(Excerpt from American Indian Freemasonry
In the beginnin...)
Excerpt from American Indian Freemasonry
In the beginning God created heaven and earth. - Genesis.
Remove not the ancient landmark which thy fathers have set. Solomon.
Speculative masonry is so far interwoven with religion as to lay us under the strongest obligations to pay that rational homage to the Deity, which at once constitutes our duty and our happiness. It leads the contemplative to view with reverence and admiration the glorious works of creation and inspires them with the most exalted ideas of the perfection of the divine Creator. Samuel Cole.
We also have a religion which was given to our forefathers and has been handed down from father to sou. We worship in that way. It teaches us to be thankful for all the favors we receive, to love one another and be united. - Red Jacket.
It is more than probable that the diversified customs, institutions and religions of the several nations of the world are less dissimilar in their origin than is often imagined. The differences arose in the progress of time, the shifting scenes of climate, condition and event. But the original ideas of existence and the laws that pertain to all created things are pretty much the same among all the tribes of mankind. - Westropp, Ancient Symbol Worship.
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The Life of General Ely S. Parker: Last Grand Sachem of the Iroquois and General Grant's Military Secretary (1919)
(Ely Samuel Parker (1828 – 1895), was a Seneca attorney, e...)
Ely Samuel Parker (1828 – 1895), was a Seneca attorney, engineer, and tribal diplomat. He was commissioned a lieutenant colonel during the American Civil War, when he served as adjutant to General Ulysses S. Grant. He wrote the final draft of the Confederate surrender terms at Appomattox. Later in his career, Parker rose to the rank of Brevet Brigadier General, one of only two Native Americans to earn a general's rank during the war (the other being Stand Watie, who fought for the Confederacy). President Grant appointed him as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the first Native American to hold that post.
During the Civil War, after his volunteer of his services had been turned down, Parker contacted his colleague and friend Ulysses S. Grant, whose forces suffered from a shortage of engineers. Parker was commissioned a captain in May 1863 and ordered to report to Brig. Gen. John Eugene Smith. Smith appointed Parker as the chief engineer of his 7th Division during the siege of Vicksburg, and later said Parker was a "good engineer".
When Ulysses S. Grant became commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi, Parker became his adjutant during the Chattanooga Campaign. He was subsequently transferred with Grant as the adjutant of the U.S. Army headquarters and served Grant through the Overland Campaign and the Siege of Petersburg. At Petersburg, Parker was appointed as the military secretary to Grant, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He wrote much of Grant's correspondence.
Parker was present when Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865. He helped draft the surrender documents, which are in his handwriting. At the time of surrender, General Lee "stared at me for a moment," said Parker to more than one of his friends and relatives, "He extended his hand and said, 'I am glad to see one real American here.' I shook his hand and said, 'We are all Americans.' Parker was brevetted brigadier general of United States Volunteers on April 9, 1865, and of United States Army March 2, 1867.
Contents:
I. The Measure Of The Man
II. The Valley Of The Rapid Water
III. How The Senecah Made War Upon Great Britain
IV. The Grand-daughter Of The Prophet
V. Boyhood Days On The Reservation
VI. The Way The Twig Was Bent
VII. Lewis H. Morgan And The "new League Of The Iroquois”
VIII. Early Experience As An Engineer And Masonic Career
IX. How Parker's Enlistment Was Refused By Secretary Seward
X. A Sachem Becomes A Warrior
XI. The Fall Of The Confederacy
XII. The Indian In The Drama At Appomattox
XIII. The Warrior After The War
XIV. An Indian Commissioner Of Indian Affairs
XV. A Sachem's Letters To A Poetess
XVI. The Gettysburg Speech Of Grant's Military Secretary
XVII. The House Of Brother Nicholson
XVIII. The Bones Of Red Jacket
XIX. The Last Grand Sachem
XX. Secretary Seward's Interest In The Indians
This book originally published by the Buffalo Historical Society in 1919 has been reformatted for the Kindle and may contain an occasional defect from the original publication or from the reformatting.
Stone Ornaments Used by Indians in the United States and Canada: Being a Description of Certain Charm Stones, Gorgets, Tubes, Bird Stones and Problematical Forms
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
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Arthur Caswell Parker was an American anthropologist, archaeologist, and museum administrator.
Background
Arthur Caswell Paker was born on April 5, 1881 in the Cattaraugus Reservation of the Seneca Nation of New York in western New York into a Seneca Indian family prominent on the Cattaraugus Reservation at Iroquois, New York. He was the son of Frederick Ely Parker, a railroad accountant of part Seneca descent, and Geneva H. Griswold, who was of Scottish and English ancestry. His grandfather, Nicholson H. Parker, with whose family Parker spent much of his early life, was clerk of the Seneca Nation, United States interpreter, census agent, marshal, and a successful farmer. A great-uncle, Brigadier General Ely S. Parker, was military secretary to General Ulysses S. Grant, who appointed him first Commissioner of Indian Affairs after Grant became president. Parker's early years on the reservation developed in him an abiding interest in natural history and in the history and traditions of the Iroquois. His intellectual bent was stimulated by the scholarly concerns of his grandfather.
Education
After attending school on the reservation, in 1897, Arhur Caswell Parker graduated from White Plains (New York) High School. His Presbyterian minister recommended that he prepare himself for the ministry, and, accordingly, Parker entered Dickinson Seminary at Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 1899. He left after three years of study without completing the course, having decided against a career in the church.
Career
For a brief time Athur Caswell Parker worked as a reporter for the New York Sun, but he soon became engrossed in his long-held fascination with ethnology and archaeology. In New York he met Harriet Maxwell Converse, a journalist, poet, and amateur ethnologist whose home was the gathering place for a number of young men with similar interests, including Mark R. Harrington, Frank G. Speck, and Alanson B. Skinner, all of whom became important anthropologists and Parker's lifelong friends. Parker also spent much time with Frederick W. Putnam, temporary curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. Putnam, who was also professor of anthropology at Harvard, encouraged his young protégé, and in 1903 sent him, as assistant to Harrington, on his first archaeological field trip, excavating a prehistoric site on Long Island. During the next few years the two men conducted excavations on prehistoric Iroquois sites in Chautauqua County, New York, and elsewhere for the Peabody Museum at Harvard.
Parker's first major anthropological appointment came in 1904, as ethnologist with the New York State Library in Albany. Two years later he passed the examination for the newly created post of archaeologist of the New York State Museum, a position he held until 1925, when he became director of the fledgling Rochester (New York) Municipal Museum. At the State Museum, Parker distinguished himself by the quality and quantity of his research and writing in the field of Iroquois studies. Among his major contributions during this period were the following monographs, most of them published as bulletins of the New York State Museum: An Erie Indian Village and Burial Site (1907), Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Food Plants (1910), The Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet (1913), The Constitution of the Five Nations (1916), Archaeological History of New York (1922), and Seneca Myths and Folk Tales (1923).
Parker was also active in Indian affairs. He served as secretary and president (1914 - 1915) of the Society of American Indians and as secretary of the New York State Indian Commission (1917 - 1919). In 1916 he organized the New York State Archaeological Association. As director of the Rochester Municipal Museum, which developed under his aegis into the Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences, Parker created a major center of community service and education. Among his many writings during this period were A Manual for History Museums (1935) and several Indian storybooks for children, which were based largely upon his own reservation life. Parker retired in 1946 to his rural home in Naples, New York, where, until his death, he continued to write and participate in Indian and civic affairs. His bibliography comprises some 300 items, including fourteen books. He died on January 1, 1955.
Achievements
Arthur Caswell Parker was among the most important Native American scholars and intellectuals of the twentieth century. Parker's writings on the Seneca and Iroquois cultures are still read and used today by anthropologists. He was also one of the first museum administrators to view the museum as a tool of cultural education.
(Ely Samuel Parker (1828 – 1895), was a Seneca attorney, e...)
Views
Athur Caswell Parker advocated the idea that museums should be accessible to everyone and viewed them as the university of the common person.
Membership
Arthur Caswell Parker was the co-founder and the president of the Society of American Indians (1935) and the first president of the Society of American Archeology.
Personality
Arthur Caswell Parker was an extremely complex, reserved, and quiet man, dignified and enigmatic even to his friends. Although only one-fourth Seneca, his facial features definitely revealed his Indian ancestry.
Connections
Athur Caswell Parker married Beatrice Tahamont, an Abnaki Indian, in 1904. They had two children before the marriage ended in divorce. In 1914 he married Anna T. Cook of Whitehall, New York. They had one child.
