Archaeologist and ethnologist, Squier was born in Bethlehem, New York, June 17, 1821. He worked as a journalist in Connecticut and Ohio from 1843 to 1848, during which time he also investigated the ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley. In conjunction with Edwin H. Davis, he prepared the narrative published as Volume I of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge (1848). He also made an examination of the ancient remains of New York State in 1848 under the auspices of the New York Historical Society. That same year, he published a monograph on the ancient monuments of New Mexico and California.
He was appointed by President Zachery Taylor in 1849 to serve as Charge d'Affairs to all Central American states and to negotiate treaties with Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras. In 1863 he was appointed U.S. commissioner to Peru, where he made an exhaustive study of Inca remains. In 1868 he was appointed Consul-General of Honduras at New York. In 1871, he was elected first president of the American Anthropological Society, an organization he helped found. In 1874, he was declared mentally insane and it was not until some years later that he was able to return to his research and writing in the field of Americanist studies.
Among his several works on Central American are Nicaragua: Its People, Scenery, and Monuments (1852); Notes on Central America (1857, revised 1870); Travels in Central America, Particularly in Nicaragua (1853); Waikna, or Adventures of the Mosquito Shore (1855); Peru, Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas (1877); and Honduras, Descriptive, Historical, and Statistical (1870). He died in Brooklyn on April 17, 1888.
From the guide to the Ephraim G. Squier Papers, 1848-1874, (Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida)
