That strategic dimension of the relationship does not erase the asymmetry, but it complicates any simple reading of Parker as merely a victim of the knowledge-extraction dynamic.

He was a sophisticated man making calculated decisions in an environment where the available options were all imperfect.

The City of Washington and What Parker Found There

Parker’s first extended experience of Washington, D.C. came when he accompanied Seneca delegations to the capital in the late 1840s and early 1850s, working as an interpreter and intermediary in the negotiations over the Treaty of Buffalo Creek and its aftermath.

Washington in the 1840s was not yet the monumental city it would become.