Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth College Library

View and Search Selected Documents, 1740s-1790s

 Samson Occom, of the Mohegan tribe, was born in 1723 at Mohegan, Connecticut. In 1743, he went to study with Eleazar Wheelock, a minister living in Lebanon, Connecticut. Occom then briefly attended Yale University and went on to become a schoolmaster and Presbyterian minister. He served Indian communities at Montauk on Long Island and at Mohegan. In 1766, he went to England in the company of another minister, Nathaniel Whitaker, to raise money for Wheelock’s Indian Charity School. In 1769, Wheelock founded Dartmouth College, using the funds solicited by Occom and Whitaker. Occom was deeply offended by what he saw as a misuse of the money he had raised and in 1773 he and Wheelock had falling out. In the following years, Occom devised a plan to set up a Christian Indian community in Oneida. He and his wife Mary Fowler and their family along with a contingent of Christian Indians settled in Oneida, New York, in a community known as Brothertown in 1789. Occom died at Brothertown, New York in 1792.

• This group of papers, digitized as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities funded Occom Circle Project, includes, letters, diaries, sermons, prose, an herbal and annotated books by or related to Samson Occom and several of Eleazar Wheelock's earliest Indian students. The manuscripts, circa 1743-1794, document Occom’s early student life under Wheelock's tutelage, his life as a minister at Montauk and Mohegan, his trip to England to raise money for what would become Dartmouth College as well as his thoughts, ideas and feelings related to his life as an educated Indian in Colonial America. The manuscripts also document his and other Indian students’ relationships with Eleazar Wheelock.

These materials elucidate a number of other subjects including:

• The Great Awakening
• Attitudes toward Indians in the 18th century
• Missionary work among the Indians
• The education of Indians
• Mohegan language and culture.

Some authors represented include Samson Occom, Eleazar Wheelock, Nathaniel Whitaker, George Whitefield, Joseph Johnson, David M'Clure, Susanna Wheatley, Benjamin Pomeroy, David Fowler and Samuel Buell.