SOURCE: “Samson Occom: Mohegan as Spiritual Intermediary,” in Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker, University of Oklahoma Press, 1994, pp. 61-78.

[In the following essay, Szasz investigates Occom's position as a cultural mediator between Anglo-Americans and Native Americans.]

The traveler bound along the turnpike road to New London, Connecticut, in 1764 might have noticed the construction of a large, two-story house just east of the town of Norwich. But the home would have attracted little attention unless a local resident had explained that it belonged to Samson Occom, a Mohegan Indian.

By the 1760s, when the Occom family home was being built, Samson Occom had traveled a considerable distance from his traditional childhood. His move from native wigwam into an English-style home marked the passage from Mohegan upbringing to prominence as a cultural broker moving between Indian and non-Indian worlds. From the era of the American Revolution to the early years of the republic, Occom achieved a singular fame as minister and missionary, fund raiser and author, tribal leader and school-master. Known throughout New England, New York, and nearby colonies and admired in England and Scotland, Occom shattered so many stereotypes, it is virtually impossible to force him into any mold. His contemporary influence and his legacy emerge from his position somewhere between the native and non-native cultural worlds of colonial America.

This chapter looks at Occom as cultural intermediary. During his life he donned many robes, but in the long run all of the parts that he played served to further his preeminent gift as cultural broker. Over the course of his life, Occom hammered out the role of an intercultural eighteenth-century American.¹

The path that led Occom to construction of a frame home in the 1760s was an extraordinary one. Born in 1723 in his native lands along the Mohegan/Thames River in southern Connecticut, in his childhood, Occom remained firmly rooted in the old ways. “My parents Lived a wandering Life,” he recalled. “They Chiefly Depended upon Hunting, Fishing & Fowling for their Living and had no Connection with the English, excepting to traffic with them in their small Trifles.” These Algonquian-speaking people, like their Niantic and Pequot neighbors, had tended small garden plots, raising corn, beans, and squash. Like other Mohegan children, Occom lived in a wigwam, spoke his native language, and successfully avoided the occasional visit of a minister from nearby New London.² The Great Awakening changed this cultural pattern and altered the direction of his life. At the impressionable age of sixteen or seventeen, Occom was converted. “From this Time the Distress and Burden of my mind was removed, and I found Serenity and Pleasure of Soul, in serving God.”

The conversion catapulted Occom into new paths. It led directly to his becoming literate—“I just began to Read in the New Testament without Spelling”—and to his studies with the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, a Congregational New Light minister of Lebanon, Connecticut.³ Within a decade after his conversion, Occom had completed a formal education roughly equivalent to that of frontier ministers of his day, and he had earned the position of schoolmaster and minister among the Montauk Indians of Long Island, where he remained until his late thirties.⁴

When Occom arrived at Montauk, he had been a student for six years, having survived by boarding with Wheelock and other Connecticut ministers, who supported him with funds supplemented by the Boston Board of Commissioners of the New England Company, a Congregational missionary organization. Even as a student, he had begun to mediate. At the same time that he was grappling with the Scriptures, Latin, Hebrew, and music, he became counselor to the Mohegan tribe and also went among his people as a novice itinerant preacher. From the beginning, therefore, he was both internal leader and spiritual intermediary.

Occom's years at Montauk were hard ones. Although the Presbyterians ordained him as a minister and he also taught school for the Montauk children, he never received adequate compensation for his position, a condition he would later reflect on with considerable bitterness. His income from the Boston Board of Commissioners, which averaged £15 a year, scarcely supported Occom, his Montauk wife, Mary Fowler, and their six children. The stringency of the Boston board forced Occom to find other means of support. He planted corn, potatoes, and beans (“I used to be out hoeing my Corn Some times before Sun Rise and after my School is Dismist, and by this means I was able to raise my own Pork”); he caught fish and hunted fowl (“I Could more than pay for my Powder and Shot with Feathers”); and he became a craftsman (“At other Times I Bound old Books for Easthampton People, made wooden Spoons and Ladles, Stocked Guns, & worked on Cedar to make Pails, Piggins, and Churns, &c.”). Despite the struggle for survival, Occom continued to shoulder responsibility for his people. He maintained his position as adviser to the Mohegan, and he often sat as judge for the Montauk and other tribes. In this capacity, he traveled to different Indian groups, “to See into their Affairs Both Religious, Temporal.”⁵

In 1761, at the invitation of the New York Correspondents of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, a Presbyterian missionary organization, Occom traveled to Iroquois country in response to news that the Oneida had requested a missionary. During the journey Occom was accompanied by his Montauk brother-in-law, David Fowler. Fowler, who was in his twenties, was studying with Wheelock at Moor's Indian Charity School, the institution that Wheelock had founded on the basis of Occom's educational achievements. Travel expenses came from two sources: funds hastily collected by the New York correspondents, and a small donation secured by Wheelock from the Boston Board of Commissioners. Wheelock sent Fowler along to recruit Iroquois students for Moor's school.

Success for the Occom-Fowler mission hinged on the reaction of the Iroquois themselves and the response of Sir William Johnson, Irish friend and neighbor to the Iroquois and British Indian super-intendent for the northern district. Johnson's support enabled Fowler to obtain three Iroquois students, one of whom was Johnson's Mohawk brother-in-law, the famous Thayendanegea, or Joseph Brant. The Oneida were also receptive. They spoke of a missionary and possibly a school, and as symbol of their trust, they sent a belt of wampum, which, they said, “shall bind us fast together in perpetual Love and Friendship.”⁶ But full success was marred by the Oneidas' deep poverty. Fowler described them as “exceeding poor,” a condition that raised the question of their ability to help support a missionary, let alone a schoolmaster.⁷ Moreover, Occom's overtures appeared aggressive to them. Another minister familiar with the Iroquois reported that the Oneida resented Occom's zealous instructions. Occom ordered them to grow their hair long, “as the English do,” and told them “they must not wear the Indian ornaments, as wampum and the like: but put them off and burn them in the fire.”⁸

Occom made two additional trips in 1762 and 1763, but the conditions he encountered proved overwhelming. The Oneida, faced with starvation, were preoccupied with the “Pigeon hunt,” “going-a-fishing,” and hunting deer, which prevented them from attending his meetings. Occom himself suffered a recurrence of his rheumatism when he slept “upon the wet.” In 1763, he did not even travel beyond the Mohawks because of the fear engendered by Pontiac's rebellion, which became the coup de grace for his Iroquois mission.⁹ By December of that year, he had gone to Mohegan to choose a site for the house he was planning to build.

The following spring of 1764 appeared to promise Occom a permanent homecoming when he and Mary moved their family to his inherited lands at Mohegan. The construction of the house implied that Occom's long-held dream of serving as missionary to his own people had come to fruition. Acting as catalyst for the dream, the Boston commissioners had offered him a new position as missionary to the Niantic, Mohegan, and nearby groups, at a salary of £30 per annum. As soon as Wheelock heard of the proposal, however, he intervened. Seeking a means to incorporate Moor's school, Wheelock had persuaded the society in Scotland to establish the Connecticut Board of Correspondents, which promptly fell under his thumb, enabling him to convince the Boston commissioners that they should release Occom to the Connecticut correspondents. Unlike the Boston board, Wheelock's correspondents had no funds to pay the missionary. Moreover, Occom's move to Mohegan threatened a conflict between the Indian minister and the Rev. David Jewett, the English minister there.¹⁰

At this juncture, Wheelock turned to the Rev. George Whitefield, the renowned English evangelist. Whitefield, then in New York, had already met Occom and Wheelock and had recently collected £120 for Moor's school. Consequently, Wheelock assumed Whitefield would fund yet another Occom-Fowler mission to the Iroquois. For Wheelock, the trip was urgent. He expected it to fend off a clash between Occom and Jewett, to add students to Moor's school, and to provide Occom with both salary and missionary work. Even if Whitefield funded the journey, however, Wheelock still faced another dilemma: who would finance and supervise the construction of Occom's house in his absence?

When Occom agreed to this trip, he had serious reservations. En route to New York late that summer, he wrote to Wheelock, promising, “Sir I shall end eavour to follow your Directions in all things.” But Occom remained concerned about the funding. He wrote, “I'm sorry you couldn't get at least Some Money for David.” And leavening the message with his occasionally wry humor, he cautioned, “[It] looks like Presumption for us to go on Long Journey thro' Christians, without Money, if it was altogether among Indian Heathen we might do well enough.” Finally, he resolved the question of family support. “But I have determined to go, tho' no white missionary would go in such Circumstances—I leave my House and other Business to be done upon your credit. … I leave my Poor Wife and Children at your feet, and if they hunger Starve and die let them die there.”¹¹

Mary Occom and the children were not left alone for long. No sooner did Occom and Fowler arrive in New York than they were forced to turn around and come back to Connecticut. Wheelock had misjudged Whitefield. After the English evangelist had met Occom in Connecticut, he had anticipated becoming Occom's patron, but when the Boston commissioners and the Connecticut correspondents assumed arbitrary decision making over Occom's career, Whitefield opted out. Wheelock later apologized. “It was my compassion to him [Occom] not knowing what else to do with him that moved me to act at all in the Affair.”¹²

This turn of events reminded Occom of the humbleness of his position. Eventually he would understand that Wheelock and his colleagues saw him as a convenient tool for their goals. His twelve years at Montauk should have been justly rewarded, because he combined in one person the talents of several Englishmen. In another instance, the Boston commissioners had paid a young, non-Indian missionary (without any family) £50 for one year, plus £50 for an interpreter and an additional £30 for an “introducer.” Some years later Occom recalled, “In my Service … I was my own Interpreter I was both a School master and Minister to the Indians, yea I was their Ear, Eye & Hand, as Well as Mouth.” For this he was paid £180 total for twelve years. In retrospect, Occom said, “I leave it with the World, as wicked as it is, to Judge, whether I ought not to have had half as much … but I must Say, ‘I believe it is, because I am a poor Indian.’”¹³ Although the Boston commissioners had finally increased his salary on his removal to Connecticut, the Connecticut correspondents had moved quickly to cut off these funds and sent him on another fruitless mission to Iroquoia. In the negotiations with these two missionary groups, all he had gained was the house at Mohegan. By 1764, therefore, Occom was a step closer to assessing the nature of his role as intermediary. Another lesson on brokerage awaited him on his return from New York that fall.

When Occom settled on his lands at Mohegan, the clash between the Indian missionary and the English minister forecast by Wheelock soon dominated the local scene. As Wheelock noted, “Mr. Occom returned … into a Fire which had been for some time enkindling.” The animosity between the two men was not restricted to a battle over territory. It fed into a larger struggle over the Mohegan land claims, known as the “Mason Case” or the “Mason controversy.”¹⁴

This case had been in dispute since 1640 when the seventeenth-century Mohegan leader, Sachem Ben Uncas, had deeded between 700 and 800 square miles of Mohegan lands to Maj. John Mason, who later conveyed all but 5,000 acres of “sequestered” lands to the colony of Connecticut. When Occom returned in 1764, final resolution of the controversy was imminent.¹⁵ As a counselor for the Mohegan, Occom felt a strong commitment to their defense, but even the Mohegans were divided on the matter. One group supported Sachem Ben Uncas, who leaned toward the colony's position; the other group, led by Occom, supported the Mohegan claim. When Occom began to preach at the Mohegan schoolhouse, his supporters, both Mohegan and English, came to hear him, and in a short time he had acquired a number of enemies, including Jewett. Rumors spread. Occom was portrayed “as a very bad, mischevious, and designing man.” Jewett wrote to the Boston board about Occom's activities, which so alarmed the commissioners that they withdrew the pension that Whitefield had secured for Occom.¹⁶ Eventually, the Connecticut correspondents persuaded Jewett and Occom to come to terms, although several months elapsed before Wheelock's sharp prodding led Jewett to write a retraction to the Boston board.

The final decision on the case, which granted all of the disputed lands to Connecticut except the 5,000 acres of sequestered lands, jolted Occom. The case had split the tribe, thereby rendering it almost defenseless. It had also demonstrated the value of maintaining legal records, which Occom would heed in the future. Above all, it had revealed the power of English acquisitiveness. Occom concluded, “I am afraid the poor Indian will never stand a chance against the English in their land controversies because they are very poor, they have no money. Money is almighty now-a-days, & the Indians have no learning, no wit, no cunning, the English have it all.”¹⁷

While Occom was engrossed in these momentous issues, Wheelock and his colleagues were planning further use of his talents. Plagued with debts and “want of money” in New England and eager to expand Moor's school into Iroquoia, Wheelock was devising a scheme that would draw on the mother country's proven sympathy for the Indian cause. After months of intensive correspondence, Wheelock revealed plans for a fund-raising tour in the British Isles to be led by the Rev. Nathaniel Whitaker of Norwich and the Rev. Samson Occom of Mohegan.

Many of those involved in the tour believed that sending Occom was a stroke of genius. But the Boston commissioners, who saw Wheelock as an interloper in their domain, opposed Occom's role. Representatives of the oldest nonconformist missionary society in the colonies, the commissioners resented Wheelock's failure to include them in the planning of the tour. When they learned of Occom's position, they launched a campaign that questioned the degree of Wheelock's influence on the Mohegan, suggesting that Occom was already schooled and Christianized when he went to Lebanon. When Occom arrived in Boston, he and Whitaker tried in vain to placate the commissioners.¹⁸ Their failure meant that the distrust engendered by the commissioners' criticism plagued Occom throughout the tour, leading him eventually to write an account of his own childhood, wherein he refuted all of their assertions. His narrative began, “Having seen and heard Several Representatives in England and Scotland, by some Gentlemen in America, Concerning me, and finding many gross mistakes in their Accounts, I thought it my Duty to give a Short, Plain, and Honest Account of my Self.”¹⁹

The English tour has been well covered in Leon Burr Richardson's An Indian Preacher in England (1933). For Occom, the tour was both exhilarating and exhausting. The grueling ocean voyage, the stint of the smallpox inoculation, and months of preaching to vast crowds in England and Scotland and of meeting prominent ministers and royalty kept Occom away from his family and his people for two and a half years. But those who had faith in Occom saw that faith reconfirmed in the financial success of the trip. In England alone, the two ministers raised £9,497; their brief stay in Scotland garnered £2,529. This was the largest amount collected through direct solicitation by any American institution in the colonial era.²⁰

A number of conditions led to this achievement. These included the guidance of Whitefield, who provided entrée into powerful, wealthy, and sympathetic circles. Occom wrote, “[He] takes unwearied Pains to Introduce us to the religious Nobility and others, and to the best men in the City of London—yea he is a tender father to us.”²¹ The ultimate secret of the tour's success, however, was Occom himself. The first American Indian minister to visit the British Isles, he found himself in the spotlight. Whether he was in London or the West Country, in Whitefield's Tabernacle or a humble church, as an American Indian, he proved to be the embodiment of his preaching. His previous experiences at Montauk, in Connecticut, and among the Iroquois served him well, as did his maturity; on his arrival he was forty-three years old. When he spoke of “the miserable & wreched situation of the poor Indians, who are perishing for lack of spiritual knowledge,” he often convinced his listeners through a combination of his Mohegan birth and his own conviction.²² The Rev. Peter Jilliard wrote of Occom, “As far as I hear he pleases in every Town & city—So much Simplicity appears in the man: So honest, guiles a Temper, with Seriousness in his public Service.”²³ Occom's popularity reached its apogee in the summer of 1766. On returning to London that June, he wrote, “This Evening I heard, the Stage Players, had been Mimicking of me in their Plays, lately,” adding, “I never thought I Shou'd ever come to that Honor,—O God wou'd give the greater courage—.”²⁴

In New England, however, Wheelock persisted in his belief that Occom needed fatherly counsel and guidance. While his counterparts in England treated the Mohegan with admiration and respect, Wheelock chided him about his pride. During the first months of the tour, he wrote to Occom, “I hope God has made you more humble than you have commonly been.” Some twenty months later, he wrote to Whitaker, “Give my love to Mr. Occom; I want to see him; does he keep clear of that Indian distemper, Pride.”²⁵

Wheelock never seemed able to separate his emotional relationship with Occom from his recognition of Occom's accomplishments. On many occasions he indicated that he had not broken loose from a relationship that was both that of parent to child and of superior (civilized and English) to inferior (partly civilized but still Indian). During the tour, Occom not only distanced himself from this psychological strain, he also found himself being treated as an equal. The adulation of the crowds combined with the respect of his contemporaries provided Occom with a long delayed sense of self-worth.

Occom's biographers have portrayed the years between 1768, when he returned, and 1772-73, when his salary was restored and he began to plan for the emigration of his people, as the low point in his life. It is difficult to judge this period, partly because there is no diary for this time. It is known, however, that Occom apologized to the Connecticut correspondents for drinking; that he and his family struggled to survive without any regular source of income; and that both Occom and his wife were in poor health. Finally, during this time Occom split with Wheelock because of the latter's decision to spend most of the British funds for English rather than Indian students at his newly founded Dartmouth College. One of Wheelock's former English students relayed Occom's position on Dartmouth: “The Indian was converted into an English School & … the English had crowded out the Indian youth.”²⁶ This reversal embittered Occom, and although he and Wheelock exchanged further letters, he never visited the campus that was indebted to him.

Occom's disillusionment may also have been rooted in the contrast between the respect he received in England and the patronizing attitude of Wheelock. His feelings toward Wheelock also mirrored the declining fortunes of the Mohegans. With the death of Uncas, the final resolution of their land claim, and a dwindling population, Occom's people needed his leadership.²⁷ As he gained in stature within his tribe, he grew increasingly suspicious of those who pretended to have Mohegan interests at heart.

One of these was his rival, Jewett. In the spring of 1768, Occom wrote to Wheelock, “Br. Jewett is picking up his charges to shoot at me, but I hope that he will overload, that his old musket may break.”²⁸ Two months later, when Jewett was presiding over funeral services for Uncas, Occom and his followers got up and walked out before the services were concluded. Although Occom had been loyal to Uncas, he was also convinced that the colony's agents had used the sachem for their own purposes. By leaving early, he could indicate his displeasure both with Jewett and with the agents of the colony. Stressing the departure in a description of the funeral, the agent reporting to Connecticut authorities warned, “The tempers of a Number of ye Indians is Worked up, to the highest pitch of Jealousy, & Distrust of ye Govemnt, and also of any Dependence of them, Either for advice, protection, Regulation, Friendship, or even as much as to be Treated with as Friend.”²⁹

The agent may have exaggerated for effect, but the Mohegan attitudes were perceptibly hardening. These years, then, were a time of retrenchment for Samson Occom. Although he and his people suffered during this interim period, Occom emerged in 1773 as a stronger person. His decades of preaching and counseling, his experiences in Britain, the break with Wheelock, and the legal blows against his people—all had molded his will and determination.

Prior to this time his urge to serve his people, as itinerant preacher, counselor, and mediator, was constantly usurped by Wheelock and the leaders of the missionary organizations. From his earliest studies with Wheelock through the British tour, his cultural mediation had been commandeered by the English. Even the tour itself had been an exercise in deception.

By 1773, therefore, Occom was ready to alter the direction of his brokerage, and from this point forward, he centered his energies on his own people. The resolution of their untenable position in southern New England emerged as his ultimate goal, and he devoted much of the remainder of his life to its fulfillment.

Before the emigration movement was fully under way, however, Occom plunged into a creative work designed to appeal to these natives. Both Algonquian and Iroquoian people of the Northeast had always enjoyed music, and many colonial intermediaries, including Fowler and Occom, had tapped into this dimension of native cultures. Occom's English visit coincided with a rigorous hymn-writing period in Britain, and while there he met many people who knew the famous hymn writers Isaac Watts and Samuel Wesley. On his return, he brought a number of hymnals to his Mohegan home, increasing the size of its already well-known library.

The immediate inspiration for his own hymnal, however, may have come in 1772, when his sermon on temperance, delivered before the execution of Moses Paul, an Indian who committed a murder while drunk, was published in New Haven. Since this was probably the first colonial publication of a sermon preached by a native minister, the initial printing sold out quickly, and it was subsequently reprinted many times in America and Britain. Only a year and a half later, Occom's hymnal appeared. The title page read, A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians, of all Denominations, by Samson Occom, Minister of the Gospel.³⁰ Reprinted twice, the second time in 1792, the year of Occom's death, the collection gathered a number of Occom's favorite hymns. One of his biographers has suggested that Occom probably wrote many of the hymns. Perhaps the most famous of them, which began with the line, “Awaked by Sinai's awful sound,” was reprinted elsewhere, thereby becoming part of nineteenth-century hymnody in America.³¹

In this manner, Occom left a legacy that was carried into American society. But those who cherished his hymns were the native people whose lives he had touched. When the southern New England Algonquians were gathered, especially after moving to Oneida country, they often concluded their meetings with singing. On a trip to the young settlement in 1785, Occom wrote, “And then we arrived at Davis [Fowler's] house as we approached I heard a Melodious Singing, a number were together Singing Psalms hyms and Spiritual songs we went in amongst them and they all took hold of my hand one by one with Joy and Gladness from the Greatest to the least and we Sot down awhile, and then they began to Sing again.”³² By the following year, the singing group had gained in stature. That fall, Occom noted, “I went home with our People, we got there just before Sun Set; and our Singers got together and they Sung some Time, We had some new Comers, at the Singing meeting.” Occom added that the singers often sang for up to two hours in a single evening.³³

Occom's Choice Collection of Hymns appeared in the midst of emigration preparations. In July 1774, when Occom and Fowler left for Iroquoia to negotiate the boundaries of the land that the Oneida had promised to them, only three months had elapsed since the hymnal was published. Since emigration preparations had been under way for almost a year, Occom may have considered the hymnal as a singular contribution to the new and distant home for his people. If this was the case, then the postponement of emigration must have been a harsh disappointment.

The proposed settlement in Oneida country suffered innumerable setbacks before it finally began to take shape. The initial proposal for the venture had come from Wheelock, but his offers to Occom (and Fowler), made in 1769, were ill-timed. At this stage of his life, Occom was not only unable to go because of poverty and lameness but was also unwilling because of the recent severing of relations between the Oneida and Wheelock (the Oneida had removed all of their children from Moor's School); finally, he rejected the offer because he was moving toward greater independence from Wheelock's paternalism.

The proposed move was stymied, therefore, until new Indian leadership emerged. In 1769, Occom had written to Wheelock from Mohegan concerning the status of religion. He observed, “Religion Decays, and the Devil Reigns.”³⁴ Two years later, however, the mood began to change, and in the Indian town near Farmington, Connecticut, Occom led a revival that affected a number of natives, including Joseph Johnson, a young Mohegan who had recently returned from two years at sea. A former student at Moor's School and then a schoolmaster among the Oneida, Johnson had left his post because of drunkenness. After his conversion, however, he became a schoolmaster and a minister; and he married Occom's daughter, Tabitha. It was Johnson who provided the impetus for the move to Oneida country.

Twice in Occom's life, therefore, a religious awakening had become the catalyst for change. The first Great Awakening led him to his schooling and career; the second local revival, three decades later, led him to the climax of his role as a spiritual intermediary.

After negotiations in 1773-74, both with the Oneida and among themselves, leaders of seven Indian communities of southern New England—Mohegan, Farmington, Montauk, Groton, Charles-town, Niantic, and Stonington—concluded their plans to form a community among the Oneida on a tract of land that Occom took care to register legally in 1774. But the March 1775 departure date for the first group of emigrants, which included Fowler and Johnson, coincided with the onset of the American struggle for independence, and as a result, Occom's people were stymied for almost a decade.

One year after the Peace of Paris, in 1784, Occom led the first group of postwar emigrants, who established their new Indian community of Brothertown. Occom's relatives and longtime friends formed the nucleus of the young settlement. These included Mary Occom's brothers, David and Jacob Fowler, who were among the earlist to arrive. Gradually other members from the seven Indian communities added their strength to Brothertown, although the exodus was not a universal one. Nearby, Indians who had removed from Stockbridge, in the Housatonic Valley of western Massachusetts, formed their own community in exile. Of the pioneer leaders of the Brothertown movement, only Johnson, a casualty of the Revolutionary War, was missing.³⁵

When Occom and David Fowler began the land negotiations with the Oneida in 1774, Occom had written, “Spent the week with an aggreable view of the Situation and helpful Prospect of the Indians future happiness.”³⁶ At this juncture in his life, he was looking both into the future and back to the past. He had not been to Oneida since 1762, and the visit made him nostalgic. Of the Oneida themselves, he noted, “Great alteration has been made … since I was here 12 years ago.”³⁷ Perhaps he was also describing himself. He, too, had undergone “great alteration” in the intervening years.

In certain respects, however, Occom had not changed. As itinerant preacher, he served as spiritual mediator from his student days with Eleazar Wheelock through the emigration to Brothertown. Whether his base was Lebanon, Montauk, or Mohegan, between the 1740s and 1770s, Occom had been a familiar visitor to wigwams located in the Algonquian towns outside many Connecticut communities. So, too, had he become an integral figure in the non-native communities of southern New England. In the early 1760s, during his first journeys to Iroquois country, he added the Dutch residents of the Hudson River Valley to his widening audience. On the British tour, he included the English and Scots among his supporters. The post-Britain years saw a strengthening of his reputation in southern New England and along the routes that he followed to Iroquoia—up the Hudson via New York City or across northwestern Connecticut and along the Housatonic.

Occom appealed to the wide variety of people who gathered to hear him during his travels. Seldom described as a sophisticated theologian, Occom held his audiences through an evangelistic style, possibly intensified from observing Whitefield, and through the use of allusion and illustration. The few sermon notes that remain suggest his feel for the rhythm of the language and convey a sense of the persistent kinship network of his native culture. “Be perfect / —i.e., be united, compact together everyone in proper place as every Limb & joint of a Human Body must be otherwise it will be deformed, imperfect & weak … Be of good comfort. … Be of one Mind … all going Heart & Hand in ye Easy-Difficult Road to Zion.” He also spoke to the condition of his largely rural audience. For example, “Live in peace. … Cultivate peace, i.e.— / take care to plant manure & cherish it as ye vintner his Vine, or ye Husband-man his corn.”³⁸ The Brothertown years saw the culmination of Occom's itinerant preaching. Since Mary Occom did not move to the new community until 1789, during the preceding five years he was constantly on the move, in Brothertown, en route to Brother-town or Mohegan, or traveling to communities within a day's ride from Mohegan. During these journeys he reached out to his rural listeners through his increasingly extemporaneous preaching, through his willingness to listen and to offer counsel, both to natives and non-natives, and through evenings of singing and/or “exercising” with his “Christian cards,” a set of playing cards with biblical verses printed on them which served as both entertainment and instruction. Occom carried these cards on all of his travels and used them frequently. In the summer of 1787, en route to Oneida, he noted in his journal,

Took Dinner here in the after Noon the People collected … there was very good attention; … and after I sat a while in the House, I had Exercise with my Christian Cards with some young Women that came late for the Sermon, and Some were somewhat Startled, but Some began they were all delighted, and behaved very decent, and Some Old People Chose Texts also, and it was agreable exercise. I Lodged at the Same House and was Extreamly well treated by the Whole Family.³⁹

Although Occom's itinerant preaching appealed to both native and non-native, his heart and affections lay with the natives, whom he often described as “my people.” He addressed not only his immediate family but other native people, as well as “Brother” or “Sister.” For the English or Dutch, however, he reserved the more formal titles of “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” “Capt.,” “Elder,” “Esqr.,” or “Deacon.” The joy that he expressed when he was united with his people at Brothertown was unequaled by any experience with non-natives. One summer in the late 1780s, he recorded in his journal, “I and my sons went to the Lake, which was about-half a mile off & it was just Night, and we Fishd, and we Catchd a fine parsel of fish presently, & made up a Fire by the Creek and had fine supper of F and afterwards Prayd, & then we went to Sleep by our fire quietly.”⁴⁰

Wheelock once described his former student as “Mr. Occom the Indian minister.” A stranger whom Occom met en route to Oneida spoke of him as “the strange mister.” But the family name of Occom, which translates as “the other side,” was perhaps the most apt name for this Mohegan intermediary. From the 1740s through the 1760s, Samson Occom had moved between native and non-native cultures, and in so doing, he had learned much from “the other side” of the cultural divide. From the early 1770s forward, however, he recast that knowledge in the form of a tool that native groups might use to maintain a degree of autonomy.

If Occom chose to lead these native people toward a form of spiritual syncretism, by the 1770s, he had lost any illusions about English willingness to eradicate the natives' cultural heritage. The actions of Wheelock, his colleagues in the missionary societies, and the Connecticut authorities had delivered a clear message. Few choices remained for these natives. They had seen their communities become as islands in the ocean of Euramerican settlement. If they chose to remain, their future was uncertain; if they chose to flee, there was hope. Flight offered them a respite and an opportunity to regain a sense of control over their lives. It appeared to promise an avenue for selective adaptation by enabling them to merge nonconformist Protestantism into their native world view without losing their sense of community and the unique heritage that set them apart from the English. For this reason, Occom, David Fowler, and others determined to lead the emigrants in their north-western migration. Several decades later, their grandchildren would make a similar decision, when they emigrated from New York to lands near Green Bay, Wisconsin, where their descendants live today.

The decision to move to Oneida was a deliberate one that had required considerable thought. The fact that Mary Occom did not make the long trek until five years after her husband had led the first settlers suggests the complexity of the choice and explains why some Mohegans remained in Connecticut and others returned later, thereby splitting the tribe. In 1789, when the Occoms moved to Brothertown, they thrust a familiar land behind them. It was a third move for Mary Occom, a second for her husband; for both it meant turning their backs on the Mohegan house that had been their home for twenty-five years. When the home was under construction, Occom's trust in the English was still intact; twenty-five years later, it had not recovered from the events of the early 1770s. Like the move to Mohegan, the move to Brothertown symbolized Occom's stance as intermediary between cultures. For twenty years he had cooperated with the English, but when they had betrayed his trust, he had moved away from the other side and toward his own people.

Notes

1. Works on Occom include William DeLoss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1899); Harold Blodgett, Samson Occom (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1935); Leon Burr Richardson, An Indian Preacher in England ([1933] Reprint. Hanover: Dartmouth College Publications, 1939); Margaret Connell Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607-1783 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988): chaps. 8-10; David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991): 44-47, 53-57.

2. Transcript of Samson Occom's Journal [Diary], 3 vols., Dartmouth College Archives, Hanover (hereafter cited as DCA). September 17, 1768, 1: 82 (hereafter cited as Occom Diary). On natives of this region see Bert Salwen, “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Early Period,” in Handbook of North American Indians, Northeast, vol. 15, ed. by Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 160-176.

3. September 17, 1768, Occom Diary, 1: 84. On Wheelock, see David McClure and Elijah Parish, Memoirs of the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock (Newburyport, Mass.: Edward Norris and Co., 1811); James Dow McCallum, Eleazar Wheelock, Founder of Dartmouth College (Hanover: Dartmouth College Publications, 1939); McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock's Indians (Hanover: Dartmouth College Publications, 1932); James Axtell, “Dr. Wheelock's Little Red School,” in Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, chaps. 8-10.

4. The Rev. Samuell Buell, who preached Occom's ordination sermon, said that had Occom's failing eyes not prevented him from enrolling in Yale, he would have entered as a second-year student. Love, Samson Occom, 40-41.

5. September 17, 1768, Occom Diary, 1: 86, 87.

6. Love, Samson Occom, 93.

7. Wheelock to Dennys de Berdt, November 16, 1761, 761616 DCA.

8. Samuel Hopkins to Wheelock, September 30, 1761, 761530 DCA.

9. Wheelock to George Whitefield, September 16, 1762, 7651516 DCA; Love, Samson Occom, 98.

10. Wheelock to Whitefield, September 16, 1764, 764526.2 DCA.

11. Occom to Wheelock, September 8, 1764, 764508.3 DCA.

12. Wheelock to Whitefield, September 26, 1764, 764526.2 DCA.

13. September 17, 1768, Occom Diary, 1: 91-92. In this context, David Murray suggests that “we need to be aware of the extent to which Occom may be utilizing the complex situation of Indians talking to each other, but being overheard and stage-managed by whites, and turning it, if only marginally, to his own purposes.” Murray, Forked Tongues, 47.

14. On the Mason Case see William Kellaway, The New England Company, 1649-1776 (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1961), 253-255; Szasz, Indian Education in The American Colonies, 186-87, 196.

15. Love, Samson Occom, 120-21; McCallum, Eleazar Wheelock, 152.

16. Wheelock to Whitefield, May 4, 1765, 765304 DCA; Wheelock to John Brainerd, January 14, 1765, 765114.3 DCA.

17. Love, Samson Occom, 123.

18. Saturday, November 23, 1765, Occom Diary, 1: 62. John Hancock, part owner of the ship Occom and Whitaker sailed in, helped to pay for their passage. Love, Samson Occom, 136.

19. September 17, 1768, Occom Diary, 1: 82. Without the pressures that forced this narrative, inserted into his diary as a recollection, history would have little record of Occom's childhood.

20. Richardson, An Indian Preacher in England, 15.

21. Thursday, February 13, 1766, Occom Diary, 1: 64.

22. Occom is quoted in William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, Presbyterian Print (New York: Arno Press, 1969): III: 194.

23. Peter Jilliard to Wheelock, March 2, 1767, quoted in Richardson, An Indian Preacher in England, 227.

24. Saturday, February 22, 1766, Occom Diary, 1: 75.

25. Wheelock to Occom, April 9, 1766, 766259 DCA; Wheelock to Whitaker, November 28, 1767, in Richardson, An Indian Preacher in England, 321. These references to pride may be the outcome of Occom's independent stand during the Mohegan land issue, a source of annoyance to Wheelock.

26. David McClure to Wheelock, May 21, 1770, 770321 DCA. On the founding of Dartmouth, see Leon Burr Richardson, History of Dartmouth College, 2 vols. (Hanover: Dartmouth College Publications, 1932); Frederick Chase, A History of Dartmouth College and the Town of Hanover, New Hampshire (to 1815), 2d ed. (Brattleboro: Vermont Printing Co., 1929): 1; Jere Daniell, “Eleazar Wheelock and the Dartmouth College Charter,” Historical New Hampshire 24 (Winter 1969): 3-44.

27. A list of Mohegans compiled in 1782 includes only 141 names. Indians, Ser. 1, vol. 2: 328-a, b, c, d. Connecticut State Archives, Hartford [hereafter cited as CA].

28. Occom to Wheelock, March 17, 1769, 769217.2 DCA.

29. William Stillhouse (?) to the Honorable, The Government and Council of his majesties colony of Connecticut, May, 1769. Indians, Ser. 1, vol. 2: 286-a. Stillhouse wrote that the Indians' absence made it “almost impossible” to carry the coffin for burial at the “usual Burying place” in Norwich, so it was buried at “Mohegan on their own Land.”

30. At least four copies of the hymnal are in collections, including the Congregational Library in Boston and the New London Library (Conn.). Love, Samson Occom, 180.

31. Love, Samson Occom, 179-87.

32. Monday, October 24 [1785], Occom Diary, 2: 162.

33. Sabb: September 3 [1786], ibid., 235.

34. Occom to Wheelock, July 1, 1769, 769041 DCA.

35. On Brothertown, see Love, Samson Occom, 247-315; Blodgett, Samson Occom, 172-214. On Stockbridge, see Patrick Frazier, The Mohicans of Stockbridge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).

36. Sabbath, July 24 [1774], Occom Diary, 1: 97.

37. Ibid.

38. Occom Sermons, no. 13, 2-3, DCA.

39. Friday, June 15 [1787], Occom Diary, 3: 297.

40. Monday, August 4 [1788], ibid., 371.