Department of the Army, 1955).

76 Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1870, 447.

196

conﬂict of opinion having arisen as to the duty, power and responsibility of either."77 Of
course, Parker saw this as only a stop gap until the BIA could be properly seated within
the War Department.

Religious organizations, such as the Society of Friends, criticized Parker’s support
of the BIA transfer. In a memorial to Congress in 1869, the Friends stated that they
appreciated the "evident desire of Congress to remedy the gross evils and abuses of our
Indian system" and that they were sure that the "proposal to place the Indian affairs in the
control of the War Department has been dictated by motives of humanity, both to the
interest of the Indians and the honor of the nation." They argued, however, that the
transfer should not occur because the "loathsome disease which has destroyed thousands,
and which now enfeebles and degrades most of the tribes, must be traced to licentious
intercourse between the soldiers and the Indians."78 It was not, though, these criticisms
that prohibited the transfer. Rather, it was simply historical circumstances. In 1869-
1870, General Phillip Sheridan authorized and defended an attack on Piegan Indians in
northern Montana. These military actions became known as the "Piegan Massacre" and
raised questions about the military’s ability to simultaneously punish the "hostile" Indian
communities while protecting the "friendlies." When the congressman from Illinois and
chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs of the House of Representatives, John A.

Logan, read the details of the Piegan Massacre in early 1870, "his blood ran cold in his

 

77 Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1870, 448.

78 "Memorial of Yearly Meetings of the Society of Friends Relative to the Treatment of the
Indians," House of Representatives, 40th Congress, 3rd Session, Misc. Doc. No. 29, 1869, 2.

I97

veins" and he asked the committee to "let the Indian Bureau remain where it is, and the
committee. . .agreed to that."79
Though it was not reﬂected in Parker’s 1867 preliminary proposal for BIA
reform, pressuring the federal government to provide educational opportunities served as
another pillar of his reform agenda. In an 1885 letter to his ﬁ'iend Harriet Maxwell
Converse, an aging Parker stated that one of the driving philosophies of his earlier work
in policy reform was Indian education. In the midst of a discussion about coercive
assimilation policies, Parker intimated that the "only salvation for the Indians and the
only solution of the great Indian problem is to give them secular and industrial schools in
abundance." "This alone will perpetuate their life," he wrote. 80 He attributed his
professional success to the educational opportunities that he received as a result of his
own hard work and his friendship with Lewis Henry Morgan. As a young man Parker
studied at both Yates Academy and Cayuga Academy in upstate New York.81 Morgan
often encouraged him through their correspondence and instilled in him the recognition
that education was the key for Native peoples. In an 1848 letter, Morgan referred to
Parker's efforts to study law and wrote "I am glad to hear that you are attending diligently

to your studies. All eyes will be upon you and if you establish a good character as a

student and as a man, and I have no doubt you will, you will ﬁnd something in Aurora

 

79 "Message of the President of the United States Communicating the Second Annual Report of
the Board of Indian Commissioners," Senate, 4Ist Congress, 3rd Session, Ex. Doc. No. 39, I871, 90. See
also Paul Hutton, "Phil Sheridan's Pyrrhic Victory: The Piegan Massacre, Army Politics, and the Transfer
Debate," Montana 32, no. 2 (1982): 32-43.

8" Ely 3. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, ca. 1885, MS 674, Folder 5, Ely Samuel Parker
Papers, NL.

81 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 21-22.

198

”82 Morgan demonstrated a similar interest in the education of Parker's

worth having.
sister Caroline. They corresponded frequently and in one letter Morgan wrote, " You are
now at the time of life when it is necessary to put forth great effort for the improvement
of the mind. . .Be encouraged therefore to pursue your studies with diligence."83 Parker
also wrote to Caroline while she was at school and stated, "I must hope also that you are
improved in your studies."84
Upon entering into federal policymaking as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in
the late-18603, Parker focused on establishing educational opportunities for Native
communities. He used a portion of the $2 million Congressional allocation to develop
schools and educational programs in conjunction with mission work. In his ﬁrst annual
report as Commissioner, Parker argued that the improvement in Indian affairs during the
previous year was directly attributable to "supplying them [Indian communities] with
means for engaging in agricultural and mechanical pursuits, and for their education and
moral training."85 Using language that today seems offensive, but at the time reﬂected
common perceptions, Parker asserted that through education, "the clouds of ignorance

and superstition in which many of this people were so long enveloped have disappeared

...and opened up a brighter future."86 Later in his report, Parker commented that among

 

82 Lewis Henry Morgan to Ely S. Parker, Gah-sah-nah 14, 1848, Box 1, Folder 4: Lewis Henry
Morgan to Ely S. Parker and his sister Caroline Parker, Photostats, 1844-1868, Arthur C Parker Papers,
SC13604, NYSL.

83 Lewis Henry Morgan to Caroline Parker, July 30, 1847, Box I — Correspondence, I839-1854,
Folder 1 I — Morgan Correspondence, 1847, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, l839-I885, UR-RRL.

84 Ely S. Parker to Caroline Parker, May 10, 1846, Folder I — Correspondence, 1846-1 854, Ely S
Parker Papers, 1846-1924, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department, UR-RRL.

85 Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1870, 445.

86 Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1870, 445.

I99

the Seminoles of the Southern Superintendency, "schools are well attended and a deep
interest is apparent in regard to the subject of education."87 Concerning his own New
York communities he wrote, "[a]n increase is manifested in reference to education

"38

...twenty-six schools are in operation. Throughout his tenure as a federal

policymaker, Parker worked to institute within the BIA his own personal maxim:

"Education to be made ﬁrst above all. . .Other good things will follow."89

Although he probably did not realize it at the time, Parker’s reform agenda on the federal
level represented both a signiﬁcant break with previous traditions in Indian policy and
was a forerunner to larger, later trends in social policymaking. Parker's biographer even
noted that his "Indian plan was well received" and that a "new voice had been heard in
Indian affairs."90 By attempting to apply public oversight of policy administration by
concerned citizens with no vested interests beyond philanthropy, Parker initiated
techniques that would rise to prominence in the larger efforts of social policy reformers in
the Progressive era. In his assertion that one of the most important responsibilities of the
BIA was to provide supplies, goods, and money to Native peoples, as well as educational
opportunities, and that rather than breaking up tribal groups, the BIA should work to
maintain Indian community coherence, he applied a framework based on compensatory

legislation that intended to ease the disruptions caused by dispossession and colonial

 

87 Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1870, 480.
88 Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1870, 488.

89 Ely S. Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, ca. 1885, MS 674, Folder 5, Ely Samuel Parker
Papers, NL.

90 Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 120-121.

200

action, while allowing Native people to assimilate into mainstream American society on
their own terms, in their own time. This framework was very similar to that which would
be used by later reformers who worked among urban immigrant groups at the turn of the
twentieth century. Finally, by working for the transfer of the BIA back to the War
Department, with its efﬁcient, impartial, and expanded bureaucratic capacity, Parker
started a movement that, though unsuccessful in the transfer debate, would result in the
increasing bureaucratization of Indian affairs and the ultimate conﬁnement of Indian
peoples through the General Allotment Act of 1887 and its accompanying coercive
assimilation programs.” Of course, this was the exact opposite of Parker's philosophy,
but the other prominent group of reformers of the Peace Policy era, in particular William
Welsh and the Board of Indian Commissioners, became responsible for leading policy in
this direction as the federal government began to take on an increasingly colonialist

mantle in the late-nineteenth century.

 

91 Stephen Skowronek argued that individuals engaged in expanding the powers of federal
bureaucracies rarely understood the full ramiﬁcations of their actions. Although he referred to the
Interstate Commerce Commission and railroad administration, his overall assertions apply in the case of the
expansion of the BIA. See Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of
National Administrative Capabilities, I8 77-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

201

Chapter 5

“Black Deception, Damnable Frauds and Persistent Oppression:” Ely Parker,
William Welsh, the Board of Indian Commissioners, and the Contentious Peace
Policy

"I have little or no faith in the American christian civilization methods of
healing the Indians of this country. It has not been honest, pure or sincere. Black
deception, damnableﬁauds and persistent oppression has been its characteristics,

and its religion today is that the only good Indian is a dead one. "

Ely 3. Parker, 1885‘

On January 13, 1871, Ely Parker, serving as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, met with
members of the Board of Indian Commissioners (BIC), Secretary of the Interior
Columbus Delano, representatives of the major Christian denominations involved in the
institutionalization and administration of the Peace Policy, as well as the ﬁery
independent philanthropist William Welsh at the Department of the Interior building in
Washington DC. Parker worked closely with many of these individuals in the past, but
the meeting on this day was different. While the Indian policymakers discussed how to
balance the roles and responsibilities of the religious organizations, federal bureaucrats,
and Indian agents within the hybrid, public and private framework of the new Peace
Policy, across the mall, in the capitol building, the House of Representatives’ Committee

on Appropriations investigated charges that Parker had committed fraud and misconduct,

and prepared for a public hearing. The hearing would begin on January 17.2

 

1 Parker made this comment in a letter to his close friend, the poet and ethnographer, Harriet
Maxwell Converse. Ely S. Parker to Cousin Gayaneshaoh (Harriet Maxwell Converse), ca. 1885, MS 674,
Folder 2, Ely Samuel Parker Papers, NL.

2 Minutes of January 13, 1871, Records of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Minutes of Board
Meetings, vol. I, 40-41, MS 907, Edward E. Ayer Collection, NL.

202

Throughout the previous month, December, 1870, Parker had travelled to Indian
Territory and attended a general council of Native communities. With the commissioner
out of the capital and unable to respond immediately, William Welsh published an open
letter to Secretary Delano that suggested Parker had committed "frauds in the purchase
and transportation of goods for the Indian service."3 While Welsh published these
charges and worked to destabilize the position of Indians within the federal policymaking
process, Parker did the exact opposite. All month he met with and spoke to
representatives of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Seneca, Ottawa, Wyandotte, Creek, Pawnee,
Osage, Sac and Fox, Seminole, and Chickasaw Nations, among others, in an effort to
create a confederated territorial government of Indian people, "a government exclusively
of Indians, ultimately to become one of the States of the Union."4

Although Parker did not return to DC until the end of the month, the House of
Representatives adopted a resolution to conduct a proper investigation into these charges
on December 12. The Committee on Appropriations decided that during the hearing,
Welsh would not only be allowed to serve as a witness, but also as an ad hoc prosecutor,
with the privilege of calling, questioning, and even cross-exarnining witnesses, including

Parker himself.5 The New York Herald speculated in late-December, that if the charges

 

3 Report of Honorable E. S. Parker, Commissioner of Indian A ﬂairs, to the Honorable Secretary of
the Interior, on the Communication of William Welsh, Esq., Relative to the Management of Indian Aﬂairs,
(Washington: Joseph L. Pearson, Printer, 1870), 1, Edward E. Ayer Collection, NL.

4 "The Indians: Great Council at Okmulgee - Proposed Confederation of the Tribes in the Indian
Territory - A New State Looming Up in the Southwest," New York Herald, 19 December 1870, 7.

5 "Affairs in the Indian Department," House Report No. 39,41 Congress, 3rd session, serial I464,

203

"prove true upon investigation, it is believed that General Parker will be removed, to say
the least, from the position he now occupies."6
Following two months of investigations and hearings though, the House of

Representatives exonerated Parker in February, 1871. They could not ﬁnd evidence of
fraud or misconduct. They did note, however, that testimony revealed “irregularities,
neglect, and incompetency,” but these facts alone did not distinguish Parker from other
federal appointees during the Grant administration.7 After the investigation, Parker
realized he would be unable to make headway among reformers and legislators that
expected Indians to be the subjects of federal policy, but not active voices in its creation.
His resignation letter stated that the BIC had robbed his ofﬁce of its importance and made
his position ambiguous, but The Nation declared, in August 1871, that his ouster signaled
“the complete overthrow of a most gigantic system of wrong, robbery, hypocrisy, greed,
and cruelty, and the triumph of right, of ofﬁcial integrity, of administrative economy, and
of the principles of a Christian civilization.”8
The House of Representatives investigation of Ely Parker's conduct as
Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1871 effectively drew to a close a moment when
profound change in the history of Indian-white relations seemed possible. Much like the
broader Reconstruction policies of this era, the reform efforts of the late-18603 and early-
18703 represented an opportunity for politicians and the general public to set a different

course for race relations. Parker’s policies could have protected a degree of tribal

sovereignty and the existence of Indian communities as distinct entities that the Indian

 

6 "Indian Bureau," New York Herald, 30 December 1870, 8.
7 "Affairs in the Indian Department," ii-

8 “The Recent Change in the Indian Bureau,” The Nation, 17 August 1871, 100.

204

 

Figure 12: William Welsh (1810-1878)
Source: William Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 153

205

policies of 18803 and 18903 did not. Like developments related to the Reconstruction
project, though, the Peace Policy and Parker’s reform campaign failed on many levels.
Most importantly, the BIA did not promote Indian community cohesion or self-
determination; rather, beginning in the 18703 and culminating with the passage of the
General Allotment policy in 1887, it created and administered a federal colonial program
of dispossession and coercive assimilation that marked the nadir of Indian history.

William Welsh and the Board of Indian Commissioners represented a group of
individuals who developed a reform agenda characterized by its focus on coercive
assimilation as a component within the larger emerging federal schema of dispossession.
They looked to take advantage of this important and transitory period in the development
of Indian affairs and the federal government provided them with a signiﬁcant amount of
power in the execution of their duties, a fact often overlooked in the scholarly literature.
Their driving philosophy argued that the Christian philanthropists of the United States
understood the best interests of Indian peoples, better than Indian peoples themselves. As
they worked within the Peace Policy framework to monitor Indian appropriations and the
purchase and dispersal of goods and supplies, they also pushed a reform agenda that was
characterized by its Christian, conservative, coercive, civilizing character.

The 1871 House of Representatives investigation represented a signiﬁcant
moment in the development of Indian policy. Through the testimony it heard and
through its ﬁndings, it became clear that the federal government supported dispossession
and coercive assimilation for Indian people as a means to foster western settlement. The
reform agenda supported by Welsh and the Board of Indian Commissioners appealed to

broader elements in politics and society, particularly western settlers and politicians, who

206

sought land and Indian removal, and eastern humanitarians, who sought coercive
assimilation through isolation on reservations. These non-Native reformers used the
language of racial prejudice to destabilize Parker's position, and thus the position of
Indians, in the federal government. They rejected the idea that Indians should be
involved in the process of Indian policymaking at all. The years after the investigation
also revealed an unintended consequence of Parker's efforts to expand the bureaucracy of
the Bureau of Indian Affairs. His efforts, though well-intentioned, actually helped
establish the mechanisms necessary to allow for the creation of the allotment policy, a
program that would not have been possible without a well-developed bureaucratic
structure.

This chapter takes as its primary sources of evidence, the writings, both published
and unpublished, of the various reformers and policymakers, Congressional and other
government documents related to policy development, and the House of Representatives
investigations of fraud and corruption, as well as newspaper accounts and commentaries
from the time period. I contend that the early Peace Policy era represented a moment
when radical change in the direction of Indian affairs, through the reform agenda of a
signiﬁcant Native American leader, and through public oversight of policy
administration, was possible. Ultimately though, the contentiousness of the conﬂicting
visions for the role and responsibilities of the Bureau of Indian Affairs that emerged in
the creation and administration of this policy effectively ended this optimistic period for
Indian communities and provided the foundation for the allotment program in the late-
nineteenth century. While the mechanisms of the Peace Policy appeared disjointed and

sometimes contradictory, it is clear that two overarching reform agendas developed, one

207

championed by Parker, the other by William Welsh and the Board of Indian
Commissioners. These reformers all operated within the larger framework of late-
nineteenth-century reform, but the goals of the latter group hinged upon an expectation of

complete Indian conﬁnement, while the former did not.

Coercive Assimilationists: William Welsh and the Board of Indian Commissioners
Following the 1862 United States-Dakota War in Minnesota, Episcopal Bishop

Henry Benjamin Whipple outlined before Congress an idea for a "council of
appointment," in an effort to end the corruption and problems in Indian affairs. Whipple,
at ﬁrst interested only in establishing an Episcopalian Diocese in Minnesota, became an
outspoken critic of the federal government’s policies and treatment of Native people. He
also aided the convicted Dakota “hostiles” and fought to have many of them pardoned
prior to the 1862 mass execution. Through the 18603 Whipple, William Welsh, the
Episcopal philanthropist, as well as the Society of Friends argued that the federal
government create a national board of inspectors to monitor the BIA. They cited as
precedents both the Freedman's Bureau and the United States Christian Commission that
operated during the Civil War.9 The government had ﬁnanced both of these hybrid
public and private organizations and both worked with civilian and military ofﬁcials. '0
These proposals differed in at least one signiﬁcant way from those that Parker set forth in

his 1867 program of reform, though. While he sought to utilize both Native and non-

 

9 In addition, the Doolittle Commission of 1867 recommended inspection boards to oversee the
work of the BIA. The work of the New York Indian Board in the 18203 and 18303 also served as
motivation. There is no consensus in the literature as to which, if any, of these recommendations was most
signiﬁcant in the establishment of the BIC, rather, it seems as though the idea emerged and evolved
organically through the series of recommendations. See Prucha, American Indian Policy, 32-34, and
Keller, American Protestantism, 20-21.

10 Keller, American Protestantism, 20-21.

208

Native individuals to work with Indian communities in an effort to maintain community
solidarity and inspire conﬁdence in the government's willingness to help them, these men
envisioned the control of Indian policy in the hands of overtly Christian individuals who
would actively proselytize and apply a coercive approach to "civilization" programs.

In 1868 William Welsh called a meeting of interested philanthropists and
developed a committee of representatives from various Protestant religious bodies. This
committee met with President Grant and the Secretary of Interior Jacob Cox throughout
1868. One of the prominent members of this committee was George Stuart, a ﬁiend of
Grant’s and a wealthy Philadelphia merchant. Stuart had been an active anti-slavery and
temperance crusader, as well as a leader in the Young Men’s Christian Association and in
the Sunday school movement. Stuart’s autobiography characterized him as "zealously
Christian and diligently a man of business."11 As a result of the lobbying effort,
Congress, on April 10, 1869, authorized the president to appoint a committee of men
“eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy,” to work with the Interior Department to
monitor treaty appropriations. '2

It was clear that the Board of Indian Commissioners approved by Congress in
1869, resembled Whipple’s, Welsh’s, Stuart’s proposals much more closely than
Parker’s. Because of his previous work with the Christian Commission during the Civil
War and because of his role as a lobbyist for this development, Grant asked his friend

Stuart to help his appoint the board. He told Stuart, “you and Welsh have got me into

some difﬁculty by the passage of this bill. . .I want you to name some likely men. . .who

 

11 Robert E. Thompson ed., The Life of George H. Stuart: Written by Himself (Philadelphia: J .M.
Stoddart and Company, 1890), 20-21, quoted in Prucha, The Great Father, 503.

12 16 United States Statutes 40, quoted in Prucha, The Great Father, 503.

209

”'3 Stuart suggested several men whose personal

will be willing to serve the cause.
accomplishments included success in business, politics, education, and within various
religious organizations. They hailed from different regions of the United States, though
only as far west as Missouri, and were afﬁliated with the Episcopalian, Presbyterian,
Congregationalist, Methodist, and Baptist churches. The group included Felix Reville
Brunot, a Pittsburgh businessman who worked on the Sanitary Commission during the
Civil War, and had fought for temperance and other conservative reforms as a college
student.14 It also included William Dodge, a former dry-goods merchant who was a
partner in the ﬁrm of Phelps, Dodge & Company, a prominent dealer in copper and other
minerals. He earned a fortune in business and helped develop the copper industry in the
Lake Superior region and the iron industry in Pennsylvania. He also bought large tracts
of pine lands in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and the South. As a philanthropist
he was a staunch supporter of the YMCA and a leader in the Evangelical Alliance.15
Stuart also recommended Robert Campbell, who amassed a fortune as a fur-trapper and
competitor of the American Fur Company in St. Louis as a young man. Campbell then

invested in extensive real estate ventures, a large dry-goods enterprise, the Southern

Hotel, and several banks in Missouri. Throughout his life he maintained an interest in

 

'3 Thompson ed., The Life of George H. Stuart, 239-241, quoted in Prucha, The Great Father,
505.

14 For more on Brunot, see Charles Slattery, Felix Reville Brunot (New York: Green and Co.,
1907).

15 Allen Johnson ed. Dictionary of American Biography, vol 5 (New York: Charles Scribner’s
and Sons, 1930), 352-353.

210

Indian affairs and had previously served Millard Fillmore as a commissioner in the Fort
Laramie councils in 1851.”
Stuart’s list continued. He included John Farwell, another dry-goods merchant
who had great success in New York and Chicago where he eventually sold his companies
to both Marshall Field and Potter Palmer. He lived by a strict moral code and maintained
a ﬁery religious fervor. He used a portion of his wealth to establish the ﬁrst Methodist
church in Chicago.17 Stuart also tapped Vincent Colyer, a New York artist and activist
who served as a colonel of an African American regiment during the Civil War. He was
also an anti-slavery advocate and one of the lobbyists for the Christian Commission
during the war.18 Rounding out the list was Henry Lane, a former “Indian ﬁghter” from
Kentucky who moved to Indiana and there was elected as a state legislator, US. senator,
and governor. He was also a founding member of the Republican Party in 1856.'9
Finally, Stuart selected Nathan Bishop from Boston, the former executive chairman of the
Christian Commission, manager of the American Bible Society, and a member of the
Evangelical Alliance, and William Welsh from Philadelphia.20 Grant approved of this

list, but also added George Stuart as well. Although Felix Brunot's biographer referred to

it as "in every way a representative body of men," none of them were Native people and

 

'6 Allen Johnson ed. Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner’s
and Sons, 1929), 462-463.

17 Allen Johnson ed. Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 6 (New York: Charles Scribner’s
and Sons, 1931), 295.

'8 The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography vol. 7 (New York: J.T. White, 1897), 541.

'9 The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography vol. 13 (New York: IT. White, 1901), 270-
271.

20 Allen Johnson ed. Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner’s
and Sons, 1929), 206-207.

211

aside from Campbell, Lane, and Welsh, none of them had much previous interaction with
Indian communities.21 Interestingly, almost all of the men maintained business interests
in the dry-goods, mineral extraction, and transportation industries. All of these industries
stood to gain from Indian conﬁnement in the west and this fact suggests that perhaps their
personal interests inﬂuenced the BIC’s Indian policy work and their support of coercive
reservations. The initial BIC elected William Welsh as its ﬁrst president.

Conﬂicts and controversies between Parker, Interior Secretary Delano, and the
Board of Indian Commissioners emerged almost immediately. In Parker's ﬁrst letter to
the BIC, outlining their responsibilities and power, he reiterated Congress’s statement
that as a board, their primary function would be to exercise “joint control” with the
Secretary of the Interior and monitor the distribution of the treaty appropriations laid out
in the Indian appropriation bill of 1869.22 Historically, the Bureau of Indian Affairs
served as the central agency in control of procuring and distributing treaty goods, so from
the perspective of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the BIC would ﬁt into this system
as an advisory board with a secondary role. Parker though, was willing to work with
them and asked for their "suggestions, recommendations, and reports" regarding the
development of Indian policy.23 These powers did not satisfy Welsh and he believed that
the BIC should hold a central position in the Interior Department. In a pamphlet written
later, he argued that the act of Congress that established the BIC characterized its role as
one of "joint control." He asserted that "instead of giving the Board the joint control as

indicated in the Act of Congress, its powers were limited to that of a mere council of

 

2' Slattery, Felix Reville Brunot, 143.
22 Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, Accompanying Papers, 1870, 485.

23 Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, Accompanying Papers, 1870, 486.

212

advice."24 Welsh believed that President Grant sided with Parker, who did not want the
BIC to exercise more power and inﬂuence than he did, and after only a month as the
Chairman of the BIC, Welsh resigned.25 He publicly pledged to "serve the cause as a
private citizen," but privately he also vowed “Col. P[arker] will have to leave."26
William Welsh, a staunch Episcopal layman who amassed a fortune in
Philadelphia though the importation of West Indian sugar, worked for various
philanthropic causes throughout his life.27 He founded several Episcopal churches and a
hospital in Philadelphia. He also authored several books about home missions and the
role of laymen in the Episcopal Church, and owned the North American and Philadelphia
Gazette.28 He suffered a heart attack in 1861 and afterwards, devoted himself to
becoming an outspoken and inﬂuential voice in the development of Indian policy, due to
his ﬁiendship with Bishop Henry Whipple. Although Welsh was considered one of the
"most earnest and devoted" of all the Indian reformers, he also had major conﬂicts at one
point or another with many signiﬁcant Indian policy reformers. His conﬂict with Parker

was not an anomaly; he also clashed with President Grant, Secretaries of the Interior

Jacob Cox and Columbus Delano, the second BIC Chairman, Felix Brunot, and even his

 

24 William Welsh, Indian Oﬁice: Wrongs Doing and Reforms Needed (Philadelphia, 1874), 2.

25 Minutes of November 17, 1869, Records of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Minutes of
Board Meetings, vol. I, 40-41, MS 907, Edward E. Ayer Collection, NL.

26 Welsh, Indian Oﬂice, 2, and ER Smith to George Whipple, December 15, 1870, American
Missionary Association Archives, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, quoted
in Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 154.

27 Prucha, The Great Father, 502.

28 Keller, American Protestantism, 73-74.

213

close and trusted friend, Bishop Whipple.29 From 1869 through the end of his life Welsh
channeled hi3 energies into a reform agenda that attempted to mold Indian people into his
conservative, Christian vision of “civilization” by eliminating tribal autonomy and by
destroying Indian communities.

In a short 1869 book entitled Taopi and Friends, or the Indians' Wrongs and
Rights, Welsh laid out his ideas for Indian reform. He argued that Indian policy in the
nineteenth century had not successfully promoted “civilization” among the Indians. He
believed that treaties should no longer be made with Indian communities, and that those
"which allow Indians to retain large tracts of land. . .must, of necessity, be broken."30
Welsh also saw corruption in Indian appropriations as a major problem and asserted that
nepotism and political patronage within the Indian Office "render every attempt to
civilize the wild Indians utterly abortive."31 It was this component of his reform agenda
that led Welsh to charge Parker with fraud and corruption, and demonstrated one of
Welsh's major downfalls, his almost obsessive suspicion.

A cornerstone of Welsh’s reform agenda was a belief in the process of
Christianization, however, he believed that if Indians were to embrace Christian
civilization, they had to be dispossessed and held coercively on reservations.32 “It is
apparent that the efforts thus far made to extend the saving inﬂuence of the Christian

religion to the Indians in their nomadic condition,” he wrote, “have generally been so

 

29 Keller, American Protestantism, 74-75.

30 William Welsh, T aopi and his Friends, or the Indians' Wrongs and Rights, (Philadelphia:
Claxton, Remsen & Haffelﬁnger, 1869), xii-xii.

3' Welsh, Taopi and his Friends, xiii.

32 Welsh, Taopi and his Friends, xiv.

214

unsatisfactory as to dishearten most of those who have undertaken this work.”33

Conﬁnement was the key and Welsh argued that Indians who would not go willingly to
the reservations, “would be driven by force or exterminated in the process."34 He even
supported the creation of the North Paciﬁc Railroad in 1872 because, he asserted, it
would allow "the War Department to bring the lawless Indians of the North into
subjection, and thus aid effectively the religious bodies charged with bringing Christian
civilization to bear upon the Northern Indians."35
Welsh lobbied Congress in an effort to advance his agenda and he vigorously
challenged anyone who championed different programs of reform. His "greatest
weakness was a nagging suspicion of conspiracies, a trigger judgment that anyone who
disagreed with him on Indian affairs was a member of the Indian Ring."36 The "Indian
Ring," in Welsh's mind, was a shadowy and nefarious group of politicians and suppliers
that sought to defraud the government by providing insufﬁcient or inadequate goods for
treaty appropriations at exorbitant rates. Hi3 suspicious personality and his policy

framework led Welsh to challenge, charge, and ultimately ouster three signiﬁcant Indian

policymakers in the 18703, including Commissioners of Indian Affairs, Ely Parker and

 

33 Welsh, Taopi and his Friends, xvi.

34 William Welsh wrote many other pamphlets and reports on Indian issues, but they did not tend
to deviate from his assertions in the Taopi. For other examples see William Welsh ed., Journal of the Rev.
8.0. Hinman, Missionary of the Santee Sioux Indians and Taopi, by Bishop Whipple, (Philadelphia:
McCalla and Stavely Printers, 1869), William Welsh, Reports to the Missionary Organizations of the
Protestant Episcopal Church, and to the Secretary of the Interior, on Indian Civilization, (Philadelphia:
McCalla and Stavely Printers, 1870), William Welsh, Report of a Visit to the Sioux and Ponka Indians on
the Missouri River, made by William Welsh to the Secretary of the Interior, (Washington DC: GPO,
1872), and Welsh, Indian Oﬂice. See also Fritz, Movement for Indian Assimilation, 81.

35 Welsh, Report of a Visit to the Sioux, 28.

36 Keller, American Protestantism, 74.

215

one of his successors E.P. Smith, as well as Secretary of the Interior, Columbus Delano.
As a private citizen though, Welsh required insights, access to information, and support,
and the Board of Indian Commissioners frequently provided these between 1869 and
1874.

Secretary of the Interior J.D. Cox and President Grant encouraged the BIC to
function similarly to the United States Christian Commission that operated during the
Civil War. This hybrid, public and private organization received funding from the
government, but the Young Men's Christian Association ran its day-to-day activities,
providing Union soldiers with religious reading, church services, food, and supplies.”
Several of the BIC members served directly in the Christian Commission, including
Stuart who was its chairman, as well as Farwell, Dodge, Bishop, and Colyer who were
members or involved to a lesser extent.38 With their experience in this earlier
commission as a framework, the BIC began their work in Indian affairs in May 1869.

During the ﬁrst meetings of the BIC, federal ofﬁcials met with and expressed
optimism in the power and inﬂuence of the group. On May 27, 1869, President Grant,
William Tecumseh Sherman, the Commanding General of the United States Army, who
led many military campaigns against Plains Indians, and the Secretary of War, John
Rawlins, all visited with the commissioners and conﬁded in them the importance of their
work. Grant stated that both he and Secretary of the Interior Cox would provide the BIC

with "the fullest authority over the whole subject [Indian affairs] that could be given,”

 

37 See Keller, American Protestantism, 21 and Prucha, American Indian Policy, 34. Richard
Levine argued that the BIC was also modeled after the Sanitary Commission, an unpaid commission that
worked with the govemment during the Civil War to help improve the health, diet, and living conditions of
Union soldiers. See Levine, “Indian Fighters and Indian Reformers,” 334.

38 Prucha, American Indian Policy, 34-35.

216

and furthermore, that they had “their cordial support."39 Grant later assured the BIC that
they could have full access to the records of the Indian Ofﬁce and that they could inspect
and advise the Indian agents and superintendents in the West.40 General Sherman and
Secretary of War John Rawlins both offered to aid the BIC in any way they could."1 At
their second meeting, the BIC drafted a statement acknowledging their conceptualization
of their power and responsibilities. The Board "considers itself clothed with full power to
examine all matters appertaining to the conduct of Indian Affairs,” they wrote, and “to act
both as a consulting board of advisers, and through their sub-committees as inspectors of
the agencies, etc., in the Indian country."42 Historian Francis Prucha noted that the BIC,
through a series of conﬂicts and controversies, lost power in the federal government later
in the 18703, and their role became more loosely deﬁned.43 It is true that many of the
original members resigned in the mid-18703 and the new appointments bore the mark of
political patronage, thus other Indian policy reformers lost conﬁdence in the ability of the

group to ﬁght for reform.44 For the period between 1869 and 1874, however, the BIC

 

39 Minutes of May 27, 1869, Records of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Minutes of Board
Meetings, vol. I, 40-41, MS 907, Edward E. Ayer Collection, NL.

40 Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, Accompanying Papers, 1870, 486.

4' Minutes of May 27, 1869, Records of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Minutes of Board
Meetings, vol. I, 40-41, MS 907, Edward E. Ayer Collection, NL.

42 Minutes of May 28, 1869, Records of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Minutes of Board
Meetings, vol. I, 40-41, MS 907, Edward E. Ayer Collection, NL.

43 Prucha, American Indian Policy, 46. The early power of the BIC is often ignored in the
literature. Because they were less active in the 18803 and 18903 many scholars have overlooked their

abilities to shape reforms in the 18703.

44 Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian, 131.

217

exercised a considerable amount of power and inﬂuence, not just in their efforts to
oversee appropriations, but through their efforts to lobby for policy reform.

When Ely Parker ﬁrst addressed the BIC, he left them with several questions upon
which the BIA sought their advice. He asked them what they believed the legal status of
Indians should be. He also asked if they believed the federal government should continue
making treaties with Indian nations, and if Indians should be placed on reservations.
Finally, he asked them how best to approach the acquisition and distribution of treaty
appropriations and if they supported a transfer of the BIA from civilian control in the
Interior Department, to military control in the Department of War.45 In their answers to
these questions, the BIC outlined their policy agenda and not surprisingly it ﬁt well with
Welsh’s coercive assimilative framework. In their ﬁrst response to Parker’s questions,
the BIC stated that they "were unanimously of the opinion that the Indians should be
gathered into reservations, and that legislation ought to discriminate between the civilized
and localized Indians, and the wild roving Indians of mountains and plains."46 As for the
Indians’ legal status, they believed that they "should be treated as wards of the United
States government, which should exercise over them the care of legal guardians, with a
view to prepare them to become citizens as soon as practicable?"

The BIC developed this agenda further. In a letter dated November 23, 1869,

they stated that the "policy of collecting the Indian tribes upon small reservations. . .seems

 

45 Minutes of May 26, 1869, Records of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Minutes of Board
Meetings, vol. I, 40-41, MS 907, Edward E. Ayer Collection, NL.

46 Minutes of May 26, 1869, Records of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Minutes of Board
Meetings, vol. 1, 40-41, MS 907, Edward E. Ayer Collection, NL.

47 Minutes of November 17, 1869, Records of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Minutes of
Board Meetings, vol. I, 40-41, MS 907, Edward E. Ayer Collection, NL.

218

to be the best that can be devised." Once "upon the reservations they should be taught as
soon as possible the advantage of individual ownership of property. . .and the tribal
relations should be discouraged." Finally, they asserted that the "establishment of
Christian missions should be encouraged. . . [because the] religion of our blessed Saviour
is believed to be the most effective agent for the civilization of any people."48
The Board of Indian Commissioners, especially Felix Brunot, the new chairman,
worked diligently to carry out this agenda. In July, 1870, the BIC met and adopted a
proposal to "place the Indian nations and tribes under the care of the various christian
[sic] denominations of the country and to secure men of high moral qualiﬁcations to be
entrusted with the superintendencies and agencies."49 After that meeting, the Board
toured the West and outlined proposals in support of their reform program. After
meeting with the Arapaho and Cheyenne, Brunot recommended that Congress force their
permanent settlement along the North Canadian River.50 Upon meeting with the Kiowa,
Wichita, Comanche, and Apache at F ort Sill, Brunot, along with Dodge and Bishop,
wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Interior stating that they supported the "plan of
collecting these Indian tribes into the Indian territory with a view to civilize, educate,

"SI

Christianize, and elevate them to the privileges of citizenship. And, in September,

1870, Brunot visited the Utes in Colorado, and at a council there, "urged the Indians to go

 

48 Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, Accompanying Papers, 1870, 491—492.

49 Minutes of July, 27, 1870, Records of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Minutes of Board
Meetings, vol. I, 40-41, MS 907, Edward E. Ayer Collection, NL.

50 Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, Accompanying Papers, 1870, 500.

5] Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, Accompanying Papers, 1870,, 508.

219

upon their reservation and place themselves in a position to receive beneﬁts designed for
them."52

The key feature of William Welsh’s and the Board of Indian Commissioners’
policy agenda sought to dispossess Indians of both their lands and undermine their
sovereignty. In this crucial moment following the Civil War, when the federal
government began experimenting with alternate types of compensatory legislation and
social policymaking through the Reconstruction programs, when radical change in the
history of Indian affairs was possible, these leading men advanced a body of suggestions
that differed in no signiﬁcant way from those for which earlier western politicians fought.
All reformers and legislators in this period operated within a larger framework of
colonialism, but these coercive assimilationists pursued some of the most disruptive and
destructive policies.

The Board of Indian Commissioners was intended to create what many leading
citizens believed was proper in a participatory democracy: transparency and public
oversight in policymaking. Ironically though, the BIC sought to limit who had access to
Indian policy and place it in the hands of a small circle of respected elite. When the BIA
drafted its advertisements to receive bids for annuity goods in 1871, the BIC sought to
add the words "under the supervision of the Board of Indian Commissioners" to the

bottom of the advertisement.53 Welsh and the BIC campaigned against and successfully

removed federal ofﬁcials who did not agree with their positions, particularly Ely Parker,

 

52 "Message of the President of the United States, Communicating the Second Annual Report of
the Board of Indian Commissioners," Senate, 4lst Congress, 3rd Session, Ex. Doc. No. 39, 1871, 12.

53 Minutes of May 15, 1871, Records of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Minutes of Board
Meetings, vol. I, 40-41, MS 907, Edward E. Ayer Collection, NL.

220

E.P. Smith, and Columbus Delano. Most signiﬁcantly, in 1874, the BIC proposed to
separate the Bureau of Indian Affairs from the Interior Department and establish it as an
independent, executive-level agency. While they argued that this would protect Indian
Affairs from political patronage, their suggestion bore the marks of an effort to control
further who had access to the mechanisms of political power. This proposal failed and in
response, six of the original members resigned en masse.“ This mass resignation
demonstrated the conviction these men held toward their cause. Prior to this action
though, Welsh and the BIC established a policy framework that held at its foundation, a
staunch Christian afﬁliation, a belief in coercive assimilation, and a conservative, elitist
approach to policymaking. Advancing their agenda between 1869 and 1874, these
coercive assimilationists effectively ended this moment of optimism for Indian
communities and secured, for the next several generations, the idea that non-Native
people understood the best interests of Native communities, and that the federal
government could, in a short period of time, destroy Indian autonomy and distinct
indigenous communities for the betterment of Indian people and the United States. The

question remains though: how were they able to accomplish all of this?

Indian Policy On Trial: The 1871 House of Representatives’ Hearing
When William Welsh ﬁled charges of fraud and misconduct against Ely Parker in

late-1870 there was an element of personal vendetta to his actions. Welsh believed that
Parker represented a stumbling block to the work of the Board of Indian Commissioners,
and that his position had been upheld because of his close friendship with the president.

Welsh's charges also demonstrated his suspicious nature, his fear of conspiracies, and his

 

54 Prucha, American Indian Policy, 45.

221

underlying belief that Christian activists and elite philanthropists understood the best
interests of Indian people, better than Indian people themselves. At a meeting with
Indian agent Edward Smith in December, 1870, Welsh suggested that Parker was "very
closely in with the [Indian] ring." Although Smith believed that Welsh's actual
complaints originated in the fact that Parker did not consult with him or support his
agenda. Smith concluded that, in any case Welsh believed that it was "quite possible that
Col. P[arker] will have to leave."55 It was true that Parker saw Welsh as "a presumptuous
person who would use any pretext to gain private ends."56 Parker also asserted that the
charges were "but a determination to carry out certain theories put forth by Mr. Welsh in
1869."57 Most scholars have interpreted Welsh's charges and subsequent House of
Representatives’ investigation as an outcropping of the distaste the two men shared for
each other. Several larger issues, however, drove these events.

The House of Representatives’ investigation served as a turning point in the
conﬂicts between the competing reform agendas of the Peace Policy era. It also sealed
the fate of many Indian communities because it helped establish Welsh's and the BIC's
coercive assimilative approach that would drive federal Indian policy for the next several
decades. The House investigation and subsequent hearing revealed the ways in which
Parker’s and Welsh’s oppositional agendas appealed to disparate political factions and

created larger political alliances that held disproportional power and authority within the

 

55 ER Smith to George Whipple, December 15, 1870, American Missionary Association
Archives, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, quoted in Armstrong, Warrior
in Two Camps, 154.

56 Keller, American Protestantism, 74.

i 57 Ely Parker, Report of Hon. E.S. Parker, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to the Hon Secretary
of the Interior, on the Communication of William Welsh, Esq., Relative to the Management of Indian
Aﬂairs, (Washington DC: Joseph L. Pearson, Printer, 1870), 4.

222

national polity. In this way, these developments supported the assertions of American
Political Development scholars concerning the ways that certain social policy agendas
found success on the national level, while others failed.58 In other words, this
investigation and hearing demonstrated how, by 1871, Welsh and the BIC managed to
eclipse Parker's policy paradigm.

Through his association with US. Grant and through his involvement in Indian
affairs in the 18603, Parker developed his own unique reform agenda in the post-Civil
War era. His policy program, based on providing secure land rights for Indian
communities and opportunities for Indian people to compensate for previous land 1033
and continuing colonialist practices, appealed primarily to Indian people themselves, a
politically insigniﬁcant group because they lacked suffrage and other rights related to
citizenship, and to a disparate and loosely aligned group of former abolitionists and anti-
slavery advocates whose attention in this period focused on the F reedman's Bureau and
the Reconstruction program.59 Unfortunately for Parker and many Indian communities,

his agenda failed to unite diverse political factions, furthermore, it did not "ﬁt"

 

58 In her study of Civil War and Mother's pensions, Theda Skocpol argued that "the overall
structure of political institutions provides access and leverage to some groups and alliances, thus
encouraging and rewarding their efforts to shape government policies, while simultaneously denying access
and leverage to other groups and alliances in the same national polity." Thus she concluded, "degrees of
success in achieving political goals - including the enactment of social legislation - depend on the relative
opportunities that existing political institutions offer to the group or movement in question (and
simultaneously deny to its opponents and competitors)" She also asserted that "US. political structures
allow unusual leverage to social groups that can, with a degree of discipline and consistency of purpose,
associate across many local political districts." Finally, in her examination she found that successful
reform campaigns are usually able to demonstrate a "ﬁt" between the ideological framework of their
movement and that of political ofﬁcials. See Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 54-55.

59 Although Parker is a main focus of this study, other individuals, particularly those that had been
associated with abolition also made suggestions that opposed those of Welsh and the BIC. John Beeson,
Alfred Love, Lydia Marie Child, and Wendell Phillips all became involved in Indian affairs after the Civil
War and worked to uphold Indian land and sovereignty rights. Their main focus, however, looked to the
South and Reconstruction. See Levine, "Indian Fighters and Indian Reformers" and Mardock, "Anti-
Slavery Humanitarians and Indian Policy Reform."

223

ideologically with the ideas of a broad range of political ofﬁcials. The coercive
assimilation model, supported by Welsh and the BIC, with its focus on concentrating
Native groups on reservations, found wide appeal, especially from western politicians.
These men represented settlers, railroads, and mineral extraction interests with designs on
Indian-controlled territories. This framework also appealed to eastern, Christian
philanthropists, who saw in the Indian population, tens of thousands of possible converts
that would become more readily available within the reservation setting. This
assimilationist model united diverse political interests and provided an ideological "ﬁt"
with political ofﬁcials.

In early January, 1871, William Welsh assembled and ﬁled his official report
outlining charges against Parker in his capacity as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
He asserted that Parker purchased cattle, ﬂour, and other food without publicly
advertising for bids, violating federal protocol. He also charged that Parker’s purchases
violated an Indian appropriations bill, and resulted in a considerable waste of federal
funds for both the purchase and transport of these goods. Finally, he argued that because
he did not consult the Board of Indian Commissioners concerning the purchase of treaty
appropriations, Parker had violated a congressional and presidential mandate. He
concluded his charges by stating that Parker committed a " grievous wrong to the Indian
service. . .by which the Government has been defrauded, or the welfare of the Indian
retarded."60 Welsh’s charges against Parker implied three larger indications of fraud and

mismanagement in Indian Office more generally. First, he argued that favoritism to

 

60 William Welsh, Summing Up of Evidence before a Committee of the House of Representatives,
Charged with the Investigation of Misconduct in the Indian Oﬂice, (Washington DC: H. Polkinhom &
Co., Printers, 1871), 4-9.

224

certain contractors, agents, and suppliers in the issuance of government contracts for
annuity goods, had allowed Parker or the contractors to proﬁt unfairly. Second, he
charged that Indian agencies had been insufﬁciently supplied, or supplied with
inadequate goods. Finally, Welsh attempted to demonstrate that Parker and the BIA
engaged in secretive practices, failed to consult the BIC, and failed to publicly list bids
and contracts. During the hearing Parker responded to these charges and stated "I do not
claim that I have made no mistakes. . . [however] I have never proﬁted pecuniarily, or
indeed otherwise, by any transaction in my ofﬁcial capacity while I have been serving as
Commissioner of Indian Affairs." "1 have never sought to defraud the Government out of
one penny, or have knowingly lent my aid to others with that view," he added.61

The House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations listened to testimony
and gathered evidence in late-January and early-February. They called upon several
contractors, federal ofﬁcials, including Parker and ex-Secretary of the Interior Jacob Cox,
as well as members of the BIC, military leaders, and Indian agents. William Welsh had
the opportunity to question these individuals and build his case, but it was N.P. Chipman,
Parker's attorney, who ultimately persuaded the House Committee. When he questioned
BIC Chairman, Felix Brunot, Chipman demonstrated that no one called Parker's attention
to any of these problems or inconsistencies, but that the BIC, at Welsh's request, kept

records and worked to build a case against him.62 During his examination of J .W. Bosler,

 

61 Investigation into Indian A ﬂairs, before the Committee on Appropriations of the House of
Representatives, Argument of N. P. Chipman, on behalf of Hon. E. S. Parker, Commissioner of Indian
Affairs, (Washington D.C.: Powell, Ginck & Co., Printers, 1871), 1-2.

62 Affairs in the Indian Department, House of Representatives, 4lst Congress, 3rd Session, Report
No. 39, 1871, 12-14. In an 1876 investigation, additional evidence came to light that the coercive
assimilationists conspired had against Parker. During that investigation W.J. Kountz, a contractor and
supplier of Indian goods stated that his "unpardonable offense against the Indian Bureau," was that he "was
the cause of the removal of Indian Commissioner Parker." Kountz may have been one of the contractors

225

the contractor who fulﬁlled one of Parker’s allegedly fraudulent contracts, according to
Welsh’s assertion, Chipman showed that the prices Parker paid for beef and other foods
were acceptable in this case, as the agencies that be supplied along the Missouri river had
run out of these and the Indians there were in danger of starvation. Parker believed that
there was a danger of these Indians leaving the reservations to search for food, and if so,
a potential for a military conﬂict. Chipman told the Committee that Parker's actions were
completely consistent with BIA policy that "contemplates feeding rather than ﬁghting the
Indians."63 Upon completion of testimony, the Committee published its ﬁndings and
exonerated Ely Parker, though the tone of their statement was far from positive. They
wrote, "the testimony shows irregularities, neglect, and incompetency. . . [but, we] have
not found evidence of fraud or corruption on the part of the Indian Commissioner."
Furthermore, there was "no evidence of any pecuniary or personal advantage sought or
derived by the Commissioner, or anyone connected with his Bureau."64 Although it
would seem that Parker was now free to pursue his reform agenda without further
interference, in fact, a closer examination of the testimony and events of this time
demonstrates that quite the opposite was true.

When J .W. Bosler testiﬁed before the House Committee, he revealed an issue that
pervaded the coercive assimilationist reform agenda. Welsh and the BIC believed that

only the wealthy, educated elite should direct policy and through their attacks on Parker

 

that Welsh worked with to entrap Parker. However, as it seemed in this investigation that Kountz was
trying to make an argument that he had been unjustly denied a contract; his comment should be read with
some skepticism. See "Testimony taken before the Committee on Indian Affairs concerning the
Management of the Indian Department," House of Representatives, 44th Congress, lst Session, Misc. Doc.
No. 167, 1876.

63 Investigation into Indian Affairs, 14.

64 Affairs in the Indian Department, ii.

226

sought to destabilize the position of Indians in Indian policymaking. Indeed, Welsh told
Bosler that if the other BIC members had followed his lead when he resigned in 1869,
"they would have had Parker out of ofﬁce at that time; that the matter would have been
ended there." 65 Bosler also stated that Welsh spoke to him before the trial and while he
assured the contractor that his charges were not meant to reﬂect poorly on him, "he spoke
of General Parker, and said that his connection with those parties in New York [referring
to the shadowy “Indian Ring”] was not very creditable." Welsh also gave Bosler some
insight into his own racial prejudices and expectations about Indian people and said that
Parker was "the representative of a race only one generation removed from barbarism"
and that "he did not think that he should be expected to be able to withstand the
inducements of parties who were his superiors in the matters of business."66 Bosler
remembered that Welsh " said something about the President's desire to serve General
Parker" and concluded that it had nothing to do with the latter's abilities, instead, "be
attributed it to the President's goodness of heart."67 Welsh later reiterated this point in an
open letter to Grant in which he stated that "Your protection of Gen. Parker . . . seems
wholly unaccountable except on the hypothesis that love in you is blind."68 Finally, the
witness testiﬁed that Welsh asked if he "had ever seen General Parker drunk." The
philanthropist's suspicious nature was once again revealed through his belief that the

contractors and supply companies looking to deﬁ'aud the government "feasted and

 

65 Aﬂ'airs in the Indian Department, 62.
66 Aﬂairs in the Indian Department, 62.
67 Aﬂairs in the Indian Department, 62.

68 "Indian Affairs," New York Times, 13 August 1875.

227

wined" Parker, and playing off the expectation of Indian alcoholism, Welsh concluded
that because Parker was an Indian, he "did not have the moral courage to withstand
temptation."69

Parker and his lawyer used the hearing to draw attention to the larger implications
of Welsh's and the BIOS assertions. In his concluding remarks to the House Committee
Chipman argued that, “[i]f Mr. Welsh desires to keep the Indian ofﬁce free from outside
rings and corrupt combinations, heaven help him.” “[B]ut if he expects to reform our
public service by wholesale charges of corruption that have no foundation except in his
own fertile brain,” he continued, “if he hopes to elevate the Indian by openly declaring, as
he has, that the President put into ofﬁce. . .one who is but a remove from barbarism, thus
stigmatising the whole race. . .if in short, he intends to work out certain theories of his
own, under cover of Christian [sic] philanthropy. . .he will ﬁnd he has undertaken that
which will recoil fearfully upon him.”70 Unfortunately for Parker and for the Indian
communities he represented, the agenda that Welsh and the BIC advanced did not recoil
upon them, rather it presented an ideological "ﬁt" with many political ofﬁcials.

A senate debate over an Indian appropriations bill revealed that several western
politicians shared Welsh's and the BIOS racial expectations and political philosophies.
Speaking at length, one of the coercive assimilationist camp's allies, Senator Thomas

Tipton, a Republican from Nebraska, argued that the only wise Indian policy involved

placing Native people on "reservations guarded around by bayonets; reservations over the

 

69 "Indian Affairs," New York Times, 13 August 1875.

70 Investigation into Indian Aﬂairs, 114. The “certain theories” Chipman mentioned clearly
referred to Welsh’s belief that Indian people did not understand what was in their ow best interest as well as
educated, elite, Christian philanthropists.

228

limits of which the Indians shall not pass... reservations with walls as high as necessary,
and with pitfalls as deep as necessary."71
The senators then turned to a discussion of Parker and revealed the racial
expectations they shared with Welsh and the BIC. Senator Joseph Fowler stated that the
goal of the federal government was to "Christianize, and thus render a permanent
contribution to the world's civilization. . . [but, at] the head of this fountain of spiritual
light is placed," referring to Parker, "not one of the highest, but the lowest types of
humanity," he asserted. Further, Fowler argued that even as an Indian man, Parker was
never a "respectable specimen of his race." And ﬁnally, he concluded that, from the
Commissioner of Indian Affairs’ ofﬁce "is to ﬂow this ﬂood of Christian light that is to
civilize these wild Indians," however, he exclaimed, Parker "is a wild man himself! "72
Fowler further demonstrated the belief that many politicians shared with the coercive
assimilationists at the time - that only elite Christian philanthropists understood the best
interests of Indian people. He stated that he did not think Parker was "capable of
inaugurating a great policy that is to illuminate these benighted creatures," because he
was not even "at all equal to the very humblest of the Quaker sect."73
Welsh and the BIC, through their language and philosophies of racial prejudice,
successfully unsettled Parker’s position in the federal government and called into

question the position of Native people in policymaking. After the House of

Representatives investigation, Parker, though exonerated, realized that within the

 

7' Congressional Globe, 4lst Congress, 2nd Session, 1870, 4080.
72 Congressional Globe, 4lst Congress, 2nd Session, 1870, 4083.

73 Congressional Globe, 4Ist Congress, 2nd Session, 1870, 4084.

229

contemporary. political environment, his agenda based on compensatory legislation and
the protection of Indian communities could not succeed. Coercive assimilationist
reformers and their political allies expected Indian people to be subjects of federal policy,
but not voices in its creation. In his resignation letter, he drew attention to the fact that
the elitist reformers had been successful in wresting control of policymaking away from
him and those he thought shared his reform agenda. Parker asserted that the Indian
Bureau had been divested of "all its original importance, duties, and proper
responsibilities." Furthermore, he argued that the "Commissioner of Indian Affairs,
under the present arrangements, is merely a supemumery ofﬁcer of the Government, his
principal duties being simply those of a clerk to a Board of Indian Commissioners,
operating wholly outside of and almost independent of the Indian Bureau."74 "The snake
has been scotched [referring to the Indian Ring]," The Nation concluded.75 The corrupt
inﬂuences that Parker could not avoid because of his Indian heritage, at least according to
Welsh's argument, would now have to contend with a Commissioner whose views were
completely consistent with his and the BIC's. In fact, many suggested Felix Brunot, the
current chairman of the BIC, as a suitable replacement Commissioner, although he turned
down the position. While it appeared that Parker's reform agenda had been bested, the
elitist reformers were not yet satisﬁed that they had solidiﬁed their position.

Between 1873 and 1875, Welsh and the BIC continued to use tactics like those
they employed against Parker, including ﬁling groundless charges of fraud on the part of

public officials, insinuating that they colluded with shadowy contractors and suppliers,

 

74 "Resignation of Gen. Parker as Indian Commissioner," New York Times, 18 July 1871.

75 "The Recent Change in the Indian Bureau," The Nation, 17 August 1871, 100-101.

230

and that they suffered from a general ineptitude. In 1873 Welsh began to attack Secretary
of the Interior, Columbus Delano, a man who had supported and defended Parker a few
years earlier. Welsh argued that the Secretary approved $300,000 worth of vouchers for
supplies that be viewed as fraudulent. In 1874, William Dodge, a prominent member of
the BIC testiﬁed before Congress that the Indian Ring was still operating, but could not
provide speciﬁc names or examples of fraud. Welsh also attacked the new Commissioner
of Indian Affairs, E.P. Smith, a man that he believed misrepresented events at the Red
Cloud agency in an effort to discredit the Episcopal agent, J.J. Saville. Even though all of
the original BIC members resigned en masse in 1874, the events they and Welsh set in
motion came to ﬁ'uition in 1875 when both Commissioner Smith and Secretary Delano
resigned out of humiliation and anger as Parker had four years before.76

Although Parker no longer directly inﬂuenced policymaking on the federal level
after 1871, one of the central tenets of his reform agenda had critical signiﬁcance in the
development of Indian affairs in the late-nineteenth century. By encouraging the
development of an efficient bureaucracy in Indian affairs, in an effort to protect Indian
policymaking from the inﬂuence of land speculators and business interests, Parker
actually contributed to a larger trend of expanding the administrative capacity in Indian
affairs. This trend would ultimately provide coercive assimilationist reformers with the

mechanisms necessary to institute the allotment policy which dispossessed Indians of

 

76 Robert Keller, "Episcopal Reformers and Affairs at Red Cloud Agency, 1870-1876," Nebraska
History 68(3), 1987: 116-126, 122-125. See also Keller, American Protestantism, 86-93. There were
numerous published reports created as a result of the efforts of the coercive reformers in the 18703. In
particular see Documents Relating to the Charges of Professor 0. C. Marsh on Fraud and Mismanagement
at the Red Cloud Agency, (Washington DC, 1875), A Statement of Affairs at the Red Cloud Agency made
to the President of the United States, by Professor 0. C. Marsh, (Washington DC, 1875), and Report of
Commission Appointed by the Secretary of the Interior to Investigate the Charges Against Hon. E. P. Smith,
the Commissioner of Indian Aﬂairs, (Washington DC, 1875).

231

much of their remaining communal lands, broke down tribal relations, and in many ways
represented the nadir of Indian history.

When he fought to transfer the BIA to the War Department after the Civil War,
Parker sought to place it within the most complex and efﬁcient bureaucratic structure in
the executive cabinet at the end of the Civil War. After the passage of the General
Allotment Act in 1887, the BIA itself expanded to incorporate more clerks, agents, and
ofﬁcials than ever before. By establishing oversight committees, Parker's policies
focused on the importance of monitoring and verifying appropriations and supplies. As
the allotment era progressed, the BIA itself took over this responsibility and began to
create and maintain meticulous records that tabulated every aspect of Indian life on the
reservations. It created tribal roles that standardized Indian names and often translated
them into English. It also recorded demographic information including genealogical
records, dates of baptisms, conﬁrmations, and deaths. As part of his reform agenda
Parker sought to "make the government the purchaser of all articles usually brought in by
the Indians." Among other things, he argued that this would make it "an easy matter to
regulate the sale or issue of arms and ammunition to the Indians."77 The allotment
program in its most extreme form ultimately tabulated every aspect of Indian life on the
reservations, from agricultural output, to purchases of supplies, even those as
inconsequential as shoes and socks, or hammers and nails. Regulating the sale of Indians
goods and the purchase of supplies and materials became one of the important functions
of the BIA in the allotment period and an early incarnation of that responsibility was

clearly present in Parker's reform agenda. Historian Philip Deloria characterized these

 

77 "Letter from the Secretary of War," 2.

232

developments as efforts to “transform Indian people from conquered enemies into
colonial subjects, pe0ple who were — and who saw themselves as — part of the American
state.” The knowledge contained in these meticulous records “could be translated into
power over Indian people.” “To be known by name, date and location of baptism, rations
drawn, and enrollment number,” Deloria wrote, “was to be made visible to the colonial
bureaucracy.” Among other things, this process “made it easy to locate a particular
person in time and in space,” and to regulate “education, discipline, containment, or
shunning.”78 In a word, the expansion of the BIA bureaucracy and administrative
capacity made Indian communities “legible.”79 Although Parker certainly could not
foresee it, his reform agenda would help to develop one of the most disastrous state-run

projects in United States history.

Historian Robert Keller once wrote that just "as United States history too often is written

omitting Indians, Indian history can be written as if it were central to America's past. It

 

78 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 25-26.

79 In his study of global colonial state development, entitled Seeing like a State, James C. Scott
described the components of state projects that ultimately failed to help the people for whom they were
designed. His observations have inﬂuenced my understanding of the allotment program in important ways.
First, Scott stated that all of these failed projects began with the process of ﬁnding "legibility." This was "a
state's attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simpliﬁed the classic state
functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion." He noted that problems arose in states
where the population became legible, and the state valued a “high modernist” ideology, one that
demonstrated a “version of self-conﬁdence about scientiﬁc and technical progress. . .the mastery of nature
(including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the
scientiﬁc understanding of natural laws.” If such a state was “willing and able to use the full weight of its
coercive power to bring these high-modemist designs into being,” and if the society under scrutiny lacked
“the capacity to resist these plans,” then the state-run project was likely to fail. One would be hard pressed
to ﬁnd a more accurate description of the coercive assimilation reformers in the late-18603 and 18703. The
history of Indian affairs demonstrated that the work these men carried out during the Peace Policy era
effectively drew to a close a moment when alternate frameworks for Indian policymaking were possible
and the program they established instead, led to decades of suffering among Indian communities. See
Scott, Seeing Like a State, 2-7, 343.

233

was not."80 This statement reveals that scholars and other American citizens with a
presentist orientation often tend to dismiss the signiﬁcance of Indian history and the
development of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the nineteenth century. However, the
preceding examination of the Peace Policy era has suggested that policymakers,
reformers, and journalists invested a signiﬁcant amount of time and energy in Indian
issues. Politicians who directly shaped Indian policy, such as the senators who debated
Parker's strengths and weaknesses in the halls of Congress, the United States
representatives who investigated the charges of fraud against the BIA, the conservative,
Christian philanthropists who fought for their reform agenda, as well as the members of
two executive departments, War and Interior, the President himself and his close Seneca
friend were all consumed with Indian affairs, but so too were other politicians, far
removed from Washington, and not directly inﬂuential in policymaking. These men and
women also followed and commented upon developments in Indian Affairs. In 1870, the
US. minister to France, E.B. Washburne, forwarded a letter to Parker at the BIA from his
colleague, C.C. Andrews, the US. minister to Sweden. In the letter, Andrews
complimented Parker and the Grant administration on their efforts to reform Indian
policy and wanted to "urge upon the Administration the great importance of at once
setting in motion" additional reforms.81 The Nation poignantly described elements of the

Peace Policy as "a revolution in a most important branch of public affairs."82 When

 

80 Keller, American Protestantism, 15.

81 Letter from Christopher Columbus Andrews, Minister to Sweden to E. B. Washbume Minister
of the United States in Paris, May 25, 1870, forwarded to Ely S. Parker, Miscellaneous Letters, Ayer MS
22, Edward E. Ayer Collection, NL.

82 "The Recent Change in the Indian Bureau," The Nation, 17 August 1871,100.

234

viewed within this context, the larger signiﬁcance of the policy debates and conﬂicts
between Parker, Welsh, and the Board of Indian Commissioners becomes clear.

The contentiousness between these men extended beyond differences in
personality or issues of personal gain. When Ely Parker argued that the most important
role and responsibility of the federal government in regard to Indians was to compensate
ﬁnancially and socially for an economic and political system of domination that had
dispossessed Indian peoples of land, resources, opportunities, and sovereignty, he was
suggesting nothing short of a reorientation of the national state. His work to expand the
bureaucracy and administrative capacity of the BIA to protect it from the inﬂuence of
land speculators and business interests beyond the ofﬁcial mechanisms of governance,
actually suggested that politicians in Washington DC take a more active approach to the
social welfare of a portion of the population. When the coercive assimilationist reformers
argued that they understood the best interests of Indian people and that only a small
subset of elite citizens should drive policymaking, they too sought to impose their vision
of the role of the state in the everyday lives of its citizens. They saw that the federal state
would likely move to conﬁne Indians further and wanted to use it as a tool which the
conservative, Christian element of society could use to create their vision of the ideal
society.

This chapter has suggested that the early Peace Policy era represented a moment
of opportunity, when radical change in the direction of Indian affairs seemed possible. At
the end of the Civil War, the reformist spirit of the Reconstruction program, as well as the
legacy of the wartime experience and developments in the borderlands of Indian-white

contact inspired some individuals to work to create a signiﬁcant break from the history of

235

dispossession, colonization, and inconsistent government policy in Indian affairs.
Through the reform agenda of a signiﬁcant Native American leader and through public
oversight of policy administration, this break with tradition seemed very reasonable. This
chapter has also contended that, while the mechanisms of the Peace Policy appeared
disjointed and contradictory, it is clear that there were two overarching reform agendas,
one supported by Parker, and the other, championed by William Welsh and the Board of
Indian Commissioners. These reformers fought bitter and complex debates, but at a most
basic level, they each contested the other’s notions of who could best speak for Indian
people. Unfortunately for many Indian communities, the contentiousness of the
conﬂicting visions for the role and responsibilities of the Bureau of Indian Affairs that
emerged in the creation and administration of the Peace Policy effectively ended this
optimistic period and provided the foundation for the allotment program in the late-
nineteenth century.

Perhaps the ultimate tragedy of these events though, is one in which scholars of
American Indian history are actually quite familiar. The well-intentioned efforts of Ely
Parker to end corruption in Indian affairs through a process of bureaucratic expansion and
to compensate for dispossession had the unintended consequence of facilitating the
allotment policy. The scope of the allotment program, which sought to govern every
aspect of Indian lives in an effort to speed along assimilation, would not have been
possible without the well-developed bureaucratic framework that Parker's reform efforts
helped to create. Scholars of American Indian history, however, might also recognize a
signiﬁcant difference between this case and other cases of well-intentioned efforts in

Indian affairs that resulted in unintended consequences. In this case, the well-intentioned

236

reformer was a Native person himself, not some misguided philanthropist. The fact that
Parker’s best efforts helped to bring about the allotment program should help make
apparent the power and inﬂuence of his opposition.

The outcome of these events was not completely negative. Parker’s framework of
dissent against coercive assimilation within mainstream systems of governance, though
overcome in the early-18703, did not die out. The underlying assumptions of the
arguments he created during the Peace Policy era emerged again in the work of Thomas
Bland, the physician, philanthropist, and defender of Indian rights. In the 18805, Bland
mounted a campaign of resistance against the next generation of coercive assimilationist
reformers. John Collier's efforts in the early-twentieth century, to maintain Indian
cultural practices and distinct Indian communities, also reﬂected Parker's earlier
inﬂuence. While scholars have interpreted both of these men as innovators and creators
of a position of dissent against coercive assimilation, both drew from an older, richer, and
Indian-centered tradition. The next chapter addresses the ways in which the competing
reform agendas that emerged in the Peace Policy era evolved into the conﬂicts over the
creation and passage of the allotment policy and broader state development. In the late-
1870s and 18805, Thomas Bland stepped into Parker's role as the leader of a dissenting
opposition as Herbert Welsh, William Welsh's nephew, led the coercive assimilationist

reformers.

237

Chapter 6

Ex/tensions of Reform: Thomas Bland, the Welsh Family
and the Allotment Controversy

The manifest duty of the Government is to protect the Indians in their reservation rights,
aid and encourage them in stock raising and farming, [and] establish schools on or near
the reservations for the education of all the children...

Thomas A. Bland, 1885'
In the early-18803, events at the Pine Ridge Reservation in the Dakota Territory made it a
crucial battleground in debates about evolving United States Indian policy and state
development. A strong-minded army surgeon named Valentine T. McGillycuddy served
as the federal agent at the reservation and his actions, particularly his efforts to
undermine the customary leadership of the Oglala Sioux served to polarize interested
philanthropists and reformers. As a supporter of coercive assimilation, McGillycuddy
employed all possible techniques to pressure the Oglala to abandon customary social,
cultural, and political practices, including reducing treaty-stipulated rations. Doing so, he
believed, would facilitate the process of dispossession and provide land and ﬁnancial
opportunities for non-Native settlers.2

Herbert Welsh, William Welsh's nephew and founder of the Indian Rights

Association (IRA), an innovative reform organization based in Philadelphia, and one of

the driving forces behind the movement for coercive assimilation, saw in McGillycuddy

an aggressive supporter of his cause and exactly the type of Indian Agent that could

 

1 Thomas A. Bland, "lntemperate and III-Directed Zeal," The Council Fire 8 (September 1885):
122.

2 For more on McGillycuddy see the biography writed by his second wife, Julie B. McGillycuddy,
McGillycuddy Agent: A Biography of Valentine T. McGillycuday (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1940)

238

control customary chiefs and destroy tribal/community relations. Welsh would later refer
to the agent as "a man of remarkable ability" and particularly praised his capacity to

"3 During a visit to the

discourage to "the non-progressive element at the Agency.
reservation in 1883 McGillycuddy invited Welsh to stay at his house and upon returning
to Philadelphia, the reformer complimented the agent's ration reduction strategy, stating
that treaty appropriations led to "idleness and pauperism."4
Dr. Thomas A. Bland publicly challenged McGillycuddy's approach. Bland was a
physician, philanthropist, author, editor of the Council Fire, an Indian policy reform
newspaper, and soon-to-be founder of the National Indian Defense Association (N IDA),
a reform organization that fought against the IRA in the 18805. Like Ely S. Parker before
him, Bland believed that the federal government's main responsibilities involved
protecting Indian communities as distinct entities and providing education and
employment opportunities to compensate for dispossession and the history of
colonization. In 1882 Bland supported Chief Red Cloud and other Oglala leaders, who
issued complaints and sought McGillycuddy's removal. In the pages of the Council Fire
Bland criticized the agent, calling him "a petty, vindictive, revengeful tyrant, who was

robbing the Indians. . . [and] enriching himself at their expense."5

 

3 Herbert Welsh to William F. Vilas, 3 July 1888, Indian Rights Association Papers (subsequent
citation IRAP), Series I-C, Letterpress Copy Books, 1886-1943, Ree169 - 1888, January 25 - 1889, June 8.

4 William T. Hagan, The Indian Rights Association: The Herbert Welsh Years, 1 882-1904
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 28. See also Herbert Welsh, Report of a Visit to the Sioux
Reserve, IRAP, Series II. Organizational Records, 1882-1968, Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 -
Subseries A.

5 Thomas A. Bland, "Our Visit to Red Cloud and his People," The Council Fire 7 (July-August
1884): 97.

239

 

Figure 13: Dr. Valentine T. McGillycuddy
Source: .Iulia McGillycuddy, Blood on the Moon, inside cover

240

This conﬂict between Bland and McGillycuddy boiled over in the summer of
1884 when Bland traveled west from Washington DC to meet with Red Cloud and the
Oglala at Pine Ridge.6 In the spring of that year Bland received permission to visit the
reserve from Secretary of the Interior, Henry M. Teller, however, he cautiously warned
Bland not to "interfere in the affairs of the agencies."7 Bland and Red Cloud were close
friends and during his visits to the capital the Oglala leader had frequently been a guest in
the Blands' home. Red Cloud and an entourage of roughly ﬁfty followers greeted Bland
upon his June 28th arrival at Pine Ridge. When the group stopped for lunch
McGillycuddy sent Indian police officers to arrest the visitor. McGillycuddy and Bland
engaged in a heated debate in the agency ofﬁce that almost resulted in a ﬁstﬁght. When
McGillycuddy threatened to remove him, Bland reportedly stated, "I'm a citizen of the
United States with a letter from the Secretary of the Interior giving me permission to
come here." McGillycuddy replied that the United States was not the issue; rather they
"were talking about the Indian country where affairs had to be handled according to a

code of their own."8

The agent ignored the letter and ordered the police ofﬁcers to escort
Bland, with loaded riﬂes, off the reserve. Bland reportedly leﬂ the ofﬁce screaming, "My

wife said I was a fool for visiting your agency."9 In response, the commissary clerk,

 

6 Several scholars have also written about this confrontation. See George E. Hyde, A Sioux
Chronicle (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 96-99, James C. Olson, Red Cloud and the
Sioux Problem (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 294-295, McGillycuddy, McGillycuddy
Agent, 221-225, and Thomas W. Cowger, “Dr. Thomas A. Bland, Critic of Forced Assimilation,”
American Indian Culture and Research Journal 16, no. 4 (1992): 77-97, 80—8 1.

7 Quoted in McGillycuddy, McGillycuday Agent, 222.
8 McGillycuddy, McGillycuddy Agent, 223.

9 McGillycuddy, McGillycuddy Agent, 224. Bland's wife, Cora, was also an editor (ﬁrst in
Chicago for a journal called Ladies Own Magazine and later for the Council Fire), a physician, lecturer,
and Indian policy reformer. She played a crucial role in the development of Thomas' and the NIDA's ideas

241

Frank Stewart replied, "Well, all I've got to say is that your wife has a damn sight more
sense than some people." '0

This confrontation was not simply the result of a conﬂict between two intense,
egotistical men, rather, it developed because Bland was able to exercise inﬂuence
amongst Indian leaders. His effort to promote compensatory legislation and to protect
Indian communities (like Parker's before him) appealed to people such as Red Cloud.
McGillycuddy's coercive assimilative approach, championed by Herbert Welsh and the
IRA (and William Welsh before them), and his efforts which often bordered on physical
violence demonstrated the level to which individuals interested in coercive assimilation
were willing to engage to ensure that their agenda won out. This confrontation
characterized the severity of the conﬂicts that occurred in this critical moment in the
development of Indian policy and revealed the level of investment the competing
individuals and organizations had in its outcome.

The late-nineteenth century in Indian policy history is commonly known as the
Allotment Era and is characterized by the build-up to and passage of the General
Allotment Act of 1887, as well as its early implementation. The General Allotment Act,
or Dawes Act, so named because Massachusetts Senator Henry L. Dawes introduced the
bill, authorized the division of reservation lands into 40, 80, and 160 acres plots for
individual and family ownership. The allotments would be held in trust by the federal

government for twenty-ﬁve years. The act’s stated purpose was to encourage individual

property-ownership and an adherence to free market economic values among Indian

 

about reform. Unfortunately, the historical record provides even less insight into her life and contributions
than it does for her husband.

'0 McGillycuddy, McGillycuddy Agent, 224.

242

people. '1 The existing literature argues that in this era, "to be pro-Indian. . .was to be pro-
allotment and pro-assimilation."12 Scholars have focused on the ways that the reformers
shared social, religious, and economic backgrounds: including the "Friends of the
Indians," the Indian Rights Association, the Women's National Indian Association, the
Boston Indian Citizenship Committee, and the attendees at the annual Lake Mohonk
Conference in upstate New York.13 For a variety of reasons, however, this literature has

ignored the important and numerically signiﬁcant group whose membership argued

 

U The act itself was the result of a lengthy legislative evolution that began much earlier. An
earlier version of the allotment program was embodied in the Coke Bill, legislation introduced by Senator
Richard Coke in 1880, 1882, and 1884. Dawes revised the bill, re-introduced the legislation in 1886 and in
passed in 1887. At several points after 1887 the program was amended, signiﬁcantly in 1891 and 1906.
These amendments applied the program to additional reservations previously excluded from its jurisdiction
and allowed Indian people to legally lease their allotments to non-Native people. The latter development
seemingly undercut its ability to encourage Native farming.

'2 Senier, “Allotment Protest and Tribal Discourse,” 422. See also Senier, Voices of American
Indian Assimilation and Resistance. In it, Senier asserted that some of the most signiﬁcant critics to
coercive assimilation were Native women writers.

‘3 In his seminal study American Indian Policy in Crisis, Francis Prucha argued that the "harmony
that marked the Lake Mohonk conferences was based on a common philanthropic and humanitarian
outlook expressed in Christian terms, for the reform organizations represented there had a strong religious
orientation." Prucha framed this movement within a larger context of nineteenth-century evangelism,
asserting that the "decades at the end of the century in which Indian reform ﬂourished were marked by an
intensiﬁcation of the desire on the part of zealous evangelicals to create a 'righteous empire' in America,
and the Indians were caught up in that thrust." “Only a few men spoke out [against these
organizations]. . .and they were quickly overwhelmed,” he wrote. See Prucha, American Indian Policy in
Crisis, 147; Prucha, The Great Father; and Francis P. Prucha ed., Americanizing the American Indian:
Writings by the “Friends of the Indian " I 880-1 900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 8. The
idea that the reformers were "well-intentioned" runs throughout this literature. In the 19303 two books
began this trend. In the ﬁrst, D.S. Otis asserted that it was not private interests that motivated the
development of the allotment program, but rather that it came out of the idealism of Congress and the
reformers who wished to protect and "civilize" Indians. J .P. Kinney argued that the late-nineteenth century
reformers represented the culmination of two hundred years of efforts to assimilate and "civilize" the
Indians. See Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands; and Kinney, A Continent Lost — A
Civilization Won. Henry Fritz suggested that there were some conﬂicts during that Lake Mohonk
conference, but these involved the timetable and intensity of coercive assimilation plans, not the
coercive/assimilative ideology itself. See Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation. Wilcomb
Washburn was not as kind to the humanitarians and argued that when the allotment program failed to create
types of solutions the reformers initially hoped, they focused blame on the settlers who pressured to divest
Indians of their land base and BIA ofﬁcials who were unable to oversee the allotment process carefully.
However, he concluded that it was actually the over-zealous reformers and policy-makers who should be
blamed for the choices and judgments they made. See Wilcomb Washbum, The Assault on Indian
Tribalism: The General Allotment Law (Dawes Act) on 1887 (New York: Lippincott Comp., I975).

243

against this policy orientation. Furthermore, the existing literature has not fully situated
the debates about allotment within the longer reform traditions from the Peace Policy era,
nor has it seated them within the larger framework of state development in the late-
nineteenth century. '4

This chapter contends that the generation of reformers who emerged after the
Peace Policy era adopted and expanded the reform agendas and policy platforms of the
previous period. In these debates Thomas Bland and the National Indian Defense
Association adopted an ideology that focused on compensatory legislation and the
protection of Indian communities as distinct entities, while Herbert Welsh and the Indian
Rights Association supported the conservative, coercive assimilationist ideology that
sought to conﬁne Indians spatially on increasingly smaller plots of individually-held land,
and socially within prescribed roles. Both groups though, beginning in the 18805 situated
their arguments about Indian policy within a framework that connected developments in
Indian Affairs with larger concerns about the role and nature of the state, as well as the
relationship between the government and its citizens and wards. Bland and the NIDA
asserted that the land allotment legislation could either strengthen or undermine the

power of Congress and the federal government in signiﬁcant ways, threatening the

 

'4 Historian Frederick Hoxie represented an exception to this interpretation. He noted that the
reformers of the 18805 "bore a surface similarity to the antislavery groups of the 18403 and 18505 and to
the previous decade's peace policy advocates." He asserted that like "their predecessors they campaigned
for 'equal rights' for Native Americans and declared that they were driven by a sense of Christian mission."
He also argued that many of the reformers framed their ideas within an almost "proto-progressive"
framework which recognized that society was becoming increasingly interdependent and Indians would no
longer be able to remain isolated. However, like Prucha, Hoxie also suggested that the reformers "were
marked by a minimum of factionalism and a general willingness to shape contrasting interests into common
proposals." See Hoxie, A Final Promise, 11-13. In his study of Indian policy reform, Robert Mardock
also focused on the similarities between these reformers and the antislavery advocates before them. Like
Prucha, he also asserted that a certain social-gospel Christianity motivated their actions and shaped their
philosophies. See Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian. Hoxie was clearly inﬂuenced by
Robert Wiebe's modernization thesis which interpreted the development of the United States in this period
as an evolution from "island communities" to a coherent nation. For more see Robert Wiebe, The Search
For Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).

244

balance between state and federal authority to the detriment of all citizens. As they made
these arguments, Bland and NIDA members hoped to create legislation that would slow
the assimilation process and allow Native people to embrace mainstream culture and
societal values at their own pace, while simultaneously suggesting that the state itself
should serve a compensatory role for the nation’s most needy and disenfranchised
citizens and wards. Welsh and the IRA attempted to situate the professionalization of the
BIA within a larger framework of Civil Service reform in the federal government, and to
demonstrate the importance of federal regulation in the economy. They hoped to use the
federal government to create a society that ﬁt their visions of a proper polity with
economically-motivated, religiously-devout, and politically-homogenous citizens. Thus,
in the late-nineteenth century, Indian policy reform and the Bureau of Indian Affairs
speciﬁcally became critical sites where reformers developed and debated ideas about the

evolution of the state.

Critics of Coercive Assimilation: Thomas Bland and the National Indian Defense
Association

In the 1870s and 18805 Thomas Bland and the NIDA supported the idea of
assimilation in the same way as Ely S. Parker had a decade earlier, but like Parker, they
also saw this as a slowly evolving process and one that should involve a focus on the
protection of community and state compensation for dispossession. These ideas emerged
out of Bland's and the NIDA's interactions with Native people, the minimal inﬂuence of
direct political connections (they were not allied with congressmen who represented

land/resource-hungry constituencies), and their vision of the state as a protective tool for

its citizens and wards. Rather than simply representing an eccentric and peripheral

245

group, these individuals and their organization posed a real and signiﬁcant challenge to
the coercive assimilationist reformers.

Thomas A. Bland was not initially drawn to Indian policy reform. He was born in
1830 to parents who were members of a North Carolina Quaker colony that settled in
Indiana in 1817. He had seven years of formal education as a youth and in 1852 he
married a Virginian woman named M. Cora Davis. As a young man Bland farmed, but
after his marriage he studied medicine with particular interests in physiology and
phrenology. After completing his degree, he opened a practice six miles from the village
of his birth. He served a commission as an army surgeon during the Civil War, then with
his wife Cora, who had been studying medicine in New York, embarked on a joint career
divided between medical, literary, and philanthropic interests. The couple established
several journals including The Home Visitor in Indianapolis, The Northwestern which
became The Indiana Farmer, and Ladies Own Magazine, for which Cora served as
editor-in-chief. They moved to Chicago in 1872 and New York in 1874, where they sold
Ladies Own Magazine and Cora entered medical school again, this time completing her
degree. In 1878 the Blands moved to Washington DC. Cora practiced medicine, lectured
on health, and endorsed personal ﬁtness products like the "Pocket Gymnasium," which
she believed was the "most complete and perfect system of physical exercise ever
invented."'5 Thomas focused on his literary and reform work, publishing ten books
between 1870 and 1906, and advocating against railroad monopolies, the establishment
of a national bank, and in support of populist causes, the greenback party, and medical as

well as religious reform. In 1875 he attended a Boston lecture given by former

 

15 Advertisements for these products ran in issues of The Council Fire throughout the 18805.

246

Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Oregon and ex-Peace Commissioner, Alfred B.
Meacham. This lecture and subsequent conversations with Meacham sparked an interest
in Indian affairs - an interest that would help shape the debates over coercive
assimilation, to which Bland devoted ten years of his life.16

In 1875, having recently survived a battle with Modoc Indians in northern
California, Alfred Meacham toured the northeast delivering a lecture entitled "The
Tragedy of the Lava Beds." Although Meacham had been severely injured during the
melee and had not yet fully recovered - he was shot four times and leﬁ for dead, partially
scalped - he argued that he felt compelled "to do something for these poor despised

"17 Meacham became a proponent of

down-trodden misunderstood people [Indians].
tribal sovereignty and believed that more than anything else the Indians should be
allowed to express their own opinions and ideas about the allocation of treaty annuities

and issues of federal governance. '8 The tour failed as a ﬁnancial venture and his health

deteriorated, however, after attending Meacham’s lecture at Cooper Institute Hall,

 

‘6 Unfortunately there is no extant manuscript collection of Thomas or Cora Bland papers. There
is a brief biography in the introduction to his edited volume entitled Pioneers of Progress (1906), penned
by Rev. H.W. Thomas, D.D. There is also some biographical information in an MA. thesis completed in
1992 by Jo Lea Wetherilt Behrens. See Thomas A. Bland ed., Pioneers of Progress (Chicago: Blakely
Printing Company, 1906), 10-15 and Jo Lea Wetherilt Behrens, "In Defense'of 'Poor Lo': The Council
F ire's Advocacy of Native American Civil Rights, 1878-1889" (M.A. thesis, University of Nebraska,
Omaha, 1992), 78-81. See also Cowger, “Dr. Thomas A. Bland."

17 Memo, September 21, 1873, Meacham Papers, quoted in Edward S. Phinney, "Alfred B.
Meacham: Promoter of Indian Reform" (Ph.D. diss, University of Oregon, Eugene, 1963), 228. See also
Behrens, “In Defense,” 63-65 and Thomas A. Bland, The Life of Alfred B. Meacham (Washington DC: TA.
and MC. Bland Publishers, 1883), 42. Meacham actually considered serving as legal counsel for the
Modoc Indians charged with his assault because he believed that the government had put them is a position
where there was no other option than violence.

‘8 Behrens, "In Defense," 59. See also Phinney, "Alfred B. Meacham," 109-110.

247

 

 

 

 

 

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Unfortunately, no photographs of Thomas or Cora Bland exist.

Source: The Council Fire

248

Thomas Bland pledged he and his wife's medical, literary, and oratorical talents, as well
as monetary support to Meacham's cause.19 Indian land issues appealed to Bland's anti-
monopoly ideology, as he believed that it was railroad companies who provided the
strongest inﬂuence to divest Indian communities of their lands.20 Over the next several
years, with the Blands' assistance, Meacham continued lecturing and began to publish an
Indian reform journal called the Council Fire, as a corollary medium to educate the
public on Indian issues.

As editor of the Council Fire, Meacham upheld a ﬁerce devotion to the tenets of
the Peace Policy. While other reformers began to advocate a movement away from the
slow-paced, community-oriented, "civilizing" process of the programs initiated by Parker
and Grant, Meacham argued that up to that moment, it was "the best one ever attempted
by this Government."21 In the last years of the 1870s and the early 18805, Meacham and
Bland used the journal to ﬁght the transfer of the BIA to the War Department, to support
the reservation system as a method of protecting Indian communities, to support Standing
Bear and the Ponca in their opposition to federal removal policies, and to support an
assimilation process carried-out only at a pace dictated by Indian peoples.22 When

Meacham passed away in 1882 the Blands assumed co-editorship of the journal. As

 

'9 Cowger, “Dr. Thomas A. Bland," 78.
20 n n
Behrens, In Defense, 80.
2' "To Churchmen," Council Fire 1 (January 1878): 3.

22 Behrens, "In Defense," 69-77. For more on the Ponca issue see Valerie Sherer Mathes and
Richard Lowitt, The Standing Bear Controversy: Prelude to Indian Reform (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2003). In it the authors argued that it was this event that helped to spark the intensiﬁed movement
for Indian reform in the late-nineteenth century and that rather than the eastern humanitarians who are
usually interpreted as the leaders of this movement, it was the western lawyers and policy-makers who
provided much of the early leadership and ideas.

249

editors the Blands maintained Meacham's advocacy of gradual assimilation "through
rational educative measures."23 However, in the 18805 agitation for Indian policy reform
intensiﬁed and through the Council Fire, Bland ﬁrst invited other reform organizations to
use the pages of the journal to spread their message, but then ultimately parted ways with
them as it became clear that their expectations of Indian conﬁnement and assimilation
differed signiﬁcantly.

In an 1883 Council Fire article, Bland noted that popular interest in Indian affairs
had intensiﬁed in recent years, in fact, that it was " growing on public attention much
faster than did the question of negro rights during the early years of anti-slavery
agitation."24 He celebrated the fact that many reform organizations emerged in
“Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other cities for the purpose of giving systematic
force and effect to the sentiment of justice in the public treatment of the Indian question."
Bland suggested that one of the most promising was the Indian Rights Association to
whom he extended "fratemal greeting" and offered "the columns of the Council Fire,
through which to communicate with each other and the general public."25 It soon became
clear though, especially through the controversies that developed at Pine Ridge between
the Oglala Sioux and Agent McGillycuddy, that the IRA and other organizations differed
greatly from the reform ideologies shared by the Blands and their allies. By 1884 and
1885 the editors of the Council Fire and the leaders of the IRA openly fought in the

newspapers, and through pamphlet literature, including an article in the Springfield

 

23 M. Cora Bland, "From Savage Life to Civilization," Council Fire 2 (October 1878): 150.

24 "Indian Rights Associations," Council Fire 6 (June 1883): 84. See also Cowger, “Dr. Thomas
A. Bland," 79.

25 "Indian Rights Associations," Council Fire 6 (June 1883): 84

250

 

Republican, penned by Henry Dawes, the Massachusetts senator, successor to Charles
Sumner, and one of the leading political supporters of the IRA. In it Dawes stated that
Bland was "a very strange man. . .making trouble and mischief with everybody who is
trying to help [the Indians]."26 Bland responded in the Council Fire that perhaps the
name Indian Rights Association was a misnomer because they openly supported corrupt
Indian Agents.27

As the McGillycuddy/Oglala Sioux controversy intensiﬁed, Bland and like-
minded individuals recognized the signiﬁcance of their challenge to the Indian Rights
Association and in late-1885 founded the National Indian Defense Association in
Washington DC "for the purpose of protecting and assisting the Indians of the United
States in acquiring the beneﬁts of civilization, and in securing their territorial and

"28 The membership of this organization, "friends of a sound and

proprietary rights.
humane Indian policy," and "practical philanthropists" as Bland referred to them,
expanded quickly.29 They developed a platform that held at its heart many of the tenets
of the earlier Peace Policy and especially those championed by Ely Parker in the late-
1860s and early-18703. However, their platform expanded these notions in many

important ways, and in doing so broadened the scope of debates over Indian policy and

the function of the Bureau of Indian Affairs exponentially. At the founding meeting of

 

26 Henry L. Dawes, The Case of McGillycuddy (Philadelphia: Indian Rights Association, 1884).
This pamphlet was originally published in the Springﬁeld Republican, 7 September 1884.

27 "The Indian Rights Association - Is The Name A Misnomer?" Council Fire 8 (April, 1885): 49.
28 "The National Indian Defense Association," Council Fire 8 (December 1885): 174.

29 "The National Indian Defense Association," Council Fire 8 (December 1885): 173; “Truth And
Justice Must Triumph,” Council Fire 9 (February, 1886): 21.

251

 

 

Figure 15: Senator Henry L. Dawes
Source: William Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 42

252

the NIDA, Bland and the other founders delineated three fundamental propositions to the
organization's platform. Both in ideology and practice these three propositions
represented an extension of Parker's earlier reform agenda. They resolved ﬁrst that civil,
criminal, and property laws of the United States should be used to protect Indian people
within their communities against encroachments and actions of non-Native people. In
addition they asserted that tribal sovereignty should be federally protected on a
permanent basis. Second, they took the stance that the "tribal condition,” which they
deﬁned as communal land-holding and customary practices of tribal governance, should
be maintained until, at some point in the future, they could be incorporated “into some
political institution in harmony with the general system of our Government." And
ﬁnally, they contended that Indian communities should be given secure patents for their
land to protect them from continued efforts toward dispossession}0 The organization
elected General James W. Denver, a former governor of Kansas Territory, Commissioner
of Indian Affairs, and member of Congress, as their president. The long-time pastor of
the First Presbyterian Church in Washington DC and current pastor to President
Cleveland, Reverend Dr. Byron Sunderland, served as the ﬁrst vice president. Judges
A.J. Willard and E.J. Ellis, Reverend Alexander Kent, Professor Bernard Janney, and
Thomas Bland rounded-out the ﬁrst executive committee. Bland expressed his optimism
for this organization stating that the "new association starts under favorable auspices, and

will, we believe, be a potent factor in solving the Indian problem."3 '

 

30 "The National Indian Defense Association," Council Fire 8 (December, 1885): I75.

31 "Constitution of the National Indian Defense Association," Council Fire 8 (December, 1885):
176.

253

In this critical moment of Indian policy reform, the National Indian Defense
Association used historical examples to situate their reform argtunents, and rather than
simply outlining problems in the administration of Indian policy, they championed
several speciﬁc policy correctives. They also appealed to and provided opportunities for
Native people to present their ideas. Most signiﬁcantly they vehemently opposed the
ideology, methods, and goals of the Indian Rights Association and other self-styled
"Friends of the Indian."

As they began their organized assault against the Indian Rights Association and
the coercive assimilationist ideology, Bland and the NIDA used historical evidence to
support their reform objectives. In an article entitled "Why Not Proﬁt By Experience?"
Bland argued that the United States had already found a satisfactory answer to the
“Indian Question” when it gave patents in fee to the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws,
Chickasaws, and Seminoles of Indian Territory. The term "patent in fee" refers to the
title deed by which the federal government transfers land ownership to different people.
Receiving a patent in fee nulliﬁed the trust relationship or "trust patent" previously
established between the government and Indian nations. Patents in fee could be granted
to entire communities as Bland suggested. This property law concept is different from
that of "fee simple." Under fee simple ownership, an individual, not a community, holds
a title to speciﬁc property. Ending the trust relationship in land ownership, Bland and the
NIDA believed, would empower Indian communities, protect tribal sovereignty, and help
insulate them against additional land loss. "Those ﬁve tribes," Bland continued, "still

own and occupy the lands then secured to them. . .and they have solved the problem of

254

civilization for themselves and in their own way."32 He later wrote that the Indian
Territory experience suggested that “if the policy of uniting tribes with internal powers of
self-government is extended to the mass of the Indians, it will produce the long desired
outcome of the Indian question."33 Bland further asserted that the experiment of
negotiating forced land allotment treaties with individual Indian communities such as the
Delaware had been a failure. He concluded that “the greed and shrewdness of their white
neighbors proved too strong for the Indians. . . [t]hey were cheated out of their lands.”34
Bland and the NIDA leaders, like Ely Parker before them, saw education as the
key for Native communities to succeed in the late-nineteenth century and beyond, and
they ﬁlled the pages of the Council Fire with pleas for expanded educational
opportunities. Bland once wrote that education was "the primary factor in a true system
of Indian civilization." He believed that a well-rounded and liberal education should
serve as the ﬁrst step of any policy reform and that no signiﬁcant changes should be
made to the legal status or property of Native people until after a new system of Indian
education had been implemented.35 NIDA leaders recognized the educational potential
among the Indians, but also believed that this would be a slow process and that "until

then the Indians must have special protection against the avarice and dishonesty of the

white man."36 Later, in the aftermath of the allotment controversy, Bland found one

 

32 "Why Not Proﬁt By Experience?" Council Fire 8 (January 1885): 1.

33 "Shall We Now Adopt A Wise Indian Policy?" Council Fire 9 (July, 1886): 102.
34 "Why Not Proﬁt By Experience?" Council Fire 8 (January 1885): 1.

35 "lntemperate and Ill-Directed Zeal," Council Fire 8 (September 1885): 122.

36 "Meeting of the Indian Commissioners," Council Fire 8 (February 1885): 20.

255

positive effect of the new legislation. A "hopeful feature of the present situation is found
in the fact that. . .the present administration is preparing to do what the Council Fire has
from the ﬁrst urged should be done - educate every Indian child," he concluded. Though
he also lamented, "this is the only ground of hope."37
Next to education, NIDA leaders championed the protection of Indian
communities, the fulﬁllment of treaty obligations, and the expansion of sovereignty
rights, all tenets of Parker's reform agenda, as the most signiﬁcant, speciﬁc reforms to
Indian policy. In his critique of the 1885 Lake Mohonk platform, Bland passionately
stated that "what the Indian stands in need of to-day is the faithful fulﬁllment of the
obligations of the Government toward him." These obligations included protection of
reservation lands, a federal investment in farming and employment opportunities, the
creation of reservation schools, and "the exercise of genuine ﬁ'iendship."38 A.J. Willard,
a former Chief Justice in the South Carolina Supreme Court and executive committee-
member of the NIDA wrote that if "the Indians are entrusted with asuitable degree of the
power of self-government, and have the title to their lands, they can protect themselves

against injurious intrusions." Furthermore, using language that echoed Parker's, Willard

stated that "tribal relations should not be hastily or suddenly ruptured,” and that land titles

 

37 "Then and Now - A Review of Indian Policies," Council Fire 12 (December 1889): 100.

38 "The Mohonk Platform," Council Fire 8 (November 1885): 157. See also "Status Of The
Indians, Political And Proprietary," Council Fire 9 (October 1886) in which Bland stated that " Our ﬁrst
duty toward the Indian is to do what we have engaged to perform towards him. Having done this we may
do him all the good in our power. To disregard the right of another in order to force upon him that which
we regard for his good and against his inclinations is of the worst form of tyranny, usually blended with

hypocrisy." ( 136)

256

 

needed to be secured.39 Bland also reminded readers of the Council Fire that through
"solemn treaties," the federal government had already recognized Indian land title and
had agreed to protect it. "To ignore this title... and break up the system of holding
land. . .all supposed to be protected by the solemn covenants entered into between the
Indian tribes and the United States Government," Bland stated ﬁrmly, "would be an act of
bad faith."4°

As a policy platform though, NIDA leaders realized that their ideas could be
criticized as an effort to promote racial difference and inhibit the incorporation of Indians
into mainstream society. Many opposing reformers certainly did criticize the NIDA on
these grounds. Reverend Alexander Kent, an NIDA executive committee-member,
recognized this issue and wrote that the "opposition of the National Indian Defense
Association to the land in severalty bill [allotment program]. . .has been characterized by
the advocates of that measure as a ﬁght against progress, an effort to perpetuate
barbarism." Furthermore, he noted that some critics suggested that the NIDA sought "to
keep the Indian perpetually in his present relations, and to prevent progress toward
manhood and citizenship?“ He assured the Council Fire readership, however, that the
NIDA did support a notion of assimilation, but that they opposed the allotment program
because it ignored "the Indian's wishes, feelings and convictions... [and was] a deliberate

and intentional disregard of Indian rights."42 It was this focus on the opinions, ideas, and

 

39 AJ. Willard, "A Brief of Objections to the Sioux Bill," Council Fire 9 (June 1886): 94. See
also Jo Lea Wetherilt Behrens, “Forgotten Challengers to Severalty: The National Indian Defense
Association and Council Fire,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 75, no.2(l997): 128-159, 135.

40 "The Mohonk Platform," Council Fire 8 (November 1885): 157.

41 Alexander Kent, "An Address to the Friends of Justice," Council Fire 10 (March, 1887): 37.

257

voices of Native people that perhaps most closely resembled Ely Parker's reform
proposals from the 18605 and early-18708 and what made the NIDA an exceptional and
forceful opponent to the supporters of coercive assimilation and dispossession.

In late-1886, Thomas Bland toured through the southeastern states to encourage
membership and support for the NIDA. Nearly one-ﬁfth of those who joined were
Native people.43 At NIDA meetings, Native people were given the opportunity to speak
and Bland frequently published letters and submissions from Native writers in The
Council Fire. In 1886, Bland published a letter written by Chief Red Cloud, the Oglala
Sioux leader. In it, Red Cloud supported the NIDA agenda and spoke for Native people
across the nation. He wrote that Indians opposed selling their remaining reservation
lands through the allotment program.44 Later, “a Cherokee” concurred that “all [Indians]
are opposed to allotment.”45 The editors ﬁlled the pages of the Council Fire with letters
and statements such as these.46 Bland often disregarded BIA ofﬁcials and counseled
Native people to resist coercive assimilation tactics. In late-1886, a Peoria Chief named
W.C. Lykins complained to Herbert Welsh about recent developments on his reserve. He
noted that Commissioner of Indian Affairs J .D.C. Atkins met with the Peoria people and
encouraged them to accept land in severalty. Then "Doctor T.A. Bland appeared and

held a meeting in our school house. . .he urged us to hold our lands and never consent to

 

42 Kent, "An Address,” 38.

43 “Names Of Members,” Council Fire 9 (November-December, 1886): 157-158.
44 “Discussing The Dawes Sioux Bill,” Council Fire 9 (March 1886): 39.

45 “An Indian On The Allotment Bill,” Council Fire 9 (June 1886): 96.

46 See also, “Chief Brant’s View of Civilization,” Council Fire 9 (June 1886): 97; “Speech Of
Col. G.W. Harkins Of The Chickasaws,” Council Fire 9 (February 1886): 23; and “Speech Of Chief John
Jumper Of The Seminoles,” Council Fire 9 (February 1886): 24.

258

severalty, claiming that he and others would see that no laws were passed that would
affect us in any way."47 While some of the Indian leaders such as Lykins, who stood to
proﬁt from coercive assimilation legislation, complained, most Indian people appreciated
and supported Bland and the NIDA.

In 1886, Senator Henry Dawes introduced legislation to restrict the reservation
lands "occupied by the various tribes of the Sioux Nation. . .[and] transfer to the United
States a large portion of the lands ceded to those tribes by the treaty of 1868. . . [to
become] a part of the public domain of the United States."48 Bland spoke out against this
IRA-supported Sioux Bill in the House of Representatives and to the House Committee
on Indian Affairs. He argued that it was unjust because it did not offer the Indians a
choice in the sale of their lands. He also asserted that the amount of compensation was
"far below" the value of these lands, and that the Indians themselves did not wish to sell.
His organization, the NIDA, opposed the bill because the Sioux Reservation was for
"exclusive use of the Sioux." During this meeting he read a letter from Chief Red Cloud
to the assembled representatives. In it Red Cloud argued against the sale of his
reservation and stated that he hoped "the entire Sioux Nation will unite and concur in my
views." Never one to miss an opportunity to attack an opponent, Bland also added that it
was "evident. . .that those who desire to break up the Sioux Reservation and rob these

Indians of their lands regard McGillycuddy as an important agent in carrying out their

 

47 W.C. Lykins, Peoria Chief, to Herbert Welsh, 18 October 1886, IRAP, - Series l-A - Incoming
Correspondence, 1864—1968, n.d., Reel 2. Bland also engaged in similar actions with the Kiowas and
Comanches. See Herbert Welsh to CC Painter, 16 February 1887, IRAP, - Series I-C, Letterpress Copy
Books, 1886-1943, Reel 68 - 1886, March - 1888, January 25. In this letter, Painter, the IRA Washington
DC lobbyist stated that "I certainly think that something must be done to counteract Bland's pernicious
inﬂuence. . . "

'8 A.J. Willard, "A Brief of Objections to the Sioux Bill," Council Fire 9 (June 1886): 90.

259

 

Figure 16: Red Cloud, ca. 1880
Source: James Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem

260

selﬁsh scheme."49 A political victory followed this meeting and also bolstered Bland and
the NIDA. In the aftermath of a federal investigation that found evidence of fraud and
mismanagement at Pine Ridge, Secretary of the Interior Lamar permanently suspended
the Agent McGillycuddy.50 While the NIDA objected to the proposed Sioux Bill, they
suggested that if it was absolutely necessary for the United States to buy land from the
Sioux, the Indians themselves should name the price. Such an action would have been a
natural extension of the sovereign rights the NIDA advocated in the 18808.

Most of the existing literature does not recognize the signiﬁcance of the NIDA's
opposition to the IRA and to the coercive assimilative approach. But, Thomas Bland
understood the far-reaching impact of his organization and in 1886 he claimed that they
had a larger membership than any other Indian reform group and almost equal numbers to
all the others combined. He noted that the NIDA "embraces over 200 of the most
intelligent Indians of Indian Territory, including the governors and other public officials
of all the ﬁve civilized nations, and also over 40 white Christian missionaries, who have
spent years among those people and whose opinion of Indian policy is entitled to
respect." In addition, he reminded readers of the Council Fire that the NIDA had "a large
membership in Boston and other cities of the East as well as Washington."5 ' The actual

NIDA membership was approximately 1,000 in 1885.52 That year the IRA claimed only

 

49 “Discussing The Dawes Sioux Bill,” Council Fire 9 (March 1886): 38-39.
50 "Agent McGillycuddy Removed from Ofﬁce," Council Fire 9 (June 1886): 86.
5' "Misrepresenting the President's Policy," Council Fire 10 (January 1887): 10.

52 Behrens, "Forgotten Challengers," 153, n.5. See also "Annual Meeting of the N.I.D.A.,"
Council Fire 10 (February 1887): 18.

261

250 and their numbers did not breach 1,000 until 1888 or 1889.53 The editor
acknowledged though, that even if the NIDA had signiﬁcant numbers, they faced an
uphill battle against the older and well-entrenched IRA. He appealed to his friends and
readers stating that they were "engaged in a conﬂict of ideas and of interests with
powerful combinations." "Our opponents are rich in material resources and strong in
political inﬂuence. . .Our resources in those regards are not large," he concluded.54
Despite IRA opposition, Bland and the NIDA experienced several important
victories in 1886 that frightened the IRA leaders. The ﬁrst victory came in the form of a
political compromise with the Board of Indian Commissioners which had continued its
advisory work to the BIA through the 18703 and 18805. At the January 21, 1886
meeting, Thomas Bland, along with Dr. C.C. Painter of the IRA, and Rev. M.E. Strieby, a
representative of the American Missionary Association, were appointed to serve on the
resolutions committee. The group was unable to agree on their resolution concerning the
severalty bill proposed by Sen. Dawes and Bland submitted a minority report insisting
that "patents. . .be issued by the Government to the Indian tribes, to be held in common
until by education - literary, industrial, and political - they should be prepared to safely
have the land divided and patented to them in severalty."55 Bland’s time frame and
suggestion of educational opportunities to compensate for dispossession closely followed

the ideologies of the NIDA. Painter and Strieby argued that education should follow

 

53 For IRA numbers see Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 45, 47. See also Prucha, American
Indian Policy in Crisis, 142. Prucha stated that even by 1892 the IRA only counted 1,300 members
nationwide. However, Prucha also noted that even though the membership numbers were low, Welsh,
through the media, was able to appeal to a wide audience.

54 "The Sinews of War are Needed," Council Fire 10 (February 1887): 27.

55 "Conference of Indian Commissioners," Council Fire 9 (February 1886): 28.

262

allotment, not precede it. After heated discussions, the Council Fire editor agreed to
support the majority view, only if they reworded their resolution to state that treaty rights
would be maintained until, at some point in the future, when the Indians themselves
deemed it appropriate, tribal relations could be dissolved and lands divided.56 In effect,
this restatement was intended to provide Indian communities a more comfortable time
frame and a longer period of support from the federal government. Later, when the
Dawes Allotment Bill moved through the forty-ninth Congress and senators excluded a
critical clause requiring Indian approval of the allotment program prior to it being
instituted on individual reservations, Bland and the NIDA pressured the House to amend
it. They succeeded and the bill moved forward with an amendment "to prevent its
enforcement upon tribes of Indians until two-thirds of the men shall have signiﬁed their
consent)”;7 In addition, the NIDA successfully blocked the IRA-supported Sioux Bill in
March and in mid-1886, the allotment bill stalled-out in the House. Despite IRA efforts,
it would not come up for a vote by the time the session ended in August.58 Coupled with
the permanent suspension of Valentine McGillycuddy, these developments demonstrated
to the Indian Rights Association that they faced signiﬁcant opposition. While it had
already established itself as an inﬂuential reform organization, by late-1886 the IRA
began to prepare for what they believed would be a signiﬁcant battle over the future of

Indian policy.

 

5‘ Behrens, “In Defense,” 187-188.

57 "The General Severalty Bill..." Council Fire 9 (May 1886): 74. See also Behrens, “In
Defense,” 188; "Senator Dawes' Bill to Allot Lands. . .," Council Fire 9 (March 1886): 48-49, "There is at
this date. .." Council Fire 9 (July 1886): 110, "A History of the Policy of Coercion," Council Fire 10
(December 1887): 92, and Hagan, 65.

58 Behrens, “In Defense,” 189. See also "Opposing the Dawes Bill," Council Fire 9 (April 1886):
55-60, and "There is at this date..." Council Fire 9 (July 1886): 110.

263

Coercive Assimilationists in the 1880s and 18903: Herbert Welsh and the Indian
Rights Association

Herbert Welsh and the Indian Rights Association supported a coercive
assimilationist approach to Indian policy in much the same way as William Welsh and
the Board of Indian Commissioners had in the early-18703. These individuals argued that
the Bureau of Indian Affairs was a corrupt and mismanaged agency and supported the
movement for immediate land allotment, citizenship rights and responsibilities for Native
people, the abrogation of treaty appropriations, and the opportunity to open reservation
land for white settlement and economic development. These ideas emerged out of the
reform traditions already established in the Philadelphia area, a strong religious
. (Protestant, Episcopalian, and Evangelical) bias, direct political connections to powerful
legislators, and a vision of the state as a mechanism that should model the nation upon
ideals and principles that ﬁt their vision of a modern nation.59 These ideals and principles
were premised upon an expectation of the spatial, social, and political conﬁnement of

Indian communities. The Indian Rights Association employed a full-time lobbyist in

Washington DC, which was an important innovation in Indian policy reform, but also in

 

59 The reform ideology of the Indian Rights Association can best be understood as a combination
of traditional internal colonialism that involved economic exploitation and political domination with
elements of a "social control" mindset. For an excellent discussion of the viability of intemal colonialism
as a analytic concept see Gordon, "Internal Colonialism and Gender. " For two recent examples of
scholarship that use the "social control" concept to explain social reform in the late-nineteenth and early-
twentieth century see Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive
Movement in America, I 870—1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003) and Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing
"The People ".' The Progressive Movement and the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). Earlier scholarship also portrayed progressives as social
conservatives or "corporate liberals," including Samuel P. Hayes, "The Politics of Reform in Municipal
Government in the Progressive Era," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55 (1964): 157-169; and Gabriel Kolko,
The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, I 900-191 6 (New York: Free Press,
1963). Other scholarship has presented many of the shortcomings of progressives, including their racist,
irnperialist, and sexist orientations. See Gail Bedennan, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of
Gender and Race in the United States, I 880-1 91 7 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995) and Matthew
Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad,

I 876-] 91 7 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).

264

social policy reform more generally. They built relationships with senators and
congressmen who represented land/resource-hungry constituencies and corporations.60
Signiﬁcantly, they did not disregard the National Indian Defense Association or Thomas
Bland, as some scholars have assumed, but understood, particularly in 1886 and 1887,
that these opponents posed a real threat to their vision of Indian policy, and as such, led a
campaign in the newspapers and in the capital, to misrepresent them and their ideas. It is
due to their success in this process that the NIDA and Bland have been ignored in the
literature.

Born in 1851, Herbert Welsh grew up in a wealthy Philadelphia family. His
father, John Welsh, and his grandfather were both successful merchants, and his brother,
also named John, prospered in the railroad, steel, and banking industries.“ While
Herbert Welsh decided not to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors, he probably
received early encouragement for his philanthropic interests from his aunt and uncle,
William and Mary. William Welsh, the Episcopal missionary, served as the ﬁrst
president of the Board of Indian Commissioners, and Mary founded the Indian's Hope
Association. Herbert's father too, was well-known in Philadelphia for his public work.

He took a leading role in the creation of the Centennial Exhibition in 1876, and endowed

 

60 For more on the history of interest group lobbying see Clemens, The People ’s Lobby. Clemens
work typiﬁes some of the most interesting work being done in the American Political Development School
of Political Science and she was heavily inﬂuenced by the work of Theda Skocpol and Stephen Skowronek.
Clemens argued that in the late-nineteenth century interests were able to assert more inﬂuence because they
changed their "organizational repertoires." They became less radical in their demands and more willing to
compromise. They advocated speciﬁc policy reforms, monitored the behaviors of policy-makers, and
educated their membership on how to vote. The Indian Rights Association ﬁt this description; however,
they made these innovations prior to the agricultural, labor, and women's lobbyist groups in her study.

61 Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 2-3.

265

 

 

Figure 17: Herbert Welsh, ca. 1883
Source: William Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 2

266

a chair in literature at the University of Pennsylvania.62 Welsh's elite upbringing and
wealthy family background were typical of nineteenth-century, Eastern philanthropists.
In 1882, 31-year-old Welsh and his friend Henry Pancoast traveled to the Great
Sioux Reservation and visited several agencies in Dakota and Nebraska.63 Inspired by
the poverty and hardships of reservation life and impressed by the potential
forassimilation and interest they believed Native people had in mainstream society,
Welsh and Pancoast returned to the East prepared to create an organization to pressure
the government for changes in Indian policy. Welsh published a brief pamphlet that
recounted his trip and suggested changes in the government's approach to Indian
legislation. His account appeared to support the compensatory legislation and protection
of Indian community that Parker and Bland championed. Welsh wrote that the
"Government owes them such assistance [rations, etc.] in consideration of the many
injuries inﬂicted upon them, and the wholesale appropriation of their land. "64 He
followed this statement, however, by asserting that the government should hasten a
movement away from this compensatory program and instead provide "the giﬁ of

severalty," a United States law code to supersede tribal sovereignty, and "sound

 

62 Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 4-5. For more on the signiﬁcance of the Centennial
Exhibition see Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International
Expositions, 1876-I916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Rydell argued that World's Fairs
and Expositions serve as clear representations of America's imperial interests. It is interesting to note that
Herbert's father served a leading role in the creation of the Philadelphia exposition, as it was the ﬁrst in this
tradition. Between his father's inﬂuence and the inﬂuence of his uncle William, it is not surprising that
Herbert approached Indian policy from a perspective that supported continuing colonialism and coercive
assimilation.

63 Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 6-7 and Prucha, American Indian Policy, 138-139.
64 Herbert Welsh, Four Weeks Among Some of the Sioux Tribes of Dakota and Nebraska, together
with a Brief Consideration of the Indian Problem (Germantown, PA: Horace F. McMann, Steam-Power

Printer, 1882), 29. It may have been statements like this that encouraged Thomas Bland to offer the pages
of the Council Fire to the IRA initially.

267

" 65 While this ﬁnal suggestion might seem, on its surface, to be a point of

education.
similarity between his, Bland’s, and Parker’s programs, Welsh believed in a speciﬁc kind
of industrial or practical, and religious education that promoted immediate assimilation,
rather than the more well-rounded liberal and classic education program supported by the
others. Pancoast also wrote a pamphlet that recounted their trip, and like Welsh, he
argued that severalty, industrial education, and the usurpation of tribal sovereignty served
as the pathway through the barriers that separated Indians from mainstream society. 66
These pamphlets attracted a wide readership and indicated an increased interest in
Indian reform in several eastern cities, including Boston, New York, Washington DC,
and Philadelphia. In 1882, Herbert Welsh and his father John invited like-minded
individuals to found a reform organization based in their city.67 The meeting brought
together forty philanthropists, both young and old. The mayor of Philadelphia, Samuel
G. King presided and many of the leading citizens of the city attended, including a large
number of Episcopal and Quaker leaders. Interestingly, among the older attendees, many
were leaders in merchant, steel, oil, and railroad industries, including John Wanamaker,

H.H. Houston, and William Sellers, who was the president of the Midvale Steel Company

and the Edgemoor Iron Company."8 While it did not likely occur to the meeting

 

65 Welsh, Four Weeks, 30-31.

66 Henry Pancoast, Impressions of the Sioux Tribes in I 882, with Some First Principles in the
Indian Question (Philadelphia: Franklin Printing House, 1883), 6. The following year, Pancoast published
a second pamphlet espousing very similar ideas, although he added that making Indians full and immediate
citizens of the United States would help to terminate the difference legal status that he believed was such a
hindrance. See Henry Pancoast, The Indian Before the Law (Philadelphia, 1884), 8-9 and 21.

67 Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis, 139. See also Constitution and By-Laws of the
Indian Rights Association, (Philadelphia, 1884), IRAP, Series II. Organizational Records, 1882-1968, Reel
102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 - Subseries A, 3.

68 Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 17.

268

attendees, this observation stands out. That much of the initial interest and ﬁnancial
support came from industrial leaders who proﬁted from mineral and resource extraction,
and transportation development, suggests that perhaps business concerns were one of the
reasons why the IRA so vociferously supported allotment legislation and dispossession.
They nominated a former Minister to Turkey and Attorney General, Wayne MacVeagh,
as president. Herbert Welsh became the corresponding secretary and the executive
committee included Henry Pancoast, and Quaker leaders, Dr. James Rhoads, and Philip
Garrett.69 This committee would serve as the vanguard for the organization.

The IRA made two decisions early in their development that proved signiﬁcant
both for their reform agenda, and for the broader history of social reform in general. The
ﬁrst involved an institutional innovation adopted from the Quakers. During the Grant
administration they had employed a full-time agent in Washington DC to serve as a
contact and liaison to Congress and the Indian Bureau. At the suggestion of Dr. Rhoads,
Herbert Welsh contacted Charles C. Painter, an experienced activist for African
American rights and previously a faculty member at Fisk University. Interestingly,
Welsh and the IRA ﬁrst considered purchasing the Council Fire from the Blands and
installing Painter as the editor. Painter initially approved of this idea, provided that he
could get it "away from the Cora Bland atmosphere and surroundings."70 For ﬁnancial
reasons, however, the paper stayed with its current editors. Instead, the IRA hired Painter

to serve as their contact in Washington DC, full-time, a position that he held until his

 

69 Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 18-19; Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis, 139-
I40.

70 Painter to Armstrong, April 25, 1883, in Armstrong Papers quoted in Hagan, The Indian Rights
Association, 21.

269

 

death in 1895.7' Though the IRA did not purchase the Council Fire, they decided that
controlling and using the media would be one of their main tactics in shaping public
opinion. This second innovation was also signiﬁcant in the broader history of social
reform. To build public support and inﬂuence popular opinion, the IRA created a
Committee on Public Information. This committee served as one of the most important
components of the IRA strategy and through it, they maintained an active engagement in
public discourse through pamphlet literature, letters to the editors of national and regional
newspapers, and lecture tours.72 With these innovations in place, the organization
developed and publicized their platform.

Despite all of their rhetoric to the contrary, the IRA platform represented a
constellation of policy directives that was the product of earlier generations of coercive
assimilationist reformers, including most recently William Welsh and the Board of Indian
Commissioners. The general principles of their platform included support of allotment
legislation, "practical" education, the extension of civil law to the reservations (resulting
in the end of tribal sovereignty), and immediate citizenship — all premised upon Indian
conﬁnement. The marked difference between this program of reform and those
championed by earlier generations, had more to do with a timetable than actual policy
innovations. For the IRA, these reforms needed to be instituted immediately.

An 1885 pamphlet entitled, "What the Indian Rights Association is Doing,"

argued ﬁrst that the legislation they supported included stipulations for the "assignment

 

7] Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 23. At this time the IRA also hired Matthew Sniffen, a
seventeen-year-old Philadelphian to serve as clerk at their main ofﬁce. This was signiﬁcant because
Sniffen was a very talented organizational manager and it is because of his painstaking work that scholars
today have access to the complete ﬁle of the organization (which comprises 136 reels of microﬁhn).

72 Constitution and By-Laws, 4, 7.

270

of land in severalty to the Indian under such restriction as will secure him the enjoyment
of its title."73 As a component of this plank, the IRA sought to break apart tribal
communities. They suggested that the "organization of the Indians in tribes is, and has
been, one of the most serious hindrances to the advancement of the Indian. . .every effort
should be made to secure the disintegration of all tribal organization." To combat this
they believed that the federal government needed to cease recognizing Indian "political
bodies or organized tribes." They were also "thankful that at some agencies the issuing
of rations is being diminished or has already ceased."74 This practice, they believed,
would force Native people to assimilate more readily.

The IRA considered “practical education” a program "of the highest moment."75
It particularly supported the work of off-reservation boarding schools and publicly
advocated for additional federal funding at the Carlisle, Hampton, and Lincoln Institutes.
IRA leaders also supported reservation schools, and even argued in favor of allowing
Indian children to use their native languages, but only when it aided missionaries in their

efforts to teach the Gospel. Welsh argued "that promises of school-houses and teachers

for these ignorant people already contained in existing treaties should be speedily

 

73 What the Indian Rights Association is Doing, (1885), IRAP, Series II. Organizational Records,
1882-1968, Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 - Subseries A, 2.

74 Second Annual Address to the Public of the Lake Mohonk Conference In Behalf of the
Civilization and Legal Protection of the Indians of the United States, (1884), IRAP, Series II.
Organizational Records, 1882-1968, Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 - Subseries A, 6, 3.

75 What the Indian Rights Association is Doing, 2; and The First Annual Report of the Executive
Committee of the Indian Rights Association, (I 884), IRAP, Series II. Organizational Records, 1882- I 968,
Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 Reel 103 - IRA Printed Matter, Miscellaneous, 1885-1973, nd -
Subseries C, 6.

271

 

fulﬁlled."76 While this was most certainly a point at which the IRA and NIDA platforms
intersected, Welsh and his organization believed that education should hasten the process
of assimilation along a timetable established by the federal government, while Bland
asserted that it should assist Indian communities so they might incorporate themselves
into mainstream society at their own pace and on their own terms.

The IRA also argued that the state and territorial laws should be extended to
Indian reservations. In their ﬁrst annual report, Henry Pancoast argued that laws "be
enforced upon these Indian reservations, so that the Indians ﬁnally should exist not as a
separate and distinct people, but should become part of our own nationality."77 While
this might seem like a well-intentioned policy objective, what this suggestion asked for
was nothing short of an end to tribal sovereignty. Not only was this unconstitutional, as
had been addressed by the United States Supreme Court in several cases since the 18303,
but it also directly opposed the NIDA stance on sovereignty.78

In a brief pamphlet published in 1884, the IRA reafﬁrmed its goals and methods,
but several statements made by various IRA leaders, as well as some of the afﬁliations

they maintained calls into question their practices. The pamphlet stated that the IRA

 

76 What the Indian Rights Association is Doing, 2. See also Hagan, The Indian Rights
Association, 83-87.

77 What the Indian Rights Association is Doing, 2.

78 For more on sovereignty issues, see David Wilkins and Tsianina Lomawaima, Uneven Ground:
American Indian Sovereignty and Federal (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2001). In it the authors
examined United States legal doctrines and argued that tribal sovereignty had been fumly established in
legislative, juridical, and constitutional precedents. See also Jill Norgren, The Cherokee Cases: Two
Landmark Federal Decisions on the Fight for Sovereignty (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004),
and Sidney Harring, Crow Dog's Case: American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and United States Law
in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). In the latter, Harring argued
that in the late-nineteenth century, Indian communities experienced a comprehensive assault on tribal
sovereignty and self-government, that included the passage of the Major Crimes Act of 1885, the
establishment of Indian police by reservation agents, the creation of courts and codes of offenses by the
BIA, and the Dawes Act itself.

272

aimed "to secure for these 'Wards of the Nation' education, law, and a protected and
individual title to land." They also asserted that they sought "to make the Indian ﬁrst a
man and then a citizen, subject to the responsibilities and endowed with the privileges
accorded to all other citizens of the United States." Finally, they asked that "the
Government adopt toward the Indian a policy wise, ﬁrm, and continuous, neither
capricious nor vacillating, cruel nor sentimental."79 In their public rhetoric they argued
that their reform agenda had Indian interests at its foundation and that they were
motivated by altruistic philanthropic notions. As the debates with the NIDA developed,
however, the IRA appealed to legislators by reminding them that, unlike the NIDA's plan,
their policy agenda also stood to beneﬁt non-Natives in signiﬁcant ways. In an 1886
pamphlet distributed to congressmen, Welsh wrote that severalty was in "the interests,
not only of the Indians, but of the white settlers contiguous to Indian Reservations."80 An
examination of other IRA statements to legislators and correspondence reveals similar
examples. In 1885, the IRA sent a letter to President Grover Cleveland in an effort to
create an amendment to the Sioux Bill. The amendment was designed to protect non-
Native settlers whom had taken homesteads on the Crow Creek and Old Winnebago
reservations. In the letter they wrote that urgent notices had arrived from settlers “to the
effect that great injury will be done then when they are obliged to leace [sic] the lands
where they have settled." The IRA leaders argued that it was, "a matter of the highest

importance not only carefully to guard the rights of the Indians... but also to shield such

 

’9 The Indian Rights Association, (1884), IRAP, Series 11. Organizational Records, 1882-1968,
Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 - Subseries A, 1.

8° Synopsis of Three Bills Advocated, (1886), IRAP, Series 11. Organizational Records, 1882-
1968, Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 - Subseries A, l.

273

 

settlers as have entered the reservation in good faith from pecuniary loss."8| The fact that
much of the early interest and ﬁnancial support came from industrial leaders who stood to
gain from severalty legislation also suggests that the IRA may not have been concerned
strictly with Indian interests. Moreover, that much of the interest came from this group
may help to explain the coercive assimilationist ideology and support for dispossession.82
Beyond simple interest and ﬁnancial support, leaders in business and industry
actively approached the IRA about ideas and tactics to pressure legislators for
dispossession. Welsh and the IRA seemed open to these alliances. During the severalty
debates, the President of the Pierre (Dakota) Board of Trade, B.J. Templeton, wrote to
Welsh to discuss the upcoming legislative sessions involving allotment bills. Templeton
wrote that they were "making preparations for a renewed effort to secure passage of the

Dawes Bill." He told Welsh that his associates had "unlimited conﬁdence" in his

 

8! Indian Rights Association to President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, 14 June 1885,
IRAP, Series l-A - Incoming Correspondence, 1864-1968, nd, Reel 1.

82 Economic interest and political domination are the two key elements of internal colonialism
and the IRA's program, as well as their supporters demonstrated this quite clearly. In her recent article
historian Linda Gordon described internal colonialism as an analytical concept ﬁrst developed by Lenin
and Gramsci. For these theorists "it came to characterize intersecting economic exploitation and political
exclusion of a subordinated group that differed racially or ethnically from the dominant group - and all this
within a polity rather than across oceans or borders." (427-428) Furthermore, this concept is a metaphor
that focuses on the "similarities between classical colonialism - in which countries of the global north
occupied and exploited 'Third World' developing regions and peoples - and interanational relations of
domination in which exploitation coincided with racism and national chauvinism." (428) For the purposes
of this analysis it is important to recognize that this concept draws attention to the role racism played in the
creation of cheap labor, or in this case, cheap and easy access to natural resources (i.e. land, oil reserves,
minerals, etc.). In sum, it demonstrates the ways in which racism is at its most basic level an economic
phenomenon. While many scholars abandoned this concept in the face of newer trends in social and
cultural analysis, more recently a literature has emerged that attempts to revive and refashion these ideas to
incorporate newer interpretive schema. For a broader discussion of the history and development of this
concept, see Gordon, "Internal Colonialism and Gender," and Robert J. Hind, "The Internal Colonial
Concept," Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (July 1984): 543-568. For a discussion of how
this concept can be applied to Native American history see Cardell Jacobson, "Internal Colonialism and
Native Americans: Indian Labor in the United States from 1871 to World War 11," Social Science Quarterly
65 (March 1984): 158-171. For a more recent effort to apply this concept to Native American history in a
comparative framework see Christoph Strobe], "Contested Grounds: The Transformation of the American
Upper Ohio Valley and the South African Eastern Cape, 1770-1850," (PhD diss, University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, 2005).

274

 

judgment and that they wished to know if there was anything they could "do at the
present time or at anytime prior to the convening of Congress?" He also let Welsh know
that they had "lately arranged for an interview with the NW R. [Northwest Railway]
officials to have a plain 'Medicine talk' on the R[ailroad] R[oad] clause in the Bill."83
While the IRA found support and political alliances with business and industrial leaders,
the NIDA associated primarily with retired politicians, judges, and intellectuals. Perhaps
this was exactly what Bland and the NIDA meant when they told the Council Fire
readers that their opponents were "rich in material resources."

The IRA supported several pieces of legislation that featured severalty and
coercive assimilation among their main components. The Sioux Bill, the Coke Bill, and
the Allotment Act were among their main legislative goals.84 As they worked to build
public support for these bills the IRA created many important alliances with other Indian
reform groups, reform-minded individuals, and policymakers. Welsh, Rhoads, Painter,
and other IRA leaders often spoke at the annual Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends
of the Indian, held in upstate New York at the behest of Quaker school teacher, Albert K.
Smiley.85 The IRA also worked closely with the Women's National Indian Association,

the Boston Indian Citizenship Committee, and the Board of Indian Commissioners.86

 

83 BJ Templeton, President of the Pierre Board of Trade (Dakota) to Herbert Welsh, 20 October
1886,1RAP, Series IV. Herbert Welsh Papers, 1877-1934, nd, Reel 133 - 1877, Aug. - 1900, July.

84 See Synopsis of Three Bills Advocated, (I886).

85 For more on Lake Mohonk see Prucha, American Indian Policy, 143-144. See also Prucha,
Americanizing the American Indians; Larry Burgess, "We'll Discuss in at Mohonk," Quaker History: The
Bulletin of Friends Historical Association 40 (Spring, 1971): 14-28; Hoxie, A Final Promise, 12; and
Prucha, The Great Father, Chap. 24: The New Christian Reformers.

86 These organizations oﬁen held joint conferences in addition to the Lake Mohonk affairs. See
Circular, Resolutions passed at a joint Conference of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Indian Rights
Association, Woman's National Indian Association... (1885), IRAP, Series II. Organizational Records,

275

 

 

The members of the latter often nominated Welsh and other leaders for sub-committee
and advisory positions. Interested individuals like the Wahpetonwan Dakota physician,
Charles Eastman and his non-Native wife Elaine Goodale Eastman supported the IRA’s
educational stance, as did Carlisle Institute director, Richard Henry Pratt (although he
occasionally vacillated in his support of the organization)” The IRA also established
close relations with powerful senators such as Richard Coke and Henry Dawes.88
Together these individuals and organizations operated with a certain amount of
unanimity, as they all supported a coercive assimilationist ideology. However, the NIDA
represented a serious challenge to the success of their reform agenda and the IRA,
through their control of the media, launched a campaign that not only impacted the
immediate signiﬁcance that Bland and his organization had, but also colored the

historical record to such an extent that there still remains considerable misunderstandings

to this day.

 

1882-1968, Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 - Subseries A. Founded by Amelia Stone Quinton and
Mary Bonney, the WNIA played a signiﬁcant role in the intensiﬁcation of Indian policy reform efforts in
the 1870s and 18805. For more see Mathes and Lowitt, The Standing Bear Controversy. For a brief history
of the organization see Victoria Mathes, "Nineteenth Century Women and Reform: The Women's National
Indian Assocation," American Indian Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1990): 1-18; and Helen Wanken, "Woman's
Sphere and Indian Reform: The Women's National Indian Association, 1879-1901" (PhD diss., Marquette
University, 1981).

87 For more see Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 36-37. The IRA oﬁen republished
newspaper articles Elaine Goodale Eastman wrote and distributed them among other reformers and
legislators. See for example Elaine Goodale Eastman, The Senator and the School-House, (1886), IRAP,
Series II. Organizational Records, 1882-1968, Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 - Subseries A
[originally published in the New York Independent, 4 March 1886]. Pratt did not appreciate the IRA’s
support reservation schools, thus accounting for the occasionally strained relations.

88 In his article "The End of the Savage," historian Frederick Hoxie wrote that between "1880 and
1900 the Senate was probably the most inﬂuential branch of American government, and its members
among the most accomplished politicians of their day." See Frederick Hoxie, "The End of the Savage:
Indian Policy in the United States Senate, 1880-1900," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 55, no. 2 (1977): 157-
179, 158.

276

The IRA and their allies presented to the public, through newspaper articles and
pamphlet literature, a notion of Indian policy reform that not only appealed to a broad
array of non-Native interests, but also portrayed anyone who argued against them as
eccentric, or as espousing an agenda that would adversely effect the ﬁnancial interests of
non-Native people and the well-being of Indian communities. This is signiﬁcant in that it
not only hindered Bland's and the NIDA's efforts to inﬂuence policy in the late-
nineteenth century, but the IRA records and opinions of their opponents, meticulously
maintained by clerk Matthew Sniffen, continue to shape scholarly interpretations of this
period. While the NIDA could count on the Council Fire to support its campaigns for
compensatory legislation, the IRA noted more broadly that the "newspapers of the
country, both secular and religious, have not only commented favorably upon the aim and
methods of the Association, but have lent their powerful inﬂuence in support of that
reform in the management of Indian affairs which we are seeking to effect." Welsh
attributed their success to “the cordial and practical sympathy which has been manifested
by the editors of our leading papers."89 As a recognition for the important role this part
of the IRA tactics played, Welsh included a Special thank you to newspaper editors in
every IRA annual report.90

The IRA newspaper campaign proved Signiﬁcant at several key moments in the

debates between the organizations and their leaders. During the McGillycuddy

 

89 The Second Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the Indian Rights Association,
(Philadelphia, 1885), IRAP, Series II. Organizational Records, 1882-1968, Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets,
1883-1892 Reel 103 - IRA Printed Matter, Miscellaneous, 1885-1973, nd - Subseries C, 12. The IRA
frequently published and circulated pamphlets that either summarized or reprinted full articles from several
prominent newspapers. See for example The Opinions of the Press on the Need of Legislation for Indians
by the Present Congress, IRAP, Series II. Organizational Records, 1882-1968, Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets,
1883-1892 - Subseries A.

90 The First Annual Report, 9.

277

 

Figure 18: Matthew K. Sniffen
Source: William Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 27

278

controversy in the early-18805, the IRA and their associates sought not only to defend the
agent in the public press, but also constructed Bland as unworthy of the public trust. In
an 1884 letter to the editor of the Springﬁeld Republican, Henry Dawes referred to Bland
as "a very strange man, having some notions about Indians which seem kind, but on the
contrary making trouble and mischief." He "has the conﬁdence of no one in
Washington," Dawes continued, he "is as wild in his attempts to state facts as he is in his
ideas of what is the proper policy toward the race he thinks he serves." Finally, Dawes
characterized Bland’s approach to Indian policy as conservative and a stumbling block to
progress, stating that "chief Red Cloud and Dr. Bland are for the old order of things,
when chiefs ruled and made themselves rich out of the Indians."91

Later, after Bland publicly criticized IRA support of allotment legislation, Herbert
Welsh wrote a letter to the Boston Herald, "not so much for the purpose of correcting Dr.
Bland's misstatements - this were an endless task - but to make clear an irreconcilable
difference of opinion. . .which separates him and his association from Senator Dawes and
other prominent defenders of Indian rights." He wrote that Bland wanted to keep "the
Indian as he is, his tribal relations untouched, his reservations intact; and in opposing the
sale of his unused lands, upon no matter how equitable conditions, for white settlement."
While this was a very clear representation of Bland's reform program, one which

followed in Parker's tradition, and which would prove to be quite Signiﬁcant in the

twentieth century, Welsh disagreed and instead argued that NIDA “theory is prejudicial

 

9] Dawes, The Case of McGillycuddy, IRAP, Series II. Organizational Records, 1882-1968, Reel
102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 Reel 103 - IRA Printed Matter, Miscellaneous, 1885-1973, nd - Subseries
C, [originally published in the Springield Republican, 7 August 1884].

279

 

 

to the best interests of the Indians... it is wholly impracticable.” 92 It is hard to analyze
the immediate impact of this newspaper campaign, but it must have seemed effective to
Welsh and the IRA because they continued this tactic even aﬁer the Allotment Act
became federal legislation.

After the passage the General Allotment Act of 1887, Bland and other members
of the NIDA met with many Indian communities to strategize possible responses and the
best course of action. The NIDA planned to test the constitutionality of the law in the
Supreme Court and traveled to build support. After one of these receptions, the IRA
published accounts in several newspapers alleging that Bland asked the Indian
communities to support these efforts ﬁnancially. In a New York Tribune article, Welsh
claimed that the "Kiowas and Caddos, were glad to know they had friends in
Washington, but were doubtful about a friendship for which they were asked to pay."93
Welsh implied that the NIDA generally found little support among Indian communities
and among policymakers in Washington. C.C. Painter, the IRA lobbyist, also published a
pamphlet at this time, in which he argued that the NIDA was "managed and controlled by
two or three white men, who, while they assume the role of special defenders of the

Indians, appeal to them for support, and ask that a part of these same tribal funds shall be

devoted to this purpose." He concluded that because it looked for ﬁnancial support from

 

92 Herbert Welsh, The Indian Problem, IRAP, Series II. Organizational Records, 1882-1968, Reel
102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 Reel 103 - IRA Printed Matter, Miscellaneous, 1885-1973, nd - Subseries
C, [originally published in the Boston Herald 27 December 1886].

93 Herbert Welsh, Friendship that Asks for Pay, IRAP, Series II. Organizational Records, 1882-
1968, Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 Reel 103 - IRA Printed Matter, Miscellaneous, 1885-I973, nd
- Subseries C, [originally published in The New York Tribune 13 March 1887]. See also "Allotment of
Lands. Defense of the Dawes Indian Severalty Bill," IRAP, Series II. Organizational Records, 1882-1968,
Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 Reel 103 - IRA Printed Matter, Miscellaneous, 1885-1973, nd -
Subseries C, [originally published in the Boston Post 6 April 1887].

280

Indian communities directly, the NIDA could not be considered an unbiased
organization.94 Such actions were not typical of the NIDA and Thomas Bland, however.
In 1879, during the Standing Bear controversy, Bland publicly criticized the western
journalist Thomas Tibbles for creating undue discontent among the Poncas and for "using
the situation to solicit funds [from Indian people] to pay for a court test."95 Ultimately
though, the validity of the allegations was probably not that important to the IRA, the
allegations alone unsettled public opinions.

During this period, the IRA also propagated a story that three prominent members
of the NIDA signed a declaration endorsing the allotment program. These three
individuals included B. John Ellis, who, as a member of the House of Representatives,
served as the chairman of the sub-committee on Indian appropriations, General J .W.
Denver, a former commissioner of Indian Affairs and Colonel Samuel F. Tappan. In the
Boston Post, Welsh reported that "the [National] Indian Defense Association is not
harmonious in its membership." It brought together a committee of six members in an
effort to create a resolution to help stop the president from signing the Allotment Act into
law, but "three of the committee. . .signed a report declaring it an excellent measure."96
Bland responded in the Council Fire that it was actually only Tappan who felt this way

and that the Colonel tricked Ellis and Denver into signing the report. Tappan approached

Denver while the latter made preparations for holiday travel and told him simply that the

 

94 CC. Painter, The Dawes Land in Severalty Bill and Indian Emancipation, IRAP, Series II.
Organizational Records, 1882-1968, Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 Reel 103 - IRA Printed Matter,
Miscellaneous, 1885-I973, nd - Subseries C.

95 Behrens, “In Defense,” 76.

96 Allotment of Lands. Defense of the Dawes Indian Severalty Bill, 4.

281

 

report outlined the NIDA's view of the allotment bill. Denver later stated that the "Indian
Rights Association is managed in the interest of the whites, and is a deadly foe to the
Indians."97 Ellis related a Similar story and concluded he was "in full sympathy with the
National Indian Defense Association."98 Although they had been caught in a lie, Welsh
and the IRA never answered the NIDA response, but did, in May 1887 reprint the Post
article in the form of a pamphlet entitled "Allotment of Lands, Defense of the Dawes
Indian Severalty Bill." Similarly, Bland revealed that a correspondent for the St. Paul
Pioneer Press, ﬁiendly to the IRA, fabricated stories about the NIDA and its leadership.
Even though the story had been proven false, the damage was done as other newspapers
had already reprinted it.”

During these exchanges, the NIDA fought back in the pages of the Council Fire.
In a ﬁve-page response, Bland outlined the allegations Welsh made in articles from the
Boston Post, the New York Sun, the New York Post, and the Pioneer Press, and the
Friends Review. Bland argued that the allotment program was "the embodiment of
despotism and injustice," and that if "its true intent could be laid bare before the whole
country, the public conscience would revolt, and the great majority of the people would
demand its repeal." In his most direct reprisal Bland wrote that "Dawes and his
backers. . .exert their utmost abilities in efforts to clothe it [the severalty law] in a garb of

ﬁctitious virtue and to misrepresent the views of those true defenders of the rights of the

 

97 Thomas Bland, "Injustice Sustained by Falsehood," Council Fire 10 (April-May, 1887): 59.
98 Bland, "Injustice Sustained by Falsehood,” 60.

99 For more on this issue see Behrens, “In Defense,” 199.

282

 

Indians who oppose this infamous scheme of despotism and robbery." '00 Because this
response was published only in the Council Fire, however, it is difﬁcult to judge the
extent to which it reached a broad audience.

Bland and the NIDA were not the only individuals to experience character
assassination at the hands of Welsh and the IRA. This strategy was one they employed
often against other critics of the coercive assimilation approach and politicians who
sought to block the IRA's reform agenda. When Sarah Winnemucca, the outspoken
Paiute critic of forced assimilation, received a position as a teacher in a school run by .

Boston philanthropist Elizabeth P. Peabody, funded through private donations, C.C.

 

Painter, as an agent of the IRA, conducted investigations into her background and
personal life. In his vitriolic report, dripping with disdain, Painter stated that he believed
Winnemucca to be a very immoral person, who among other things, lived with a man
who was not her husband, gambled, fraudulently sold Indians' wheat, drank frequently,
and committed assault with a brick and a " grip sack." Painter concluded that she was an
"unmitigated fraud."101 Later, the IRA investigated the actions of Alice Fletcher. Even
though in this case the subject was a proponent of the IRA'S coercive assimilationist
stance, the results were quite similar to their earlier experience with Winnemucca. Hiram
Chase wrote to Welsh from the Omaha reservation that "among Miss Fletcher's favorites

is Frank La Flesche, who accompanied her in her work. . .camping out together

 

100 Bland, «Injustice Sustained by Falsehood," 57.

10' C.C. Painter to Herbert Welsh, 11 December 1885, IRAP, Series I - Correspondance, 1864-
1968, nd., Reel 1 - Series l-A - Incoming Correspondence, 1864-1968, nd. A "grip sack" was a small piece
of luggage or a hand-bag. For more on Sarah Winnemucca and her criticism of coercive assimilation see
Senier, Voices of A merican Indian Assimilation and Resistance; and Sally Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca
(Lincoln: University Nebraska Press, 2001). For more on this issue, see Hagan, The Indian Rights
Association, 85-86.

283

 

Figure 19: Charles C. Painter
Source: William Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 24

284

alone. . .and it is believed that undue intimacy existed between them." He also noted that

she fraudulently administered allotments. '02

When they turned their rhetorical attentions
toward policy-makers though, they ran into more signiﬁcant difﬁculties.

In 1886, Welsh publicly attacked Secretary of the Interior Lucious Q.C. Lamar
and a clerk at the Standing Rock agency arguing that they were both unﬁt for service in
Indian Affairs. In the latter case, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, J .D.C. Atkins wrote to
James McLaughlin, the Standing Rock Agent, and suggested that either Welsh's
allegations were untrue, or that it was McLaughlin's responsibility to report on the
conduct of his clerk. '03 That Atkins believed the allegations could be false demonstrated
his familiarity with the IRA'S media campaigns. Earlier that year, Welsh had published,
in the Civil Service Record, a statement that asserted the Secretary of the Interior Lamar
had mismanaged his position and the direction of Indian policy was improper. In a
scathing critique of his and the IRA'S methods, Lamar wrote a personal letter to Welsh
and asserted that although he believed Welsh held a “sincere desire” to help Indian
people, his method of making unfounded allegations in the popular press was damaging

and counterproductive. He argued further that Welsh could be more effective if he

consulted public officials directly.'°4 Unfortunately, these reprisals were not frequent and

 

‘02 Hiram Chase to Herbert Welsh, 27 May 1886, IRAP, Series IV. Herbert Welsh Papers, 1877-
1934, nd, Reel 133 - 1877, Aug.- 1900, July. For more on Alice Fletcher see Joan Mark, A Stranger in Her
Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988) and
Tong, Susan La F lesche Picotte.

103 JDC Atkins, Commissioner of Indian Affairs to James McLaughlin, Indian Agent, Standing
Rock Agency, 27 September 1886, IRAP, Series I - Correspondence, 1864-1968, nd., Reel 2 - Series l-A -
Incoming Correspondence, l864-1968, nd.

"’4 Secretary of the Interior Lamar to Herbert Welsh, 25 February 1886, IRAP, Series I -
Correspondance, 1864-1968, nd., Reel 1 - Series l-A - Incoming Correspondence, 1864-1968, nd. For a
similar exchange see Frank Wood to Herbert Welsh, 10 March 1887, Series I - Correspondence, 1864-
1968, nd., Reel 2 - Series l-A - Incoming Correspondence, 1864-1968, nd.

285

the IRA often pursued character assassination techniques in the newspapers unabated as
they did with the NIDA. That so few scholars understand the role and signiﬁcance that
Bland and the NIDA had in this era can be, to a large extent, explained by the IRA'S

successful media campaign against their opponents.

The Allotment Controversy and the Evolving Role of the State
Although the IRA, the NIDA, and their principle spokespeople drew from ideas

and traditions previously established in Indian reform, they expanded the scope and
signiﬁcance of their arguments in the 18803. As pressures for land and resources
mounted in the late-nineteenth century, the IRA and the NIDA framed their arguments in
such a way as to demonstrate that the direction of Indian policy was a critical front in the
development of the role and power of the state in this era. In signiﬁcant ways, Bland’s
and the NIDA’s vision of the state as a compensatory and protective agency differed
profoundly from that of Welsh and the IRA, who argued that it was the state’s
responsibility to shape the polity according to the values and interests of the elite.
Bland's National Indian Defense Association suggested that the question of allotment was
actually a question of the congressional power. By destroying the communally held
reservations and creating individually held land plots, allotment legislation would
actually remove Indian policy from federal jurisdiction and place it in the hands of the
states, thus undermining Congress' role. Or, by providing Congress with the authority to
distribute and sell lands owned by tribes as corporate bodies, allotment legislation could
set a precedent that would expand the federal power exponentially and perhaps allow

Congress in the future to do the same thing to municipalities or private corporations.

286

Welsh's Indian Rights Association tied allotment to a larger process of Civil Service
Reform and a connection between the state and the economy. They asserted that through
Civil Service Reform and the professionalization of the Indian Bureau, corruption would
cease, and furthermore, that it was the responsibility of the state to foster economic
development by opening land, resources, and markets for American entrepreneurs. By
expanding the framework of Indian policy debates, these reform organizations made the
Bureau of Indian Affairs a crucial meeting-ground upon which policy-makers and others
attempted to address issues related to role of state in this time period.

Examining the ways in which both the IRA and NIDA situated their arguments
about Indian reform reveals that, to both reform organizations, there was much more at
stake than just reservation policies. In the 1870s and 1880s interest in Indian policy
reform intensiﬁed across the nation, but it was not until reformers linked Indian policy to
broader concerns about federal power and individual liberty that large numbers of
senators became fully engaged in the cause. ‘05 The signiﬁcant Indian reformers of this
era were not, as they have frequently been portrayed, a marginal special interest group,
they spoke for a majority of the population and represented widely held viewpoints.106

In their ﬁght against severalty legislation, the NIDA attempted to frame their
arguments ﬁrst within the context of legal philosophy. In the October 1885 issue of the
Council Fire, Bland published the transcript of a minority report ﬁled in the House of
Representatives by Russell Errett of Pennsylvania, Charles Hooker of Mississippi, and

TM. Gunter of Arkansas. The report stated that the biggest ﬂaw in the allotment

 

105 Hoxie, "The End of the Savage," 165.

106 Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis, 167-168.

287

program was that Indian people would hold a paradoxical position before the law. Errett
and the other representatives stated that the ﬁrst part of the program treated the Indian "as
a man in giving him land and exacting from him the duty of maintaining himself upon
and off of it.” They continued, however, "as soon as we do this, we proceed to treat him
as a child, an infant, a ward in chancery, who is unable to take care of himself and
therefore needs the protecting care of the government."107 NIDA leaders believed, like
the representatives who ﬁled the report, that this program would set a poor and
contradictory precedent. In its rhetoric it would place Native people on an equal legal
footing with other members of the polity, but it would simultaneously disadvantage them
by withholding the franchise and Native people’s ability to elect leaders to represent
them. In addition, the allotment program took a similarly contradictory approach in
relation to economic development on the reservations by pressuring Indian farmers to
participate in commercial agriculture, while holding their proﬁts in trust accounts for
which they were not given complete access.

The more Signiﬁcant NIDA argument came in the form of an extended discussion
of the role and power of Congress and the impact that enacting allotment legislation
might have. Judge A.J. Willard, in an 1887 Council Fire article, informed readers that
the land rights of Native people “are vested in the tribe as a corporate body.” And
furthermore, that the tribes held political authority over these lands in the same ways that
private corporations and municipalities held their property. This was signiﬁcant, Willard
wrote, because, if Congress could arbitrarily "distribute the tribal property among the

members of the tribe," through the allotment program, then it could just as easily divide

 

'07 "How Shall the Indians Hold their Lands," Council Fire 8 (October, 1885): 139.

288

the lands held by municipal corporate charters or private companies "among the
individuals constituting such corporate bodies." With this precedent, Congress could
dispossess city governments and private landholders alike. Willard asked rhetorically if
the people of the United States were willing to extend such extraordinary powers to
Congress. He concluded most directly that the issue was no longer simply a
"question. . .of robbing the Indian, but it is a question whether Congress shall enter upon a
career of legislation that embodies the worst principles. . .upon the stability of social
institutions." '08
Even after Congress enacted the General Allotment Act, the NIDA continued to
connect Indian policy to broader political issues in the United States in published
materials. In an 1889 Council Fire article, Willard warned of the dangers inherit in the
allotment legislation, both for Indian people and non-Natives alike. The NIDA leaders
believed that it was Congress' responsibility to compensate for dispossession and the
history of colonization by providing opportunities for Indian communities, and
continuing to distribute treaty appropriations. Allotment, however, threatened the
balance of political power and authority between the federal and state levels. The
allotment program removed Indian affairs from congressional jurisdiction, because the
Constitution, which established this congressional authority, assumed the existence of
tribes, and once tribal land was allotted, the individual landholders would no longer
maintain tribal status. The new law, Willard asserted, "destroys the tribal condition and

assumes to place the Indian on the same footing within the States as their white citizens."

This development would not only unsettle the balance of federal and state power, Willard

 

'03 A.J. Willard, "The Dawes Land-in-Severalty Bill," Council Fire 10 (January 1887): 13.

289

continued, but the history of Indian-white contact demonstrated that when Native
communities fell under the jurisdiction of a state or territory, there was often little interest
by local politicians or settlers to protect them and their lands. He concluded that the
allotment program broke the "solemn trust" between Congress and Indian people, and
more importantly for his larger argument, undermined the power of Congress and the
federal government more generally.‘09

That Bland would support compensatory legislation and the protection of Indian
communities as distinct entities is not surprising when one considers his other reform
interests. Though far-reaching, Bland's reform associations all centered on the idea of the
government performing a compensatory role in some form or another. As a writer,
Bland's publications clearly reﬂected these interests, as did his membership in a number
of political parties and organizations that espoused these values. In the 18705 Bland
published Farming as a Profession (1870), How to Grow Rich (1879), and The Life of
Benjamin Butler (1879).110 The ﬁrst was a novel about a young man who became a
successful farmer, the second attacked monopoly, while the latter, though biographical in
nature, focused intently on the "greenback" issue. Bland believed that the federal
government should issue paper money, and vehemently opposed bankers. He argued that
as long as these people controlled the currency, farmers and the working classes would

always operate at a disadvantage in a capitalist society. It was the role of the state, Bland

 

'09 A.J. Willard, "Indian Jurisdiction After Division in Severalty," Council Fire 12 (March 1889):
46-4747.
“0 Thomas A. Bland, F arming as a Profession (Boston: Loring Publisher, 1870) and Thomas A.
Bland, M.D., The Life of Benjamin Butler (Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1879). See also Behrens,
M.A. Thesis, 79. He also published a short biography of the greenback party members of Congress in 1879
called The Spartan Band. '

290

suggested, to compensate for the short-comings of a capitalist economy. As a
greenbacker, Bland would have been interested in labor issues, supporting the eight hour
workday, the establishment of an income tax, and even women's suffrage. ' ” Bland also
took issue with railroad monopolies, this in fact may have dovetailed nicely with his
efforts at Indian reform, and was the subject of his fourth and ﬁfth books entitled The
Reign of Monopoly (1881) and How to Grow Rich (1881).”2 In 1892 he turned back to
his interest in banking and published Esau: or the Bankers Victim, in which he attacked
the National Bank, and People 's Party Shot and Shell which addressed the reform agenda
of the upstart populist party.l '3 His interest in populism also easily ﬁt with his
compensatory ideology. ' '4

AS the NIDA sought to expand the framework of its arguments, so too did the
IRA, and Herbert Welsh's interests in Indian policy ﬁt well with his other reform interests
and ideology. Welsh once wrote that the members of the IRA believed that "this Indian

question, like the national evil of slavery in the past or the corruption of the Civil Service

 

“I For more on the National Greenback Party see Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era: A Social and
Political History of American Finance, 1 865-18 79 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964); Gretchen
Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

“2 Thomas A. Bland, Reign of Monopoly (Washington DC: Rufus H. Darby, Printer and
Publisher, 1881). Darby also published the Council Fire. See also Behrens, M.A. Thesis, 80. For more on
the signiﬁcance of railroads in United States history see John Stover, American Railroads (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1961); Gabriel Kolko, Railroads and Regulations, 1877-1916 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1965);Sarah Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed
American Life, 1829-1929 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997); and Barbara Welke, Recasting American Liberty:
Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, [865-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2001)

”3 See Behrens, “In Defense,” 80. Thomas A. Bland, People ’s Party Shot and Shell (Chicago:
Charles M. Kerr and Co., Publishers, 1892).

”4 For more on populism see Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in

America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

291

in the present, was a great national question."l ‘5 As they constructed their arguments in
support of the coercive assimilationist ideology, they sought to demonstrate how
important Indian affairs were to the broader nation by connecting it to civil service
reform, and to the issue of governmental regulation of the economy. However, like other
elements of their work, there was an underlying ideology that drove their rhetorical
expansions.

In the 18805, partly motivated by the patronage politics of the Cleveland
administration and bolstered by the passage in 1883 of the Pendleton Act, Welsh became
a devoted proponent of civil service reform and its extension to the Indian ofﬁce.l '6 He
solicited information from and built ﬁiendships with several important leaders of the
movement, including Dorman B. Eaton, the man who drafted the Pendleton Act, Richard
H. Dana, the editor of the Civil Service Record, and George W. Curtis, the editor of
Harper's Weekly and president of the National Civil Service Reform League (N CSRL). ' 17
Curtis and Welsh worked closely together and in the mid-18805 he created a committee
that included Welsh, Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of the Interior, Charles Schurz.
This committee worked to coordinate strategies between the NCSRL and the IRA. Early

victories for Welsh and the IRA on this front came when the National Civil Service

Reform League passed a resolution in 1886 to advocate the application of civil service

 

”5 Constitution and By-Laws of the Indian Rights Association, 3.

“6 The Pendleton Act established the United States Civil Service Commission and is understood
as the ofﬁcial end of the patronage politics. The impetus for this legislation was Garﬁeld's assassination by
Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled ofﬁce-seeker. However, it is also important to note that many politicians
initially criticized this law signiﬁcantly.

“7 For more see Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 81-82 and 1 13-1 14. That Welsh sought

out allies among editors is signiﬁcant in that it ﬁt nicely with the IRA'S tactic of using and controlling the
media.

292

rules to clerks in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and when the "Friends" passed a similar
resolution at Lake Mohonk that year.118 In his speech at Lake Mohonk, which the IRA
published in the form of a pamphlet, Welsh told the stories of Morris A. Thomas and Dr.
J .J .S. Doherty, two men who had been accused of fraud, yet subsequently appointed to
important positions in the Indian Bureau - Indian Inspector and Government Physician.
He also cited a story concerning General R.H. Milroy, ex-Agent from Yakima Agency.
According to Welsh, Milroy had been forced to resign for political reasons and that
conditions at the reservations had deteriorated considerably as a result. Welsh concluded
that to protect against such actions, "the reform civil service spirit, and, in some Shape,
the civil service rules Should be extended to the system which controls the appointment
and removal of inspectors, agents, chief clerks, farmers, and other subordinates in the
Indian service."l '9 Interestingly, Milroy's personal letters to Welsh, which he wrote to
solicit help in appealing his removal, were ﬁlled with vitriolic statements commenting
upon the ﬁtness of his replacement. Among his other complaints, Milroy argued that the
new agent was a Catholic and that he smoked tobacco, thus making him unsuitable for
the position. In addition, he referred to the Secretary of the Interior Lamar, a Democrat,
as a "darn Reb."120

While Milroy's comments, on their surface, bore the mark of an emotional

reaction to what he perceived to be an unjust termination, the fact that he framed his

 

] 18 Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 81.

“9 Address of Herbert Welsh, Corresponding Secretary of the Indian Rights Association,
Delivered before the Mohonk Indian Conference, October I 4th, 1886, IRAP, Series II. Organizational
Records, 1882-1968, Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892 - Subseries A 2-4.

'20 General R.H. Milroy to Herbert Welsh, 17 September 1885, IRAP, Series I-A - lncoming
Correspondence, l864-1968, nd, Reel 1.

293

solicitations for Welsh's aid by impugning his replacement’s character is revealing. At
several moments throughout his career, Welsh, a staunch Republican, demonstrated an
anti-Catholic bias, particularly in the role of the Catholic Church in Indian educationm
As the IRA leader researched the history of civil service reform in the United States and
Great Britain, he came upon the idea of competitive examinations. In England, one of the
most signiﬁcant features of the new system, Welsh observed, was "that it substituted an
open competitive examination, as a means of testing the qualiﬁcations of those seeking
place in the Civil Service of the Government, for the former methods of inﬂuence and
pressure."122 Through civil service reform, Welsh believed that it was possible to shape
the policy agenda and administration of the Indian Bureau by controlling who became

'23 Welsh believed that these examinations could serve as gateway,

administrators.
through which only properly-educated, and ideologically homogenous individuals would
pass. Signiﬁcantly, Herbert’s uncle William Welsh and the Board of Indian

Commissioners tried to control who had access to political power within the BIA in the

 

‘21 Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 88-89.

‘22 Herbert Welsh, A Sketch of the History of Civil Service Reform in England and in the United
States, (1889), IRAP, Series II. Organizational Records, 1882-1968, Reel 102 - IRA Pamphlets, 1883-1892
- Subseries A, 6. Welsh also supported V.T. McGillycuddy whole-heartedly. Prior to his removal,
McGillycuddy sent a letter to Welsh outlining some of the actions the BIA had taken at his agency,
including removing his school superintendent and matron. He stated that they "New Englanders,"
seemingly a compliment that Welsh would have understood. The replacement superintendent, he stated,
was "a single man" and "a good democrat," seemingly questioning his background and similarly he asserted
that the new matron was from the "solid south" and the daughter of an "ex-guerilla." He also mentioned
that he had been sent a new assistant teacher who "half-demented" and wandered "around the building
talking to herself." See V.T. McGillycuddy to Herbert Welsh, 17 September 1886,1RAP, Series l-A -
lncoming Correspondence, 1864-1968, n.d., Reel 2.

'23 For more on the Civil Service in United States History and Civil Service Reform, see Ronald
N. Johnson, The Federal Civil Service System and the Problem of Democracy: The Economics and Politics
of Institutional Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Patricia Ingraham, The Foundation
of Merit: Public Service in American Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and
David A. Schultz and Robert Moranto, The Politics of Civil Service Reform (New York: P. Lang Press,
1998).

294

18705, most notably in the allegations made against and subsequent trial of Ely S. Parker.
Welsh would have been familiar with this tactic and through civil service reform, he
attempted to control and shape Indian policy through the methods by which the BIA
made appointments. In the late-18805 and 18905, civil service reform began to occupy
more and more of Welsh's time and he shiﬁed the direction of the IRA to incorporate
these ideas.

The IRA also argued for a signiﬁcant expansion of governmental intervention into
the economy. In his presentation to the "Friends of the Indian" assembled at the seventh
annual Lake Mohonk Conference, C.C. Painter argued that in order for the allotment
program to be successful, the government should help create contracts between the Indian
allotees and landless white men. The white men would help break and cultivate the land
for a period of years, while the Indians would work as paid laborers. At the end of the
period, the white men would move on and the Indians would keep the ready-made
farms. '24 Two years earlier Painter had written a pamphlet entitled "The Dawes Land in
Severalty Bill and Indian Emancipation," and asserted that by breaking apart tribal
relations, creating individual farms for commercial agriculture, and disposing of
"surplus" lands to white settlers, the government would not only hasten the assimilation
process, but stimulate an economic windfall” It appears that the question of the
viability of farming on the reservations never signiﬁcantly entered into the IRA leaders

thinking, but after the passage of the Allotment Act, many Indian agricultural

 

‘24 C.C. Painter, Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of
Friends of the Indian (1889), 84-89. This source is part of an edited collection of documents of the
"Friends." See Prucha, Americanizing the American Indian, 114-121.

125 CC. Painter, The Dawes Land in Severalty Bill and Indian Emancipation.

295

 

developments failed, for a variety of reasons, and the Indian people leased their lands to
non-Native farmers, homesteaders, and mineral extraction companies.126 Nonetheless,
when they made these arguments, IRA leaders envisioned a greatly expanded federal
bureaucracy with powers previously unseen. Creating contracts between landholders and
laborers or lessees, would be a state function directly within the economic structures of
various regions, a power considered dangerous by some. By considering an expanded
federal bureaucracy, however, the IRA'S ideology was very typical of the larger social
and political reform movements of the Progressive Era.

The IRA agenda also ﬁt nicely with Welsh's other reform interests. Among other
causes, Welsh participated in the Philadelphia and National Municipal Leagues, working
to create more open and honest city governments. He also helped to found a
Pennsylvania forestry association, served as a vice-president for a national Forestry
Congress, worked in the Law and Order Society of Philadelphia, sat on the Board of
Managers for the City Parks Association, and played a key role in the Culture Extension
League, an organization created to improve recreational facilities for the poor. He also
participated in the local Board of Education and in the Universal Peace Union.127 One
key factor that united all of the reform organizations in which Welsh participated was that
they all engaged in creating a physical and human environment that they felt was most
appropriate for United States society. In Indian policy this ideology manifested itself in

the form of an approach characterized by dispossession and the spatial, social, political,

 

'26 See Leonard Carlson, Indians, Bureacrats, and Lands: The Dawes Act and the Decline of
Indian Farming (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1981); and Emily Greenwald, Reconﬁguring the
Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and the Dawes Act (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 2002).

127 For more on Welsh's other reform interests see Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 49, 98.

296

and economic conﬁnement of Indian people. Welsh and the IRA sought to expand the
framework within which they situated their arguments about Indian reform, and in doing
so, they appealed to like-minded individuals and organizations. Through their efforts and
through a number of contingent factors, their vision of Indian policy and role of the state

came to dominate the era.

IRA Victory
With the passage of the Dawes General Allotment Act in 1887 the IRA claimed

victory over the NIDA in this period of Indian policy reform. A program of coercive
assimilation coupled with dispossession would guide the BIA for most of the next 50
years. The IRA victory demonstrated several important insights into Indian policy
reform, late-nineteenth-century reform movements more generally, the development of
the post-Civil War state, and the signiﬁcance of historical contingencies.

Although the debates in the House of Representatives seemed mild compared to
the debates between reformers leading up to that moment, the ﬁnal version of the general
allotment legislation in February 1887 represented a wide political alliance and diverse
eastern and western political concerns. Some commentators understood allotment as an
idealistic, yet practical program, while others "saw the law as an opportunity for the
Federal government ﬁnally to rid itself of its obligations to the Indians."128 The IRA and
the "Friends of the Indian" had been incredibly successful in shaping the terms of the
allotment debates and in drawing together diverse interests through their lobbying tactics.
By employing a full-time lobbyist, in the person of CC. Painter, they were able to keep

Indian issues in the forefront of the minds of congressmen and legislators. This

 

128 Hoxie, "The End of the Savage," 169.

297

technique had not yet developed into a mainstay among the broader reform organizations,
as it would in the 18905 and after the turn of the twentieth century, and it is signiﬁcant
that this method was used so effectively ﬁrst in Indian policy reform. Furthermore, the
IRA'S ability to control and manipulate newspaper coverage, through letters to the editor
and through interviews with journalists, helped to establish their agenda as the central
body of thought on the "Indian Question." The IRA also drew together several factions
of the population and appealed to more individuals and organizations that otherwise may
not have considered Indian policy among the most pressing issues facing the nation.
Though the NIDA often used the Council Fire to counter the IRA claims, as a narrowly
deﬁned reform journal, the paper did not enjoy the same wide readership as larger
regional periodicals.

That the allotment law became a federal policy directive in the late-18803 also
provides insight into the ideologies of geographic expansion and of the development of
the state by the late-nineteenth century. The coercive assimilationist framework of the
allotment program was the logical extension of the efforts of William Welsh and the
Board of Indian Commissioners during the Peace Policy Era, but bureaucratic
mechanisms of the BIA had not yet developed to the point that the machinery of
allotment would have been possible. Also, federal policymakers were not yet ready to
institute such overt state-sanctioned expansionist policy, even though proposals for such
legislation had circulated in Washington DC. in the 18705 and before. By the late-18805
though, the BIA had developed bureaucratically and coupled with the recent interest in
territorial expansion, helped make allotment a political reality. In the post-Civil War era,

the settlement of western territories, debates about the potential annexation of Canada,

298

parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as the heightened interest in and
eventual colonization of Hawai’i, all developed within a similar time period and all help
to demonstrate the evolution of thought concerning state-structured expansion.‘29 This
was also a moment when policymakers were increasingly open to accepting new and
experimental policy reforms, perhaps more so that at any time in the past.'30 It is
signiﬁcant that it was within this complex social and political milieu in which the
coercive assimilationist program became a federal law.

One ﬁnal element, however, comprises this story. At the critical moment that the
state began to implement allotment legislation, the NIDA's momentum, already smarting
from its political defeat, but resigned to challenge the law in the courts, faltered due to a
tragic accident. Shortly after the passage of the Dawes Act, Bland and the NIDA vowed
to pursue a legal recourse against the congressmen who had supported the bill. Bland
wrote that the bill was "despotic, unjust and unconstitutional," and that "we have
protested against its enforcement, and we are vigilantly and anxiously awaiting an
opportunity to make our protest before the Supreme Court." He knew that they faced

sawy political opponents and noted that the Secretary of the Interior speciﬁcally

 

'29 For more on the Indian Wars and settlement of the Western Territories, see Utley, The Indian

Frontier of the American West; Utley, Frontier Regulars; Wooster, The Military and United States Indian
Policy; Wooster, Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army; Buecker, Fort Robinson and the
American West; and McChristian, F ort Bowie, Arizona. In 1865-1866 the idea of an annexation of Canada
played a key role in the development of the confederation movement in Canada. In 1866 an annexation bill
even passed the House of Representatives. For more on Canadian confederation see Martin, Britain and
the Origins of Canadian Confederation; Moore, I 86 7; and Vaughan, The Canadian Federalist Experiment.
For more on United States involvement in Latin America and the Caribbean in post-Civil War Era see
Nelson, Almost a Territory; Topik, Trade and Gunboats; Webb, Impassioned Brothers; Healy, James G.
Blaine and Latin America; Johnson, A Hemisphere Apart; and Holden and Zolov eds., Latin America and
the United States: A Documentary History. For more on the annexation of Hawai'i see Coffrnan, A Nation
Within and Silva, Aloha Betrayed. For more general studies of American Imperialism in this time period
see Paolino, The Foundations of American Empire and LaFeber, The New Empire.

130 For more on this idea of openness see Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a

Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

299

hindered the NIDA attempt to test the constitutionality of the program by initially
applying it only to small reservations that fell under the jurisdiction of executive order, or
to those that had allotment clauses in their individual treaties with the United States. '3 '
This way, he did not actually enforce the allotment law, and the NIDA could not ﬁeld a
test case. "Something besides protest and argument and appeals to the pubic sentiment
through the Council Fire is needed now," Bland asserted and he concluded "to go into the
lecture ﬁeld and make a determined effort to correct public opinion on this question, and
also to raise a fund sufﬁcient to enable the National Indian Defense Association to meet
the expense of defending the legal rights of the Indian tribes in the United States
coru'ts."132 In early May, Thomas and Cora Bland leﬁ Washington DC on an east coast
tour of prominent reform centers including Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. The
trip seemed to be useful, particularly in Boston. "[W]e felt quite encouraged with the
success attending our efforts to get Boston right on the Indian question." ‘33
They left Boston on June 20, encouraged by the positive reception they
experienced. The next day however, tragedy struck. The limited express train from
Washington collided with the Blands' homeward bound train at Havre de Grace,
Maryland. One can only imagine the terror as their passenger car was "telescoped by the

locomotive of the other train." The only other passenger sitting ahead of them was killed

instantly, and the Blands "were badly scalded and otherwise injured, but escaped through

 

'3 ' "A History of the Policy of Coercion," Council Fire 10 (December 1887), 92.
'32 "A Special Word to Our Readers," Council Fire 10 (April-May 1887), 66.

133 "Report of Work During the Summer," Council Fire 10 (November 1887), 74. See also
Behrens, “In Defense,” 200, and "Forgotten Challengers," 151.

300

a window of the car." '34 He would later note that he could not remember how they
escaped because both he and Cora "had no conscious recollection of the circumstances."
They spent the rest of the year and all of 1888 in recovery, suffering from bouts of "brain
fever" and "nervous prostration," and while they continued lecturing, their suffering
bodies prevented them from writing or editing the Council Fire. The momentum that had
been established ground to a halt because the Blands served as the conduit through which
NIDA members communicated and were the driving force behind this movement. It is
impossible to know what the outcome may have been had Bland and the NIDA been
successful in bringing a case before the United States Supreme Court to test the
constitutionality of the allotment law. For the student of federal Indian policy though,
this episode is satisfying in the sense that Bland's and the NIDA's efforts demonstrate that
there were individuals who, drawing from a tradition of dissent initiated by Ely S. Parker
and others a generation previous, fought against the idea of coercive assimilation and
dispossession. It is also frustrating, however, to know that the possibility existed for this

history to have unfolded differently if not for a tragic accident.

The generation of reformers who emerged after the Peace Policy era adopted and
expanded the reform agendas and policy platforms of the previous period. In these
debates Thomas Bland and the National Indian Defense Association lobbied for
compensatory legislation and supported the protection of Indian communities as distinct
entities - an approach popularized by Ely S. Parker. Simultaneously, Herbert Welsh and

the Indian Rights Association supported the conservative, coercive assimilationist

 

'34 "Homeward Bound - A Railroad Collision," Council Fire 10 (November 1887), 77.

301

ideology that had been the mainstay of William Welsh and the Board of Indian
Commissioners. By connecting their Indian policy agendas to larger issues in state
development and social reform, however, this generation of activists fostered a growth of
public interest in Indian affairs. Their actions demonstrate that scholars, in order to
understand the complexities of this era in United States history, must consider the role of
the Bureau of Indian affairs as a meeting ground for ideas about role of the state and its
relationship to individuals, and how these ideas served as forbearers of later reform
trends.

In his institutional history of the Indian Rights Association, historian William
Hagan wrote that while its development was interesting, the National Indian Defense
Association, "never seriously rivaled the IRA." '35 Historian Francis Prucha was slightly
more circumspect and suggested that the NIDA "appeared to have some inﬂuence in high
places." This chapter has demonstrated that in the debates leading up to the passage of
the general allotment law, the NIDA mounted a signiﬁcant opposition to the IRA. In
their rhetoric and reform tactics, Thomas Bland and the NIDA exposed some of the
inconsistencies of the IRA platform and revealed the coercive assimilationist ideology of
its leadership, especially in the persons of Herbert Welsh and Charles C. Painter. Prucha
concluded that "Bland's views, if not his methods, look better in the perspective of time

than many of those of the united humanitarian reformers [the IRA and the 'Friends']."[36

 

‘35 Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 37.

'36 Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis, 166, 167-

302

Conclusion
John Collier and the Backlash against Coercive Assimilation
The coercive assimilationist reformers won the policy reform battles of the late-
nineteenth century, and the resulting policy agenda, founded upon dispossession, moved
forward with a brash intensity. Though amended several times, in an effort to include
additional reservations within its framework, the allotment program profoundly shaped
Indian history between the late-18805 and the mid-19305. By the end of this period, the
disruption and despair that dispossession created within Indian communities - results
hinted at by the developments Ely Parker witnessed during the Ogden land dispute at the
Tonawanda reservation in the 18405 and 18505 - became painfully apparent when the
federal government commissioned a study of Indian life and governance by the Institute
for Government Research in 1928. Known to historians as the Meriam Report because of
its editor, Lewis Meriam, The Problem of Indian Administration revealed the outcome of
almost ﬁfty years of dispossession and coercive assimilation legislation. This report
noted that the infant mortality rate among Indian people was double the national average.
It also found that two-thirds of Native people earned fewer than one hundred dollars per
year, that only about one third of Native people were literate, and that Indians died from
tuberculosis at a rate seven times that of the general population. Finally, of the
155,632,312 acres Native people held in 1881, only 52,651,393 remained in Indian hands
in 1933. Although it was not tabulated, non-Native people, especially ranchers,

homesteaders, land developers, and farmers, proﬁted greatly from the opportunity to

303

purchase newly opened reservation lands at a minimum. The federal government too,
used these ﬁmds to defray some of the costs of Indian governance.l

But the Indian-centered opposition to coercive assimilation, with its notions of
compensatory and protective legislation did not disappear. After the publication of the
Meriam Report, interest in Indian policy reform once again intensiﬁed. In 1933,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed a reform-minded Indian advocate named John
Collier as Commissioner of Indian Affairs and his administration created and
implemented a system of compensatory legislation that reﬂected Roosevelt's broader
social and economic policy reform agenda. Collier became interested in social
policymaking ﬁrst through his work with immigrant communities in New York and Los
Angeles, but in 1921 he visited Taos Pueblo in New Mexico and had a transformative
experience. Inspired by what he believed was the ideal pre-modem human culture among
the Indians of the southwest, Collier began working, with the assistance of such women
as Stella Atwood of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, to improve Indian health
care and other social programs. He also founded a reform organization called the
American Indian Defense Association.2 The Indian New Deal, Collier’s reform
campaign on the federal level in the 19305, was the culmination of twelve years of ﬁrst-

hand work among Indian people. As Commissioner of Indian Affairs, he reversed the

 

I For more see The Brookings Institution, Institute for Government Research, The Problem of
Indian Administration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1928). See also Hoxie, The Final
Promise, 242; Greenwald, Reconﬁguring the Reservation, 146. The Dawes Act itself was only one of the
methods by which Indian were dispossessed in this period, but the land cessions that also occurred were
part of the general framework of dispossession and coercive assimilation in this period.

2 Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation, 124-129. There is no indication that Collier knew Thomas
Bland personally, or that he knew the history of Indian reform in the 18805. The fact that his reform
organization’s name resembled so closely, that of Bland’s, however, suggests that there might have been
some connection.

304

coercive assimilationist policies of the allotment era, beginning with the passage of the
Wheeler-Howard or Indian Reorganization Act in 1934. This act "successfully ended
land allotment, restored surplus land at various reservations, and provided funds for

"3 Collier sought to reshape the colonialist ideologies of

purchasing new real estate.
policymakers and reformers by changing the overtly hostile attitude many of these people
held (as had their predecessors) toward customary Native American cultures and
practices. He saw in Native culture a beauty and harmony that had been lost within
modern society, and he vowed to protect and foster it. While Collier may have suffered
from an overly romanticized and simplistic view of Native American culture, he played a
key role in securing the passage of the Johnson-O'Malley Act, which allowed the
Secretary of the Interior to "provide money for local assistance in the areas of Indian

"4 He also created a mechanism by

health, education, agriculture, and social welfare.
which Indian communities could assert rights of self-government by writing constitutions
of their own, electing ofﬁcers, and adopting law codes that the federal government then
supported and protected. Through this general program of reform and through speciﬁc

legislation Collier established a compensatory system that both Ely Parker and Thomas

Bland had attempted to develop within earlier and different political climates.

 

3 Kenneth R. Philip, John Collier's Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920-1954 (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1977), 186.

4 Philip, John Collier's Crusade, 133. For more on Collier, his background, and his reform
agenda, see Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation; and EA. Swartz, "Red Atlantis Revisited: Community and
Culture in the Writings of John Collier," American Indian Quarterly 18 (1994): 507-531.

305

Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Indian Policy Reform
The mid- and late-nineteenth century in Indian affairs represented a period of

contestation and complexity during which divergent and competing voices attempted to
speak for Indian people and direct Indian policy. At particular moments — in the
immediate aftermath of the Civil War and again in the 18805 — supporters of policies
designed to protect Indian communities as distinct entities, or to provide Native peoples
with opportunities, money, and goods, in an effort to balance dispossession and
compensate for a history of colonialism, confronted a group of conservative, zealously
Christian, elitist reformers who championed indigenous conﬁnement and coercive
assimilation within a larger context of United States expansion. The language and
actions of these individual reformers and reform organizations revealed the intersections
of race, class, and gender discourses within Indian/white relations at mid-century. This
period of contestation and complexity in Indian policy reform was signiﬁcant in several
ways.

First, the evolution of Indian policy between the Civil War and the end of the
nineteenth-centlu'y both shaped and reﬂected larger issues of state development and
colonial action. While the federal government had engaged in colonial actions prior to
the Civil War on a limited basis, often at the request of and under pressure from land
speculators, mineral and resource extraction industries, and enterprising farmers, as
represented by the Ogden land dispute at the Tonawanda reservation, after the war the
state became an active force in United States colonialism through its land allotment and
coercive assimilation programs embodied in the General Allotment Act of 1887 and its

corollary programs. An important and politically powerful group of coercive

306

assimilationist reformers, led in the 18705 by William Welsh and Board of Indian
Commissioners, and in the 18805 and 18905 by Herbert Welsh and the Indian Rights
Association, aided this process by articulating a policy agenda that focused on forced
land allotment and sought to replace customary cultural and political practices within
Indian communities with structures and values based on Euro-American models. They

also wanted to develop a system of mandatory Christian education for Indian youth,

 

while encouraging their parents to become involved in the market economy. All of these
programs operated within the premise of and under the assumption of total Indian
conﬁnement. The progression of this policy agenda was not the harmonious, linear
development, constructed in previous interpretations.

Second, this period in Indian policy reform represented the emergence of a

 

signiﬁcant tradition of dissent within mainstream systems of governance. Beginning in
the Reconstruction Era, an oppositional framework, previously apparent in the work of
some Native and non-Native political commentators outside of the structures of
government, developed within mainstream systems of governance - ﬁrst in the work of
Ely Parker in the late-18605 and early-18705, then in the reform campaign of Thomas
Bland and the National Indian Defense Association in the 18805. During the Ogden land
dispute Parker came to understand, at a young age, the profound disruptions that
dispossession and colonial action could cause for an Indian community. He also
understood, though, that as the nineteenth century progressed, that United States
geographical expansion and economic development would likely continue, but he
designed a reform agenda that sought to minimize the disruptions this process caused for

Native people. He did this by attempting to create policies that would provide

307

educational and employment opportunities, as well as money and goods in an effort to
compensate for the disruptions related to dispossession, while at the same time protecting
Indian communities as distinct entities. He believed that these opporttmities could help
Native people assimilate into mainstream society on their own terms, in their own time.
Although Parker’s reform campaign ended in disappointment and he no longer worked
actively in federal policymaking into the 18705, his oppositional framework emerged
again in the work of Thomas Bland and the NIDA.

Third, Ely Parker’s life and career in the nineteenth century problematizes the
existing interpretations that construct Indian leaders who worked within mainstream
systems of governance as indigenous “sellouts.” While it is true that Parker served as
Commissioner of Indian Affairs during a period in which notions of Indian conﬁnement
evolved, and even that he suggested or supported certain reforms and programs, like the
transfer of the BIA from the Interior Department to the Department of War, and the
movement to end the treaty-making period in Indian history, the evidence simply does
not support the contention that he ever abandoned his heritage. Rather, Parker was an
innovative policymaker who wedded an indigenous worldview with a western intellectual
framework. Understood within this context, it becomes clear that his efforts which have
been constructed as detrimental (or at least potentially so) to Native peoples were well-
intentioned. He believed that situating the BIA in the War Department would help
insulate Native communities against the corrupting inﬂuences land speculators and
business interests had on federal policymakers. When he sought to end ofﬁcially the
practice of making treaties between the federal government and tribal nations, he did so

because in his experiences during the Ogden land dispute, he learned how factionalism

308

and individual interests could render community leaders’ abilities to negotiate equitable
treaties ineffective, or sometimes, potentially destructive to the community interests.
Parker, though, underestimated the level to which the state had shiﬁed toward a system of
disruptive, coercive assimilation by the early-18705. Viewed within the context of the
evolving nineteenth-century state, his efforts to reform BIA corruption, to create policies,
and to expand indigenous educational opportunities can more appropriately be interpreted
as a “path not taken,” rather than an abandonment of an indigenous heritage.

Furthermore, Parker’s relationships with two prominent ethnographers in the early
and later parts of his life demonstrate that he did not have conﬂicting notions of his own
identity, but rather, that he maintained an active engagement with popular notions and
depictions of Indians and while he highlighted certain characteristics or traits that
reﬂected these notions as they shifted and evolved, he also demonstrated a consistent
public persona as a Seneca man. While Parker’s relationships with these two
ethnographers, separated by several decades, differed in subtle ways, they also revealed
his consistent effort to associate with individuals who supported Indian people and Indian
communities. In the period between these two relationships, Parker’s association with
Union General US. Grant and the public spectacle of his marriage to a young, white,
Washington DC socialite demonstrated how he continued to engage with popular notions
of Indian people, at times supporting mainstream depictions, while at other times
challenging them through rhetoric, reform, and his own public persona.

Finally, this period of Indian policy reform suggests that Indian affairs in the
nineteenth-century were not simply peripheral events in the background of broader and

more important developments in United States history. Events such as the Ogden land

309

dispute in the early-nineteenth century and Parker’s rise to prominence during and after
the Civil War in Washington DC reveal the ways local and national leaders and citizens
followed events in Indian affairs intensely and the ways that these events contributed to
both state and federal political developments, as well as the emergence of shiﬁing and
ﬂuid notions of race, class, and gender. In the aftermath of the Civil War, these
connections became even more explicit. The mid- to late- nineteenth-century BIA,
served as a crucial meeting ground for ideologies of governmental authority and its
development not only demonstrated the experimental nature of federal governance in this
period, as policymakers allowed the state to take on increasingly active functions, but
also shows the evolution of social policymaking from the hybrid public and private
character of the Reconstruction programs to the institutionalized federal compensatory
programs of the early-twentieth century. The signiﬁcant reformers and reform
organizations of this period, the Indian Rights Association and the National Indian
Defense Association, facilitated this development as they connected their notions of
Indian reform to broader issues in politics and society in their widely-distributed
pamphlets and articles in the nation’s most important newspapers. They also employed
innovative tactics in political lobbying that would, within a Short period of time, be
adopted by many other social and political reformers. The politicians who came to
support these competing organizations were not, as has sometimes been asserted,
marginal legislators, but included some of the most signiﬁcant senators, representatives,
and jurists in the nation.

While scholars of pre-Revolutionary and late-eighteenth-century North America

have demonstrated clearly that in order understand the history of this region and

310

 

timeframe, one must recognize the importance of the Indian experience and the ways
Indian people shaped this history. Scholars of the nineteenth-century Indian history have
struggled to make similar assertions for their chronological orientation and most
mainstream studies of United States history and in particular, state development, either
disregard completely, or attach little signiﬁcance to Indian affairs within the larger
context of national events. Indian policy reform in this period though, revealed the ways
that ideas about Indian people and Indian conﬁnement, as well as Indian people
themselves, shaped, inﬂuenced, and reﬂected national trends and events in mid- to late-
nineteenth-century United States history. Highlighting the primacy of the BIA in the
evolution of the state and recognizing how some state-centered social policymaking was
modeled ﬁrst in Indian policy suggests that recognizing the importance of the Native

American experience in this era is critical to our larger historical understanding.

311

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