The Life of General Ely S. Parker: Last Grand Sachem of the Iroquois and General Grant's Military Secretary (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Life of General Ely S. Parker: Last Grand Sachem of the Iroquois and General Grant's Military Secretary

This volume is in the main a narrative of Indian life, by an author who, perhaps because of his own Indian ancestry, perhaps because of his family associations and his peculiar educational equipment, is better qualified to present the red man's case from the red man's viewpoint, than could any chronicler of purely Caucasian blood. The why and wherefore of the case really matters little. The essential and important thing is, that we have here a study of Iroquois life and character from the pen of one who is not merely exceptionally well-informed in his subject, but who treats it with an inborn, native sympathy and certainty of interpretation.

It is a fine thing, a happy thing, to be able to picture for the reader of to-day, the home life and social status and relations of a typical though perhaps exceptionally endowed Seneca family. The Parker family, judged by inherent qualities, would have been notable in any community. Fortunately, where the white strain came in, it came from clean, honest, capable stock. Who that knew her, or knows only by tradition and record, of Martha Hoyt, devoted missionary to the Senecas when Buffalo was near its beginnings, would question that in taking her to wife, Nicholson Parker, the Seneca, found a helpmate as loyally devoted to his people as though she were of their race. In the long record of white and Indian dealings, usually so full of fraud and iniquity, of wrong and evil of every sort, it is refreshing to find an instance like this.

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