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This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show.

Our next story is on our 18th president, Ulysses S. Grant, and his friend and associate,

Ely Parker, the first Native American appointed to a cabinet-level position in the United States history.

Grant came to the West First as a soldier. He was, went to West Point, and one of his first

assignments he was sent out to Missouri. And then during the Mexican War, he was sent to fight

in Mexico. When he was about to go, he was already engaged to a girl named Julia, whom he would

marry. And she kept saying

to him, you know, you're going to be killed by the Indians. You're going to be killed by the

wild Camanschis. He said, don't worry about it. I'm all right. He wasn't afraid of the Indians.

But when he got into Mexico, it was the very first time he saw people of Native American descent. And he is the first

generation, eight generations of his family since the 1630s. He was the first one who had no

encounter with Indians growing up. Everybody else in his family had been on some frontier moving

from Massachusetts out to Ohio, so it at least encountered Indians.

He saw the poorest of the poor in Mexico who were descendants of Indians in native people themselves.

And he said, this country is so beautiful in the mistreatment of these people who are at the bottom of society

by the wealthy and the powerful is

terrible and that shook him deeply.

He then later was assigned to California as a soldier after the Mexican War and he said,

here are the Indians.

They were nicknamed the Digger Indians because they survived by gathering nuts and roots. He said, they're used like beast of burdened by the men seeking gold in the gold fields.

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