Arthur's father's father, and Ely S.--were sons of William Par-
ker and his wife of the Tonawanda Reservation, themselves of
lineages bearing sachemships, and they were related to the
Seneca prophet, Handsome Lake. The William Parker family
took in Lewis Henry Morgan of Rochester and hosted the first
scientific ethnography in America. ¹ Morgan dedicated his pi-
oneer work to Ely, who went on to become Sachem, engineer,
and aide-de-camp to Gen. U. S. Grant. Nicholson ("Nick") at-
tended Albany Normal School, forerunner of the University at
Albany; removed to Cattaraugus Reservation, where he farmed;
engineered; served as U.S. Interpreter; acted as lay reader in
the Mission Church; and read aloud from classics to his grand-
son, Arthur. As a young lad Arthur spent much of his boyhood
in the Parker menage near the Mission Church; but the pull
of traditional culture created an ambivalence in him, as it did
for his grandfather, who was nominally a Protestant.

English was a second language to Cattaraugus Senecas in
the 1880s; grandfather "Nick" had mastered it, but it was Ar-
thur Parker's first language. Arthur's father, Frederick Parker,
a graduate of Fredonia Normal School and a station agent for
the New York Central Railroad, and his mother, Geneva Gris-
wold Parker, a reservation school teacher, spoke English at
home. But Arthur's boyhood playmates who accompanied him
on forays the length of Cattaraugus Creek spoke a variety of
Seneca sprinkled with English nouns but adhering to the Ir-
oquoian syntax that Arthur learned and remembered years
later in collecting and interpreting folktales. His vocabulary
of Seneca terms and expressions was extraordinary; he under-
stood but did not control the language. This background and
perception made his folklore unique and original, as will appear
momentarily.

Parker wrote brief autobiographical sketches at various
stages in his career to satisfy interests just then, and his cor-
respondence in the New York State Museum documents his
term in Albany. His Rochester period is covered by Thomas. ²

During his first decade, Parker attended Indian district school,
on the Cattaraugus Reservation, and after school engaged in

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