On the afternoon of April 9, 1865, inside a modest brick house in the Virginia village of Appomattox Court House, the bloodiest war in American history came to an end.

Ulysses S.

Grant and Robert E.

Lee shook hands across a parlor table.

Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia.

Grant’s terms were generous, even gracious.

And when the moment required that the formal documents of surrender be written out in a clean, final hand, the officer who did it was not a white man from Ohio or Pennsylvania or New York.

He was a Seneca man from western New York.

His name was Ely Samuel Parker.

His Seneca name was Ha-sa-no-an-da.

He was thirty-six years old, a colonel on Grant’s personal staff, a civil engineer by trade, a man who had spent years being turned away from the legal and military careers he sought because the country he was about to help reunite did not yet consider him a citizen.

Parker wrote out the surrender terms in longhand.

When Lee looked across the room and saw him, Lee reportedly extended his hand and said — according to accounts written down well after the event, and treated by historians with appropriate caution — that he was glad to see a real American in the room.

Parker’s response, as it has come down through history in sources that require the same caution, was that they were all Americans now.

Whether those exact words were spoken is uncertain.

What is documented is the rest: that Ely Parker was there, that he prepared the formal copy of the terms, that he held the rank of colonel in the Army of the United States, and that he would go on to become the first Native American ever appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs — a position in which he would discover that writing the surrender terms was, compared to what came next, the easier part.

This is his story.

It does not fit neatly into the American mythology of Appomattox, in which Grant and Lee are the only figures who matter and the nation simply heals.