The archives of Parker’s life are scattered across several institutions: the National Archives, which holds his military records and his Bureau of Indian Affairs correspondence; the American Philosophical Society, which holds collections related to his collaboration with Lewis Henry Morgan; various state and local archives in New York; and the collections of the Tonawanda Band of Seneca themselves.

What these records show, collectively, is a man who communicated with precision and without rhetorical excess — whose letters and official documents were clear, direct, and purposeful.

There is relatively little in the surviving correspondence of the kind of introspective personal reflection that might allow a biographer to reconstruct Parker’s inner life with confidence.

He wrote about what he was doing more than about what he was thinking or feeling.

This reticence — or this disciplined professionalism, depending on how one reads it — makes his biography somewhat harder to construct than that of figures who wrote more personally and more extensively about their own experiences.