Ely S. Parker and the Tonawanda Seneca (Part 1)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We have mentioned President Ulysses S.
Grant's Peace policy a few times on the show. Most

(00:23):
recently that was in our episodes on Sarah Winnemucca. And
we've described this as a policy of replacing the existing
Indian agent system with Christian missionaries, which was in an
effort to maintain peace between the United States and Indigenous
peoples and to reduce corruption. And that's really how Grant's

(00:45):
peace policy is usually summed up. When it's summed up
in just a couple of sentences, but it really does
not capture the whole of that policy or any of
the context around how or how much it was actually implemented.
And one of the people who was instrumental in both
the creation of this policy and its initial implementation was

(01:08):
Commissioner of Indian Affairs Eli S. Parker. Parker was Seneca,
and he was the first Indigenous person to be placed
in a cabinet level position in the United States. Also
the first Indigenous person to serve as Commissioner of Indian affairs.
His life and his legacy have some similar complexities to

(01:29):
what we talked about in our episode on Sarah Winnemaca,
maybe even more so, and he is who we are
going to be talking about both today and in our
episode on Wednesday. Eli Samuel Parker was born sometime in
eighteen twenty eight, as his parents were returning to the
Tonawanda Reservation from Buffalo, New York, where they had gone

(01:50):
to trade and buy supplies. His father, William or Jono Eistoa,
had been a war chief and was the first Seneca
to enlist with the US Army during the War of
eighteen twelve. His mother, Elizabeth Johnson Parker, was a clan mother.
According to the family lore, the name Parker came from
an English officer who had been adopted into William's family

(02:13):
before he was born during the Revolutionary War. This officer
had given the family his last name after the war
was over, before departing for Canada as a way of
honoring them. Ely's Seneca name was Hasanowanda, and he was
one of six children. The Seneca are one of the
nations that make up the Hoodenashane, or the people of

(02:35):
the Long House, also called the Iroquois Confederacy or the
Six Nations. At one point, Hoddanashanee territory stretched from what's
now the Carolinas all the way up eastern North America
to what's now Canada, really into what's now Canada. By
the time the Parker children were born, though, the Hoddanashawe

(02:56):
had lost almost all of this territory. Of this was
through warfare with other indigenous nations, but the Hodenashani also
lost huge amounts of territory to Europeans. All but two
of the Hordenashani nations sided with Britain during the Revolutionary War,
and this split weakened their overall unity and power. The

(03:19):
Seneca were one of the nations that sided with Britain,
and American Major General John Sullivan carried out a scorched
earth campaign in Seneca territory in seventeen seventy seven. Some
members of nations that had sided with the British moved
to Canada after the war was over, and those who
stayed in the United States lost more and more land.

(03:41):
By seventeen ninety seven, the Seneca had been reduced to
twelve reservations, and by the time Hasanoanda was born, that
number was down to five. The Parker family was really
trying to live in a world that was dominated by
the United States while also preserving their own Seneca heritage
and traditions. This idea of two worlds was part of

(04:04):
a dream that Elizabeth had while she was pregnant with Asanowanda.
Arthur C. Parker, who was the grandson of Ely Parker's
brother Nicholson, related this story in a biography that came
out in nineteen nineteen. In Elizabeth's dream, it was snowing
and a rainbow appeared that broke in the middle, with
one side having letters like a sign on white men's stores.

(04:28):
In the words of this biography, a dream interpreter told Elizabeth, quote,
a son will be born to you who will be
distinguished among his nation as a peacemaker. He will become
a white man as well as an Indian. He will
be a wise white man, but will never desert his
Indian people nor lay down his horns. As a great chief,

(04:49):
his name will reach from the east to the west,
the north to the south, as great among his Indian
family and palefaces. His son will rise on Indian land
and set on white man's land, yet the ancient land
of his ancestors will fold him in death. So while
Hassanawanda and his siblings were raised as Seneca, they also

(05:11):
went to English schools. It's not completely clear when Hassanawanda
started using the name Ely, but he was named for
the Reverend ely Stone, the clergyman who ran the Baptist
mission school next to the Tonawanda reservation. When ely was
about ten, the Tonawanda Band of Seneca were stripped of

(05:31):
their reservation land for context. In seventeen ninety seven, the
Seneca Nation and the United States had signed the Treaty
of Big Tree. Under the terms of this treaty, the
Seneca had agreed to relinquish almost all of their land
in New York, while retaining twelve tracts of land as reservations.

(05:51):
Under this treaty, the Tonawanda Reservation measured about seventy square
miles or about forty four thousand, eight hundred acres. In
the early nineteenth century, the US government was trying to
move indigenous peoples from the eastern part of the country
to land west to the Mississippi River, something that was
legally codified under the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty.

(06:14):
In conjunction with this federal effort, land companies were trying
to acquire Indigenous land. This included the Ogden Land Company,
which lobbied heavily for access to Haddenishani Land in New York.
The Ogden Land Company acquired much of the remaining Seneca
land under a series of treaties known as the Treaties

(06:35):
of Buffalo Creek. Construction on the Erie Canal also began
in eighteen seventeen, and the canal ran directly through Seneca territory,
as did the Genesee Valley Canal that was built about
two decades later. Two of these treaties, signed in eighteen
twenty six and eighteen thirty eight, were never ratified by Congress,

(06:56):
and while they were being negotiated, the Ogden Land Company
used bribery, intimidation, and threats to try to get their way.
The eighteen twenty six treaty allowed the Ogden Land Company
to purchase six of the remaining Seneca reservations and also
reduced the Tonawanda Reservation to about twelve thousand acres, and

(07:16):
under the eighteen thirty eight treaty, the Seneca would relinquish
all the rest of their land in New York and
move west to Kansas within five years. Under this treaty,
the United States would pay four hundred thousand dollars for
the cost of that relocation, and Thomas Ludlow Ogden and
Joseph Fellows would have the rights to sell all that land.

(07:39):
In addition to the various efforts at coercion, manipulation, and
deception that the Land Company and its agents had carried out,
many Seneca considered these treaties to be completely invalid. They
argued that the people who had signed them did not
represent all of them, and that most of the nation
did not agree with the treaty's terms. The Tonawanda Seneca

(08:01):
in particular, did not feel that they were party to
the treaty at all, as the Tonawanda chiefs had not
signed it. Of course, this was part of a whole
pattern of similar treaty processes in which the indigenous people
were at best at a huge disadvantage up So, the
Seneca fought back using a whole array of strategies. They

(08:23):
sent delegations to the New York Capitol in Albany and
to the US capital in Washington, d C. As well
as a delegation to Canada. There were letters and petitions
and court cases and public meetings, advertisements, and local publications
really on and on. The Seneca rallied support from their
non indigenous neighbors, including Quakers, who had opposed these treaties.

(08:47):
From the beginning, the Seneca personally confronted land surveyors and
other officials and forced them off of the land that
they had come to survey or inspect, and this went
on four years. An eighteen forty seven annual report of
the US Commissioner of Indian Affairs described the Tanawanda Seneca

(09:08):
as putting all of their time and energy into two things,
providing for their families and quote the adoption of means
to preserve their homes and lands, and to annul or
defeat the contract or treaty. Ely would become a part
of this himself, but when the eighteen thirty eight treaty
was signed, he was only about ten years old. Soon after,

(09:32):
he went to the Six Nations Reserve in Canada. In
Arthur C. Parker's account, he ran away, but with his
father's permission and accompanied by one of his father's friends.
Other accounts make it seem more like his parents decided
to send him to Canada because Handenashawnee traditions were stronger
there and they wanted him to spend more time in

(09:53):
that world while he still could. While living at the
Six Nations Reserve along the Grand River in Ontario, Canada,
Eli Parker got a job caring for horses for the
army and sometimes driving those horses from one military post
to another, and he had a formative experience while he
was doing this. On one of these journeys, the army

(10:16):
officers that he was with were making fun of him
for not speaking English very well. This is something he
described as both rude and as good natured jesting, not
done out of malice, but in the words of Arthur C.
Parker quote, these jests and sharp thrusts they gave him
were of highest importance in determining his character and did

(10:39):
much to arouse his ambition. In the long lonesome ride,
he did a great deal of thinking. He tells us
that he resolved not only to continue his education, but
to become a master of the English tongue. More than this,
he resolved to know that language so well that he
could talk as brilliantly as any Englishman could. According to

(11:02):
Parker's account, once Elee had delivered the horses, he walked
from Hamilton, Ontario, back to Buffalo, New York. It's roughly
seventy miles, and then he walked from there back to
his family. We'll have more after a sponsor break. When

(11:26):
Eli Parker arrived back in New York, the Seneca were
still fighting to get their land back. In eighteen forty two,
a new Buffalo Creek treaty, this one ratified by the
Senate and proclaimed by the President, restored the Seneca nations Allegheny, Cattaraugus,
and Oil Springs reservations, but not the Tonawanda reservation. The

(11:47):
Seneca could stay in New York only if they moved
to one of those reservations that had been restored under
this treaty, but many of the Tonawanda Seneca did not
want to. They wanted to stay where they were, and
they still believed the treaty that had stripped them of
that reservation land was fraudulent. Also in eighteen forty two,

(12:10):
Ealy started studying at Yates Academy, about twenty miles away
from where he was living. This was an advanced coeducational school,
and he was the only Indigenous student there. An account
written by one of his schoolmates much later on suggests
that most of the student body were somewhere between curious
about and fascinated by him, but they also saw him

(12:33):
as an exception to other Indigenous people, who they regarded
as indolent and lazy. Parker wrote of it quotes here,
I progressed irregularly but well in all my studies, and
having no Indian companionship, by advanced perceptibly and rapidly in
the use of the English language. The school was eminently respectable,

(12:54):
and the association there was therefore good. It was non
sectarian and permits freedom of religious thought and action. It
was a mixed school, and the association of the sexes
had a refining, elevating tendency. I can recall my stay
here as among the happiest days of my youthful existence.
His study of English at Yates Academy allowed Parker to

(13:18):
become an active part in the negotiations on behalf of
the Tonawanda Seneca. This started when he was only about
fourteen years old, and his brother Nicholson was part of
it as well. Eley initially worked as an interpreter and
carried messages among the delegates. He also met and started
working with ethnographers Henry Rose Schoolcraft and Lewis Henry Morgan.

(13:42):
Schoolcraft was also a geographer, and the US government had
commissioned him to study the Seneca on the government's behalf.
In addition to providing Schoolcraft with information about the Seneca,
Parker also used him as a source, basically getting him
to confirm details that would help the Seneca build their
legal case against the Treaties of Buffalo Creek. For example,

(14:06):
he asked questions like whether the Seneca had any concept
of majority and minority prior to contact with Europeans, or
whether they had made decisions only through unanimity. Schoolcraft's answer
with this was unanimity, meaning that from a Seneca perspective,
a treaty that was not unanimously supported would not be

(14:30):
considered valid. Parker met Lewis Henry Morgan at a bookstore
in Albany in eighteen forty four, and for the next
six years, Parker was a major source for Morgan's anthropological research.
This relationship and this work could really be an entire
episode of its own. Morgan had a fascination with the
Hadena Shawnee that went beyond simple academic interest. He also

(14:54):
wanted to be adopted into the Seneca, which eventually happened
in eighteen forty seven, in part because of his work
against the Buffalo Creek Treaties. A couple of years before
beating Eli Parker, Lewis Henry Morgan had also founded a
secret fraternal society called the Order of the Gordian Knot,

(15:14):
later renamed the Grand Order of the Iroquois. This orders
initiation ceremonies appropriated indigenous cultures, including costumes and songs, and
symbolically taking the names of past Haddenishani chiefs. Morgan eventually
inducted Parker into this Order, and Parker later revised those

(15:36):
initiation ceremonies. They were already full of very heavy handed
stereotypes of Indigenous peoples, and Parker made them even more
over the top. Parker's thought process on this revision is
not really documented anywhere, but one of the sources I
used in this episode describes the resulting ceremonies as almost

(15:58):
a satire. On the surface, Parker was an actively willing
participant in Morgan's anthropological research, not only explaining various aspects
of the history and culture of his people, but also
supplying Morgan with clothing, objects, artwork, and other items. Parker
also translated speeches by Handenishani orators into English. He also

(16:23):
did a lot of additional work on his own, creating
documentation that Morgan didn't request or use. It's possible, based
on all this that Parker was thinking about writing a
book himself someday. But at the same time, there were
some fundamental differences in how these two men saw the Hodenashani.

(16:44):
Morgan's general perspective was that everyone was similar and cultures
were all connected. But from Parker's point of view, there
were aspects of Hoddanashani and European or American culture that
were just fundamentally dissimilar. So Morgan had a lot of
power when it came to Parker's opportunities in his future.

(17:05):
Like in eighteen forty five, Parker enrolled at Cayuga Academy,
which was an elite school that was also Morgan's alma mater.
Parker's education there was paid for by a federal Civilization grant,
which was part of a federal program to pay for
Indigenous students educations as a way to encourage them to

(17:25):
assimilate with white culture, but it's likely that Morgan had
a hand in Parker getting into that school. Unlike his
time at Yates Academy, which seems to have been pretty
happy overall, Parker faced a lot of racism and abuse
at Cayuga. He wrote in one letter quote, once or
twice I have been severely abused, but I returned blow

(17:47):
for blow with savage ferocity. Whether I gained the upper
hand of my antagonist, I leave the public to decide
for mind you, these quarrels were public bad business, but
it could not be helped. While studying there, he also
felt like it was up to him to disprove all
of the prevailing stereotypes of Indigenous people as drunken and lazy,

(18:11):
so he was driven to learn for its own sake
and also to try to prove his worth. At the
same time, he seems to have been a little bit sneaky,
or at least willing to take some maybe less than
ethical steps to keep up his academic performance. His brother, Nicholson,
was also studying at another school, and the two of

(18:32):
them would trade their essays after they had been created.
So they not only were using one another's work, but
they were also turning in versions of that work that
had already been corrected by a teacher. And Arthur C.
Parker's words quote, this was at least brotherly reciprocity, even
if it had some suspicion of a lack of ethics.

(18:54):
It was a secret between the brothers that a biographer
has unearthed for the critic, which may not be quiet fair,
but sinless heroes would be mummies, things that neither Nick
nor Ely would exactly care to be. They were boys
and very much alive. By this point. Parker had been
involved in the Seneca's efforts to overturn the Buffalo Creek

(19:15):
Treaties for years, and in eighteen forty six, at the
age of eighteen, he led a delegation to Washington, d c.
To petition James K. Polk to support a repeal of it.
Polk referred the matter to the Senate, and while the
other chiefs eventually returned to New York, Parker stayed behind
to try to talk to the President again and to

(19:36):
lobby Congress. Polk agreed that the federal government would put
off removing the remaining Seneca while they pursued their case
through both Congress and the courts. And after that Parker
returned home. But there were some Seneca who had already
gone to Kansas, and after getting home, Parker learned that

(19:57):
more than a third of them had died. So he
returned to Washington, d c. To try to lobby the
Senate to take action. Specifically, he was lobbying for the
Tanawanda Band of the Seneca to be exempt from the
Buffalo Creek Treaty of eighteen forty two, but the Committee
on Indian Affairs reported that doing that would undermine all

(20:19):
of federal Indian policy, and that was ultimately voted down.
We will talk about where Elee Parker went from here
after we have another sponsor break. In eighteen forty seven,

(20:41):
Eli Parker joined the Batavia Masonic Lodge, which was the
first of a series of Masonic lodges that he would
be a member of over the course of his life.
He was described as a very dedicated Mason. Considering all
the time that he had spent working on things like
treaty negotiations and advocate with Congress. It's probably not surprising

(21:03):
that after getting back from Washington, d c. He started
on the path of becoming a lawyer. At this point,
people became lawyers by either going to law school or
through apprenticeships, and Parker got an apprenticeship at the law
offices of Angel and Rice in Ellicottville, New York. But
once he was ready to take the bar exam, he

(21:24):
was denied because under New York law, only natural born
and naturalized citizens could do so. Indigenous people were not
considered citizens of the United States. They were considered to
be wards of the government. So he changed courses and
decided to become an engineer. With Lewis Henry Morgan's help,

(21:47):
he enrolled at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.
He then went to Rochester to work on the expansion
of the Erie Canal. He continued to work as an
engineer for the next several years. In eighteen fifty one,
Henry Lewis Morgan published his book League of the Hodena
Shawnee Iroquois. He dedicated it to Eli Parker, writing quote,

(22:10):
this work, the materials of which are the fruit of
our joint researches, is inscribed an acknowledgment of the obligations
and in testimony of the friendship of the author. This
was one of the first, if not the first, systematic
descriptions of a tribal culture in North America, and it
did give a whole lot of credit to Parker, although

(22:34):
it was of course presented through Morgan's lens. The publication
of this book is seen as a really foundational moment
in the development of anthropology as a field in the
United States. That fall, Parker was named one of the
fifty Chiefs of the Six Nations, also called Royner, meaning
caretakers of the piece. A lot of sources used in

(22:57):
this episode, including the work of Arthur C. Parker, translate
this title as sechem, which is an Algonquian word, and
these chiefs are chosen by the clan mothers. Parker was
given the title Dona Hogawa or Doorkeeper, along with a
silver peace medal that George Washington had given to his
ancestor red Jacket, as a symbol of peace between the

(23:20):
Six Nations and the United States, and he often wore
this medal at ceremonial events. The Tanawanda band of the
Seneca were still fighting against the terms of the earlier
treaties of Buffalo Creek, and that fight had now been
going on for two decades. They had filed four different
suits against the Ogden Land Company with the help of

(23:42):
attorney John H. Martindale, who would later go on to
be the New York State Attorney General. Two of these
suits did not go in the Seneca's favor, but two
of them did. One of the successful suits was against
Joseph Fellows, who had a deed for Tonawan to Seneca
land that came through the terms of the treaty. John

(24:03):
Blacksmith had been living on that land and had built
a sawmill, a dam, and other structures on it. Fellows
had forced Blacksmith off the land at gunpoint, and Blacksmith
filed suit for trespass, assault and battery under an eighteen
twenty one New York trespassing law. This went all the
way to the U. S. Supreme Court. This eighteen fifty

(24:25):
seven Supreme Court ruling was not about whether the treaties
of Buffalo Creek were valid, but whether Fellows had the
right to remove Blacksmith from the land he had purportedly acquired.
And the words of the Supreme Court ruling quote the
removal of tribes of Indians is to be made by
the authority and under the care of the government, and

(24:48):
a forcible removal, if made at all, must be made
under the direction of the United States. So Fellows, according
to this ruling, did not have the right to forcibly
remove Blacksmith, who was Seneca, from that land. The Ogden
Land Company did not have the right to do that either,
only the federal government did. The other case was decided

(25:12):
in New York a year later. John H. Martindale represented
the Seneca in this suit as well, and this one
was more broad. It was filed against Asa Cutler, John Underhill,
and Arsa Underhill, who claimed to hold title to Seneca
land under the terms of the Treaty. Upon hearing the evidence,
the New York Supreme Court ruled that quote, the Seneca

(25:35):
Nation had not duly granted and conveyed the reserve in
question to Ogden and Fellows. When the New York Court
of Appeals upheld this decision, it referred back to the
Supreme Court's verdict in Fellows versus Blacksmith. Neither of these
cases overturned the Treaty, though they were really about at
their hearts whether that eighteen twenty one trespassing law that

(25:59):
under penned both of these cases was constitutional or not.
Addressing the terms of the actual treaty itself required going
through Congress, and Parker took another delegation to Washington, d c.
And played a major role in developing their strategy. When
they did. The advocacy on the part of the Seneca

(26:20):
and their allies ultimately led to a fourth Treaty of
Buffalo Creek between the Tonawanda Band of the Seneca and
the United States. By this point, and connected to all
of this, the Tonawanda Seneca had split off from the
other Seneca bands living in New York. The new treaty
was signed at the Meetinghouse on the Tonawanda Reservation, with

(26:43):
Charles E. Mix of the Bureau of Indian Affairs signing
on behalf of the United States, and five men, one
of them Elee S. Parker, signing on behalf of the Seneca.
Under this treaty, the Tonawanda Seneca relinquished any claims they
had to land west of the Mississippi River that had
been set aside for them in the earlier Treaties of

(27:04):
Buffalo Creek, as well as any claims to any money
that had been set aside to pay for their removal
to go there, the United States would pay the tribe
two hundred and fifty six thousand dollars in consideration of
all those things that they were relinquishing any claims to,
and the Tonawanda Seneca could use that money to buy

(27:27):
back their land in New York. Ogden and fellows would
still have the rights to sell the land that the
Tonawanda Seneca did not repurchase. There were some additional terms
as well, but essentially the Tonawanda Seneca were able to
reclaim about seven thousand acres of reservation land. This treaty

(27:47):
was signed on November fifth, eighteen fifty seven, and it
was later ratified by the Senate and proclaimed by President
James Buchanan. So this meant that there were now two
federally recognized Seneca tribes in western New York, the Tonawanda
Seneca and the Seneca Nation, whose Allegheny and Cattaraugus reservations
had been restored under the Treaty of Buffalo Creek of

(28:10):
eighteen forty two. A third federally recognized Seneca nation, the
Seneca Cayuga Nation, is in Oklahoma. There's a whole additional
history involving the Oil Springs reservation that we mentioned earlier,
I feel like is separate from this whole episode. But
this also meant that the Ogden Land Company and its
agents didn't really face any kind of consequences for their

(28:33):
actions leading up to the earlier treaties of Buffalo Creek,
or their actions after those treaties had been signed and other.
Writing later on, Arthur C. Parker described the twenty dollars
an acre that the Seneca paid for their land as
blood money that rewarded the Ogden Land Company for its
terrible behavior. The Tanawanda Seneca had also spent more than

(28:55):
five thousand dollars, which that's five thousand dollars in the
mid nineteenth century on this two decade fight to get
their reservation land back. Although ELI Parker was a big
part of this, afterward he became progressively less connected to
the Tonawanda Seneca. He was appointed to oversee the construction

(29:16):
of a Federal Customs house in Galena, Illinois, and he
moved there the same year this treaty was signed. He
wrote about feeling conflicted when visiting the reservation because he
loved his family, but he also wanted to be back
in Illinois with his friends. One of his friends that
he met in Galina was Ulysses s Grant and we

(29:37):
will be talking about that next time. In the meantime,
I've got some listener mail fabulous. This is from Layla
and it goes back to our episode on Mammoth Cave
and the Cave Wars. So Leyla said, hello again, Holly
and Tracy. I'm playing a bit of catch up on
some recent episodes and I perked right up when I

(29:59):
saw the Kentucky Cave Wars episode. Mammoth Cave holds a
special place in my heart as I got engaged in
the cave on a tour. My husband and I are
trying to visit all the US National parks currently at
eighteen so plenty to go, and we did Mammoth Cave
as an extended weekend in twenty seventeen. We did a

(30:19):
lantern lit tour as part of our trip, which stopped
in a section where the park rangers told us a
story of how gentlemen would take rocks and throw them
at the ceiling to make stars for their loves. The
ceilings of the caves are covered in soot from all
the lanterns and torches used to explore before the ccc
ran electricity through portions of the cave. The underlying rock

(30:44):
is white, so when a stone hit the ceiling, it
would dislodge some soot, leaving a white spot or a
star for the couple. It was quite romantic. As we
left this area, my husband then boyfriend said the park
ranger needed us to stay behind so he could perform
so safety checks. Little did I know this was a ruse,
and he proposed to me there. So we always tell

(31:06):
people we found a diamond in Mammoth Cave. I wrote
a few years ago with pet pictures, but realized I
forgot to add names, so here are a few updated
photos with descriptions. We have a black dog named Maya,
who is a Great Dane German Shepherd mix, a total
couch potato, but the sweetest girl. A Golden Retriever named
Boone who was the best cuddler and frisbee catcher. When

(31:29):
Laila wrote last, Boone was a puppy playing in the snow.
There's a tabby cat named Peanut who continually proves he
is smarter than us. That is plotting to take over
the world. The last is Snickers, our calico girl we
rescued from under our grill. She enjoys helping fold laundry
and check on vegetables in the garden. I also included

(31:49):
our picture in the cave after we got engaged. I
cannot recommend Mammoth Cave enough to visit. It's an excellent
mixture of nature and history and it's very accessible. Thank
you both for all you have been listening since twenty sixteen.
Earned my symhc PhD, and you two are the soundtrack
of my commute. I missed you in Indianapolis, but I'm
looking forward to the next live show. All the best, Layla.

(32:12):
So yes, we do have some very sweet pet pictures
that were previously described. What we have not said in
the description of the previously described pictures as that's tabbycat.
Peanut has a little blip going on, this little tongue
sticking out on what looks like one of those window

(32:34):
mounted cat perches. And oh, how sweet. I love how
sweet this picture is from Mammoth Cave. There standing in
Mammoth Cave, you cannot really see what is around them
because they are holding up a lantern. So the lantern
is providing all of the light for the picture. But
that's all very sweet. Thank you so much, Layla. Thank

(32:56):
you to everyone who writes to us. I think it's
been a while since we've said it. We do read
every single email we get, and we love getting all
of these emails. We are not able to individually answer
all of them, so please do not let that discourage
you from writing if you're thinking about writing. We love

(33:17):
to read all of these wonderful stories that our listeners
send to us. If you would like to send us
an email, we're at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com
and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
app and wherever else you like to get podcasts. Stuff

(33:38):
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Tracy Wilson

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Monster: BTK

Dateline NBC

The Bobby Bones Show

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ely S. Parker and the Tonawanda Seneca (Part 1)