The Occom Circle

The Legislature of the State of New York is composed of two houses: the Senate, or upper house, led by the President (a post held ex officio by the Lieutenant Governor but usually filled by the Majority Leader), and the Assembly, or lower house, led by the Speaker. It meets at the New York State capitol in Albany. Members of both houses are elected for two year terms. The number of Senators varies, according to population, and stands now at 63. The Assembly has 150 members. The Legislature originated in the revolutionary New York Provincial Congress, assembled by patriots during the Revolutionary War, and has had a history of corruption. It is empowered to make laws subject to the governor's veto, which may be overridden by a two-thirds majority. It can also propose amendments to the New York State Constitution. In the late eighteenth century, this Legislature played a key role in the establishment of Brothertown. On a preaching tour of New York in 1784 to raise funds for Indian families moving up to Oneida country, Occom reported meeting a group of "agreeable" gentlemen who were members of the New York Assembly on a sloop he took to Albany, who are very pleased by the prospect of New England Indians moving to New York. Occom's journals for this period indicate that he was actively campaigning for the move, raising monies and meeting sympathetic ministers in upstate New York. He apparently made a good impresion, becaue in 1791, the New York Assembly and Senate paid Occom £15 for expenses to attend the Legislature on behalf of the Brotherton and New Stockbridge Indians (ms. 791174), indicating recognition of Occom's leadership. But the new settlement was beset with land troubles. In Fall 1786, the Oneidas, who had granted the New England Indians a tract of land in 1774 without reservations, wanted them to surrender the grant. Occom advised the Brothertown group to reject this dangerous proposal. When the Oneidas ceded all their lands to the State of New York in the Fort Schuyler Treaty of 1788, the Legislature intervened to recognize the Brothertown deed of 1774. But Occom and his group could not form the town's government and elect trustees until they ejected a group of whites who had won a ten-year lease from a group of trusting Indians. Again, the Legislature took action, passing the Act of March 31, 1795, insuring a large part of the Brothertown and New Stockbridge lands. Occom was responsible for this important measure, but it only slowed down the land grabbing that, after Occom's death, would eventually force the Brothertown Indians to move further west.

The Dutch Reformed Church developed during the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century as part of the Netherlands' bid for freedom from Spanish Catholic control. It followed the teachings of John Calvin, a Swiss Protestant theologian, and adopted a presbyterian form of church governance. Dutch settlers to New Amsterdam brought the Church over in 1628, and when the colony passed into English hands in 1664, 11 Dutch Reformed Churches existed. This increased to 34 Churches at the beginning of the 18th century, under the jurisdiction of the Classis of Amsterdam. In 1738, the American Dutch Reformed Churches wrote a petition for independence from Amsterdam, which was granted in 1755. Practitioners and Churches spread throughout New York and New England, and in the 19th century to the mid-West. In 1766 the missionary John Brainerd passed on to Wheelock a recommendation for John Kals, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, as a potential missionary and teacher of sacred languages. Occom recorded in his journal for 1787 that he preached several times in Dutch Reformed Churches and meeting houses in upstate New York to large and enthusiastic audiences.

The Narragansetts are an Algonquian tribe based in Southern Rhode Island. Narragansett students (including the Simons, the Shattocks, and the Secutors) attended Eleazar Wheelock’s Moor’s Indian Charity School, and Charlestown, RI, was also one of the seven communities that participated in the Brothertown movement (the pan-Algonquian coalition organized by former Moor’s students). The Narragansetts were recognized in the 18th-century for their indigenous Christian Separatism, and a Separatist congregation under the leadership of Samuel Niles commanded much of the Tribe’s spiritual life from the 1740s onward. While Separatism is an imprecise word, it generally denotes congregations that formally separated from Congregationalist churches and were characterized by an increased emphasis on charismatic Christianity. Samuel Niles was an illiterate preacher who had himself been ordained by lay persons (thus breaking with the formal laying on of hands by an ordained person that created a theoretical chain from the Apostles to contemporary clergy). The congregation’s practices and theology diverged from the Anglo-American norm in meaningful ways, which shocked many Anglo-American observers but also gave the Narragansetts the autonomy needed to expel Rev. Joseph Fish, a New England Company (NEC) sponsored minister, and Edmund Deake, the schoolmaster who accompanied him, in 1776. Like other New England tribes, the Narragansetts struggled with land dispossession. In this case, the sachem and colony cooperated with one another to the Tribe’s disadvantage: the sachem family, the Ninigrets, had tied themselves closely to the colony of Rhode Island when they converted to the Anglican Church in 1727. They adopted a lavish English lifestyle and funded it by selling off tribal land. By the 1760s, land sales were a massive problem, and the anti-sachem party began trying to put a halt to them. Narragansetts with powerful connections, including former Moor’s students, appealed to Eleazar Wheelock and Sir William Johnson and, in 1767, secured a temporary halt to land sales through the intervention of NEC treasurer Andrew Oliver. The next year, Tobias and John Shattock traveled to London to appeal to the privy council for a permanent solution; however, Tobias died of smallpox, and John failed. Sachem Thomas Ninigret died in 1769, and the Tribe solved the land sales problem by abolishing the office of sachem in the 1770s. The Narragansetts continued to struggle with the state of Rhode Island after the Revolution. Rhode Island unilaterally (and illegally) dissolved the Narragansett’s tribal standing in 1880, but the Narragansetts maintained tribal structures and, as much as possible, residence on their territory. They were officially re-recognized in 1983.

The Stockbridge Indians were the inhabitants of the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a Christian Indian town modeled on John Eliot’s 17th-century “praying towns” (Indian towns where the inhabitants lived an Anglicized life style). Established in 1734, Stockbridge was composed of Mahicans, Housatonics, Wappingers, and Esopus (at the end of the 18th century, the Stockbridge Indians also adopted many New Jersey Delaware). The Stockbridge Indians had close ties to the Brothertown Nation, a composite tribe of Algonquian Indians from around the Long Island Sound which was organized by alumni of Moor’s Indian Charity School. The town played host to a series of famous missionaries and ministers, including John Sergeant Sr., Gideon Hawley, Jonathan Edwards, and John Sergeant Jr. (Sergeant Sr. established a boarding school at Stockbridge that provided the model for Eleazar Wheelock’s Moor’s Indian Charity School.) Eventually, the problems that the Stockbridge Indians encountered with white families who owned land in their town (most notably the Williams family) convinced them of the dangers of white land expansion and influenced their later land policies. In 1785, the Stockbridge Indians relocated to a tract of land in Oneida territory adjacent to the Brothertown settlement. (During the Revolution, Stockbridge played host to displaced Brothertown and Oneida Indians who had fled central New York. These ties were extremely influential in the decision to relocate.) They called their town New Stockbridge. By the turn of the 19th century, land pressures again overwhelmed the Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and, along with many Oneida, they sought land in the west where they could attempt to escape white expansion.

The Baptists were a dissenter sect that became especially popular in New England after the First Great Awakening. They diverged from Protestant belief mainly in insisting that only believers should be baptized, and that it should be done by immersion in water and not by sprinkling or pouring water, but they represented the most radical of the radical New Lights and were known for lay preaching and personal spirituality. Wheelock and most of his former students were more moderate New Lights and opposed this sort of radical Christianity. Occom, however, had many connections with Baptist ministers in central New York. On his preaching tour in 1774, he records visiting several Baptist ministers, largely white, and speaking to large crowds, sometimes in the woods. He also records meeting with a "Seven Day Baptist" minister. The Seventh Day or Sabbatarian Baptists differ from Baptist beliefs mainly in observing the Sabbath on Saturday, in accordance with the ten commandments. Baptist belief held a strong attraction for Native peoples because it protected their autonomy and embraced preaching and leadership by lay people. Divides over theology became problematic at Brothertown, where Occom’s moderate sect clashed with the more Baptist sect over whether or not to lease their land to Americans. After Occom’s death, Samuel Ashpo, a Baptist Mohegan minister known for his separatism, began spending more time at Brothertown and built up a substantial Baptist congregation there.

Ballston is a town in central New York state, north of Albany. The area was occupied by Mohawk Indians, who resented the appropriation of their sacred grounds by European settlers. The first settlers, the MacDonald brothers, built a homestead on the west bank of Ballston Lake in 1763. Reverend Eliphalet Ball arrived in 1770 with his three sons and members of his congregation from Bedford, NY, bought the land from the MacDonalds, named it Ball's Town, and established a Presbyterian church there in 1771. Soon, settlers arrived from other parts of New England, New Jersey, Scotland and north of Ireland. In 1774, a stockaded fort was built in Ballston, which was attacked by the British and their Indian allies from Canada in 1780 and 1781. It became a town of Albany county in 1785 and was part of the religious circuit in upstate New York in which Occom travelled.

Galway is a town located in eastern New York's Saratoga County about 15 miles north of the Mohawk River. The area was originally inhabited by Mohawk Indians. Immigrants from Scotland’s shire of Galloway who settled the area around 1774 gave the town its name, which was recorded incorrectly as the Irish spelling of Galway when the town was incorporated in 1792. Occom often visited Galway in the later half of the 1780s when it was still an isolated community in what was considered wilderness, which is likely why he noted in his journal that he once got lost on his way to the town. Occom often preached to area residents as a part of his preaching tours along the Mohawk River. Today, the town remains small and rural and contains a village that is also named Galway.

The Hudson River, frequently referred to as the North River in Occom Circle documents, runs 315 miles from Newcomb in upstate New York to the Long Island Sound. The Algonquin-speaking tribes that originally inhabited both sides of the river called it Mahicantuck, or river that flows both ways. In 1609, Henry Hudson, an English explorer employed by the Dutch East India Company, sailed up the river while looking for a passage to India and instead found thousands of Algonquians living in the river's valley. Hudson sailed as far north as Albany before turning back. Dutch traders settled the river’s banks and established trade in the colony that would become New Netherland. The Dutch called it Noort Rivier, or North River, by contrast to South River, the Delaware River. Only when the English began to assert their claim over the North River in the 1600s did it become commonly referred to as the Hudson River, to emphasize its "discovery" by an Englishman. The Dutch eventually ceded the river to the English in 1674 under the Treaty of Westminster, but the name North River persisted into the early 20th century. In their writings, Occom and his contemporaries refer to the Hudson as North River. Occom travelled along the North River from Mohegan to Albany during his preaching tours in the mid-1780s. Eventually, Occom sailed up North River for good, settling in New Stockbridge in 1789. Today, the name North River still refers to the section of the Hudson between New Jersey and New York City.

Block Island, roughly 10 square miles in area and composed primarily of beaches, cliffs, and grasslands, is nine miles south of mainland Rhode Island and 18 miles north of Montauk on the eastern edge of Long Island. The Narragansett Indians, Block Island’s original inhabitants, called the island Manisses, meaning “Island of the Little God.” Perhaps because of this, the Narragansetts who occupied Block Island are sometimes referred to as Manissean Indians. The island derives its current name from Dutch explorer Adriaen Block, who sighted it in 1614. In 1636, an Englishman, Captain John Oldham, was murdered while trying to establish trade with the Narragansetts on Block Island. Henry Vane, Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, used Oldham’s murder as justification to seize the land. The English slaughtered 14 Narragansett warriors and burned nearly all the crops and wigwams they found on the island. From then on, the island’s Narragansetts were outnumbered by the English settlers and subject to colonial rule. Possession of Block Island passed to several private families in 1658 before being incorporated into Rhode Island as the town of New Shoreham in 1672. By 1700, the Indian population of Block Island had been reduced to about 300. During his preaching tours of New England, Occom interacted with inhabitants from Block Island, though these interactions occurred on the mainland.Although Occom’s early residence in Montauk was not far from Block Island by water, no evidence indicates that he ever visited there.

New London is a city located in southeastern Connecticut along an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean called Long Island Sound. The area that would become New London was inhabited by the Pequots who called it Nameaug when the Europeans arrived in North America. Pequot villages bordered Long Island Sound and the Tribe had authority over the neighboring Tribes of the Mohegans and Niantics (all Algonquian-speaking tribes). The Dutch first explored this land in 1614 and established trade with the Native peoples, but the English soon gained possession of the land east of the Hudson in the 1630s. English animosity toward their Indian neighbors led to the Pequot War (1634-38), part of which took place in the present city of New London. The Pequots lost the war and their population deteriorated due to the violence and disease. The General Court of Massachusetts granted John Winthrop possession of Pequot territory in 1644 after which it was to be opened for settlement. By 1646, which is considered the official year of its founding, New London had permanent colonial inhabitants and municipal laws, and jurisdiction was granted to the colony of Connecticut in 1647. In 1658, the inhabitants renamed the town New London after London, England. New London was the colony of Connecticut’s first trading port and was a hub of trade with the West Indies and other colonies. Though initially part of the town of New London when it was first settled by the colonists, Groton, Montville, and Waterford were each separated from New London in 1705, 1786, and 1801 respectively. Present-day Salem was also part of New London when it was settled, but in 1819, it became a separate incorporated town composed of parts of Lyme, Colchester, and Montville. Occom kept a school in New London in the winter in 1748. New London was the home of Captain Nathaniel Shaw, one of the wealthiest merchants in the area, who gave money to Occom in the 1750s for the missionary cause and also sold materials to Occom for the building of his home. However, their positive relationship ended when Shaw refused to provide supplies for Mary Occom while Occom was in England. New London served as the port from which Occom and other missionaries traveled to reach Long Island. During the American Revolution, New London’s location and its status as a seaport made it both vulnerable to invasion and integral to colonial naval operations as well as the exchange of prisoners.New London was incorporated as a city in 1784.

Charlestown is located in Washington County in southwestern Rhode Island along the Block Island sound. For thousands of years before European settlement, the area was inhabited by Native Americans who lived by hunting, fishing and agriculture. When the English dissenter, Roger Williams, fled Massachusetts Bay in 1636 and stepped ashore in what would become the Plantation of Providence, he was welcomed by Canonicus, sachem of the Narragansett Indians. From Canonicus, Williams purchased a large tract of land that included the settlement of Misquamicut, which would become the site of an English settlement named Charlestown after King Charles II. It was incorporated in 1783. After the Great Swamp Fight in which the United Colonies massacred many Narragansetts — and hunted down and killed or enslaved those who escaped — 500 survivors (from a pre-war population of 5,000) signed a 1682 peace treaty and received permission to join with the Eastern Niantic tribe, which had remained neutral throughout the war and had a small reservation near Charlestown. Settlers continued to acquire land from the Naragansetts, and by 1880, the tribe ceased to exist as a legal entity. A portion of tribal lands were returned to Narragansett ownership in 1978 by the courts and state legislation, and the tribe was officially recognized in 1983. Charlestown is the present-day headquarters of the Narragansett Tribe and the location of their reservation.

Rhode Island is a U.S. state located in southern New England along the Atlantic coast. What would become Rhode Island was originally inhabited by the Narragansett, Niantic, and Wampanoag peoples, who established semi-permanent villages of longhouses. They hunted deer, fished for tautog and striped bass, grew corn, beans, pumpkin, and squash, and gathered clams, oysters, and quahogs. From the quahog shell, the Narragansett Indians made the Native American currency wampum, which bolstered their wealth among other tribes in the region. In 1636, Roger Williams founded Providence following his expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay colony for what was perceived as his radical religious beliefs. Williams advocated dealing fairly with Native Americans and purchased the lands for Providence from the Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi. In 1644, Williams received a charter from the British Parliament incorporating the towns of Providence, Portsmouth, and Newport as Providence Plantation and guaranteeing religious liberty. A 1663 charter issued by Charles II more firmly established the colony of Rhode Island, which tolerated different religions and maintained friendly relations with Native Americans until the outbreak of King Philip's War in 1675. This conflict resulted in the destruction of many colonial towns, including Providence. The Narragansett tribe was initially skeptical of missionaries, because of their experience of English land-grabbing, and because the church in Charlestown, RI had its own homegrown minister, a Narragansett separatist named Samuel Niles. Although the Narragansett tribal council approved the mission of Joseph Fish in 1765, which met with initial success, the tribe eventually asked Fish and Edward Deake, the schoolmaster he engaged, to leave Rhode Island in favor of Native ministers and teachers. Rhode Island residents actively protested British rule over the colonies and openly agitated for war. In 1772, a number of Rhode Islanders attacked and destroyed the British ship the Gaspee, and Rhode Island was the first state to openly declare independence from Great Britain prior to the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Between two and five percent of Rhode Island Native Americans migrated to Brothertown.

Old Saybrook is a town located in southeastern Connecticut on the west bank of the Connecticut River, where it meets the Long Island Sound. The land that would become Old Saybrook was the territory of the Niantic Indians until the late 16th century when they were conquered by the Pequots. The first Europeans to settle in the area were Dutch, but by 1623 the colony failed due to harsh conditions. In 1635, English Puritans led by John Winthrop Jr. established a colony called Saybrook Plantation, hoping to deter the return of the Dutch. During the Pequot War of 1636, the powerful Pequot tribe conducted a siege of Saybrook Fort for eight months, but their population was ultimately decimated by the effort. Yale University, originally called Collegiate School of Connecticut, was founded in Old Saybrook in 1700 and then moved to New Haven in 1718. Because of its location, Old Saybrook was a convenient stopping point for Occom on his trips between Mohegan and Montauk, on Long Island, and was a point of embarkation for travel to other coastal cities by water. At least one Native American in Old Saybrook, the son of Josiah Wolcott, wanted to attend Wheelock’s school. Old Saybrook is one of the oldest towns in the state and was incorporated in 1854.

Samson Occom was a Mohegan leader and ordained Presbyterian minister. Occom began his public career in 1742, when he was chosen as a tribal counselor to Ben Uncas II. The following year, he sought out Eleazar Wheelock, a young Anglo-American minister in Lebanon, CT, in hopes of obtaining some education and becoming a teacher at Mohegan. Wheelock agreed to take on Occom as a student, and though Occom had anticipated staying for a few weeks or months, he remained with Wheelock for four years. Occom’s academic success inspired Wheelock to open Moor’s Indian Charity School in 1754, a project which gave him the financial and political capital to establish Dartmouth College in 1769. After his time with Wheelock, Occom embarked on a 12-year mission to the Montauk of Long Island (1749-1761). He married a Montauk woman, Mary Fowler, and served as both teacher and missionary to the Montauk and nearby Shinnecock, although he was grievously underpaid for his services. Occom conducted two brief missions to the Oneida in 1761 and 1762 before embarking on one of the defining journeys of his career: a fundraising tour of Great Britain that lasted from 1765 to 1768. During this journey, undertaken on behalf of Moor’s Indian Charity School, Occom raised £12,000 (an enormous and unanticpated amount that translates roughly to more than two-million dollars), and won wide acclaim for his preaching and comportment. Upon his return to Mohegan in 1768, Occom discovered that Wheelock had failed to adequately care for his family while he was gone. Additionally, despite the vast sums of money that he had raised, Occom found himself unemployed. Wheelock tried to find Occom a missionary position, but Occom was in poor health and disinclined to leave his family again after seeing the treatment with which they had met while he was in Britain. Occom and Wheelock’s relationship continued to sour as it became apparent to Occom that the money he had labored to raise would be going towards infrastructure at Dartmouth College, Wheelock’s new project, rather than the education of Native Americans. After the dissolution of his relationship with Wheelock, Occom became increasingly focused on the needs of the Mohegan community and increasingly vocal in criticizing Anglo-Americans’ un-Christian treatment of Native Americans. In September of 1772, he delivered his famous “Sermon on the Execution of Moses Paul,” which took Anglo-American spiritual hypocrisy as one of its major themes, and which went into four printings before the end of the year. In 1773, Occom became further disillusioned when the Mason Land Case was decided in favor of the Colony of Connecticut. The details of the Mason Case are complicated, but to summarize: the Colony of Connecticut had gained control of Mohegan land early in the 18th century under very suspect circumstances, and successfully fended off the Mohegan’s 70-year-long legal challenge. The conclusion of the case came as a blow to the Mohegans, and further convinced Occom of Anglo-American corruption. Along with David Fowler (Montauk Tribe), Occom's brother-in-law, and Joseph Johnson (Mohegan), Occom's son-in-law, Occom helped found Brothertown, an Indian tribe formed from the Christian Mohegans, Pequots, Narragansetts, Montauks, Tunxis, and Niantics. They eventually settled in Oneida country in upstate New York. Occom moved there with his family in 1789, spending the remaining years of his life serving as a minster to the Brothertown, Stockbridge, and Mohegan Indians. Harried by corrupt land agents, the Brothertown and Stockbridge groups relocated to the eastern shore of Lake Winnebago, though Occom died in 1792 before he could remove himself and his family there. Occom's writings and legacy have made him one of the best known and most eminent Native Americans of the 18th century and beyond.

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David Fowler was Jacob Fowler's older brother, Samson Occom's brother-in-law, and an important leader of the Brothertown Tribe. He came to Moor's in 1759, at age 24, and studied there until 1765. While at school, he accompanied Occom on a mission to the Six Nations in 1761. He was licensed as a school master in the 1765 mass graduation, and immediately went to the Six Nations to keep school, first at Oneida and then at Kanawalohale. Fowler saw himself as very close to Wheelock, but their relationship fragmented over the course of Fowler's mission, primarily because Wheelock wrote back to Kirkland, with whom Fowler clashed, but not to Fowler, and because Wheelock refused to reimburse Fowler for some expenses on his mission (767667.4 provides the details most clearly). Fowler went on to teach school at Montauk, and played a major role in negotiations with the Oneidas for the lands that became Brothertown. He was among the first wave of immigrants to that town, and held several important posts there until his death in 1807.

his wife

Edward Deake was an Anglo-American missionary and schoolmaster born in Rhode Island in 1732. After receiving reluctant approval from the Narragansett tribal council for the support of a schoolhouse and schoolmaster on Nov. 26 1765, Reverend Joseph Fish, who had been living among the Narragansetts, hired Edward Deake to serve as schoolmaster to the tribe in Charlestown, Rhode Island. Funded by the New England Company, Deake taught his students to read English, write, and cypher, following the pattern of other missionary schools for Native people in New England. Out of 151 school-aged Narragansetts, 53 students, boys and girls, attended Deake’s school. Deake regularly consulted a council of Indians for input on the best course of action for educating his students. In addition to his 24 pounds per year salary, Deake also received living quarters for himself and his family in the schoolhouse. After Tobias Shattock left for England in 1767, Deake became the main recruiter among the Narragansetts for Wheelock’s school, often corresponding with Wheelock to recommend students. But the Narragansetts, under the leadership of the charismatic Native preacher Samuel Niles, soon became disillusioned with Fish and Deake, distrusting the purpose and motivations of the school and fearing the colonial appropriation of their lands and right to self-government. In 1770, Narragansett leader John Shattock Sr. told Fish that the Narragansetts wanted Deake to leave, and attendance at Deake’s school evaporated in the next few years. Finally, on January 2, 1776, Deake requested relief from his position as schoolmaster and left soon after. There is some evidence he moved to New York state and worked as a minister. Deake died in 1794.

Christiana Occom was born in 1757 in Mohegan, CT as the ninth child of Samson Occom and Mary Fowler. Christiana spent her childhood in Mohegan, where she married the Reverend Anthony Paul in 1777. The couple eventually settled in Brotherton in 1784. There, they raised at least six children, four of which Samson Occom baptized. Occom's journals tell of many joyful visits he paid to his daughter and son-in-law while on his travels. Christiana and Anthony finally left Brotherton in 1797 to settle in Lake George, NY.

John Sergeant Jr., like his father, served as a minister in Stockbridge, MA. In 1773, Stephen West, the minister to the Stockbridge Indians since 1757, decided to leave his post and turned over ministering duties to John Sergeant Jr. Stockbridge, MA, which John Sergeant Sr. helped establish, failed as a Christian Indian town when the Stockbridge Indians lost ownership of their land. When the Oneida Tribe offered the Stockbridgers land in central New York after the American Revolution, many of them moved to the Brothertown and New Stockbridge settlements. The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge funded Sergeant Jr. in 1787 to continue serving as a minister to the Stockbridge Indians who moved to New York. Sergeant travelled from Stockbridge, MA, to New Stockbridge every year to serve as their minister. In 1788, the Stockbridge Indians at New Stockbridge were divided in their support for Occom or John Sergeant as the town’s minister. Mohican sachem Hendrick Aupaumut led the community members who favored Occom. According to Sergeant, 30 members of the Tribe were in favor of Occom while 50 were in favor of him (later, half of Occom’s supporters defected to Sergeant). The relationship between Sergeant and Occom was contentious, with Occom disliking Sergeant’s manner of preaching. Occom moved to Munhegunnack or New Stockbridge in 1791 and suggests in a letter that many of Sergeant’s supporters were shifting support to Occom. In his sermons, Sergeant blamed the Indians’ loss of land on what he described as their drunkenness and idleness. He suggested that the whites’ encroachment on their lands was God’s punishment for their sins. Sergeant remained the New Stockbridge minister until his death in 1824.

Captain Jehoiakim Yoke is likely a Stockbridge Indian who enlisted with colonial forces during the American Revolution. Yoke rose through the ranks to become the Captain of a company of Indian rangers. It appears that he primarily fought on the war's western front, often against Native Americans loyal to Great Britain, and was a part of the infamous Sullivan Expedition. In response to a number of successful raids by Native allies of the British, George Washington tasked General John Sullivan with destroying Indian villages and decimating Indian food supplies in western New York. By the end of the expedition, General Sullivan’s army had destroyed more than 40 villages. A Captain Jehoiakim Yoke is mentioned in the Revolutionary War writing of David Freemoyer. In Freemoyer’s account, Captain Yoke and Freemoyer’s men were involved in conflicts with Native American troops under the command of the Mohawk leader (and Moor's alumnus) Joseph Brant. In his Revolutionary War journal, Chaplain William Rogers refers to a Captain Jehoiakim, an Indian from Stockbridge. In his entries from June of 1779, Rogers describes an incident where Native allies of the British attempted to reconnoiter the Colonial encampment but were driven away. This Captain Jehoiakim and two other Stockbridge Indians pursued the Native Americans but were unsuccessful in capturing them. William DeLoss Love writes about a Timothy Yokens, who became a captain of a company of Indian rangers. Given the similar descriptions of this Stockbridge Indian captain, it seems that the sources may be referring to the same man, with whom Occom lodged several times in 1786.