He was the Seneca man who stood in the McLean house and wrote the surrender terms.

He was the engineer who had been turned away from the law, the officer who had been turned away from the army, the reformer who had been investigated and forced out by the forces he was trying to reform.

He was also, throughout all of it, Ha-sa-no-an-da — the man from Tonawanda, the man from a community that had fought for its reservation and won a partial victory, the man who carried the specific knowledge of what it meant to be Haudenosaunee in nineteenth-century America into the most powerful rooms of the American government.

The Tonawanda Seneca are still on their reservation in western New York.