Parker remained a recognizable figure in New York social and intellectual life throughout the 1870s and 1880s.

He was consulted on matters relating to Native American history and affairs.

He attended veterans’ events and maintained relationships with colleagues from his Civil War service.

He was not a forgotten figure, though he was not at the center of events in the way he had been in the 1860s.

He did not return to public office.

Whether he sought to or whether he had concluded that the Commissioner’s experience had shown the limits of what could be accomplished from inside the government is not clear from the surviving record.

He continued to write about Native American affairs and to engage with the reform debates that occupied advocates in the period — the debates over allotment, over citizenship, over the proper relationship between the federal government and Native nations that would culminate in the Dawes Act of 1887 and the policy catastrophes that followed.