It also gave him an interest in the law itself.

Parker wanted to become an attorney.

The reasoning was not merely personal ambition.

The Tonawanda Seneca were engaged in a long legal and political struggle over their reservation.

The Treaty of Buffalo Creek, signed in 1838, had purported to require the removal of the Seneca from their New York reservations to lands in Kansas.

The Tonawanda Band had resisted strenuously, arguing that the treaty had been obtained through fraud and that many of their leaders had not genuinely consented to it.

The dispute would drag on for more than a decade, ultimately producing a new agreement in 1857 that allowed the Tonawanda Seneca to remain on a reduced version of their reservation — but only after years of legal and political fighting in which access to skilled legal representation had been crucial.