Albert Pike was a Harvard dropout, Confederate general, lawyer for Native American causes, celebrated Masonic leader, and lifelong writer of poems. Erudite in many languages and expert on folklore and mythology, his work Morals and Dogma continues to be a major text in the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Despite his insistence that he was not the author, the much-reprinted poem The Old Canoe continues to be attributed to him and figures in this volume of his verses.