Ely Parker: The Seneca Engineer Who Wrote the Surrender at Appomattox
By Daniel R. Whitfield
Length3h 27m
About this audiobook
As a boy on the Tonawanda Reservation, Ha-sa-no-an-da sat outside the ring of men at the council fire and listened to the old chief John Blacksmith turn the government's word over like a cracked stone: cession, a giving up. A treaty signed at Buffalo Creek was supposed to send the Seneca west, but the Tonawanda band had never put their hands to it. When the talk turned to lawyers and petitions, the boy's father said that a thing taken by a lie could be taken back by the truth, if a man were patient enough and knew the law.
The mission school renamed the boy Ely Parker, and he took his father at his word. He went to Washington with the chiefs to fight the Ogden Land Company, studied law and was refused a license because he was not a citizen, and became a civil engineer instead. The work took him to Galena, Illinois, where he befriended a former Army captain who was clerking in the Grant family's leather store: Ulysses S. Grant.
When the war came, the Union at first turned Parker away. He served anyway, as an engineer and then as Grant's military secretary, and on April 9, 1865, in the McLean parlor at Appomattox Court House, it was Parker who wrote out in ink the terms of Lee's surrender.
Four years later he was in Washington as the first Native American Commissioner of Indian Affairs, until fraud charges pushed him to resign in 1871. Near the end the story returns to Tonawanda, and to the question his father had raised at the fire.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length3 hrs 27 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: Da-ya-wa-gwa, 1828
2Chapter 2: The Ogden Land Company
3Chapter 3: A Lawyer Without a License
4Chapter 4: Galena and the Coming Storm
5Chapter 5: Engineer in Blue
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6Chapter 6: Appomattox, April 9, 1865
7Chapter 7: Brevet Brigadier General
8Chapter 8: The Commissioner's Desk
9Chapter 9: The Board of Indian Commissioners
10Chapter 10: Resignation and Retreat
11Chapter 11: The Tonawanda Judgment
12Chapter 12: The Hand That Wrote the Terms
13About the Author
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