Cultural relics are materialized history. By studying cultural relics, we can find many historical details that have been deliberately ignored or even forgotten. Among the cultural relics, the one that carries the most history is the coin.
This is my original intention in collecting ancient and modern coins from various countries, to restore the original face of history through the study of coins.
Today I will talk about a separate American commemorative coin: the Erie parker commemorative coin. It is listed separately because this coin is extremely special, it is a commemorative coin commemorating American Indians.
Strictly speaking, it is not a relic, because it is a modern commemorative coin. But in my opinion, as long as it carries a special cultural significance, it should be classified as a cultural relic.
Who is Erie Parker? In fact, don't say that ordinary Chinese, even ordinary Americans, or scholars who have not studied American history in depth, are estimated to be unable to answer. Seriously, I've really never heard of such a person before I saw this commemorative coin.
So I used quarks (Ali's search engine) and the result was this
Turning the page, I saw all kinds of Parkers, but there was no shadow of Ely Parker.
The result of searching with Baidu is like this
At least a little better than Quark, because it at least appears with the name Ely parker.
Then I searched the headlines and finally saw a rough introduction.
In fact, this man was not a heavyweight, and his highest status was that of the secretary of General Grant, the commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Moreover, this man was the drafter of the Surrender Of the Confederate Army.
When I read this article, I could not help but make a malicious speculation: the whole army of the Confederate Army is a gentleman, and the gentleman is disdainful of surrender, not to mention that the surrender book is to be recorded in history. So this "glorious and arduous" task had to fall on Elyparque, who was not a gentleman, not even a white man.
By now, we cannot imagine how Illy parker drafted this surrender, nor how the Confederate army would look at such an Indian who drafted the surrender.
But I do know one thing: The Indians were extremely low in the United States at the time. So it's safe to say that Ellie Park was pushed out as a substitute for the dead. Who made him not white?
Such a tragic figure was forever recorded on American coins as a representative image of the Indians, which shows that the Indians have nothing to put out of the history of the United States.
In the note (and should I say carry the note) of Ely Parker's article, we also saw such a number
There were more than thirty thousand Indians serving in the U.S. Army.
The other figure is that the current population of the United States is 340 million, and the total number of U.S. troops is about 1.44 million. That is to say, the military accounted for less than 0.4 percent of the U.S. population, and there were more than 30,000 Indians with a population of less than four million, which means that Indian soldiers accounted for about 0.8 percent of the population, which is much higher than the proportion of other ethnic groups.
One cannot help but sigh that a race that has shrunk from at least 30 million to less than 4 million people has to fight for the country that slaughtered them!