Total Number Of Pages: 1
Source: Scanned from the original photograph which is 10 inches in height and 8 inches in width.
Language: English
Coverage: Unknown
Creators:
Red Thunder Cloud [Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West]
Rights: No Known Copyright Restrictions
Description: The reverse reads:
"Samson Occum was born in a wigwam at Mohegan, Connecticut in 1723, the son of Joshua and Sarah Occum, both Mohegan Indians. He later attended Wheelock's Charity Indian School which, later became Dartmouth College. Reverend Occum visited England in 1766 and his preaching drew wide attention. His Indian eloquence did much to win friends for the Eastern Indians.
Occum married Mary Fowler, the sister of his friend David of the Montauk tribe. He taught the Montauk children to read and write and made the first spelling blocks of cedar chips in the country. The Montauks were too poor to pay him, therefore he earned money by binding books for the settlers of East Hampton in his torchlight wigwam at Montauk.
He was a strong advocate of the Indian maintaining his racial purity and became alarmed by the influx of runaway slaves into the Shinnecock tribe. Because they did not want the same thing to occur among the Montauks and Mohegans, he and David Fowler founded the first settlement of Brothertown, New York, to which came the full bloods of the Mohegan, Pequot, Tunxis, Nehantic, and Narragansett tribes, reinforced by the Montauks of Long Island.
Reverend Samson Occum was ordained by the Reverend Samuel Buell of the Suffolk Presbytery at East Hampton on August 29, 1759. He died at New Stockbridge, New York in 1792, aged 69 years."
