"The Whole Wilderness Shall Blossom As the Rose": Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson, and the Question of Native Settlement on Cooper's Frontier

This article investigates the formation of two wilderness communities that sprang up in proximity to one another on the American frontier in the late eighteenth century. Cooperstown, founded by William Cooper, the speculator/politician father of James Fenimore Cooper, comes to epitomize the American frontier spirit and produces archetypal narrative templates that remain stubbornly rooted in our national psyche to this day. Brotherton, founded by the Mohegan minister Samson Occom and a group of New England Natives, is equally invested in the dreams and national will of its citizens, and yet it is a settlement that is ultimately subsumed by the suffocating fact of white encroachment. In effect, Brotherton vanishes, falls off the map, thereby serving the American hegemonic dream as fully as Cooperstown. My investigation of these two settlements is necessarily an investigation into the struggle of Native communities to retain political autonomy under relentless colonial pressures. But it also details the unusual event of a Native people seizing control of their own fate, in this era of forced removals, by ordering their own exodus. I explore the complications inherent in the competing models of settlement for these two communities, particularly in terms of how vastly different we imagine the cultural dividing lines to be between Native and Euro-American, and how those perceived differences are enforced by dominant rhetorical strategies. I focus on the writings of Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson who must tap into the prevailing discourse of the day in order to project a viable future community and find the institutional support necessary for its formation. Through the production of letters, journal passages, speeches, sermons, and even hymnals, Occom and Johnson write their imagined community into being. By doing so, however, they are in some ways positioned into reimagining who they are as a people. Ultimately the settling of Cooperstown and Brotherton offers a remarkable instruction in contrast, denoting how the ideology that so invigorated the interests of one ethnic group came to be deployed by another. For the Native American individuals who boldly developed this scheme of emigration, the incredible risks become less the risks of logistics, i.e. travel, shelter, land cultivation, and more about the politics of identity. Through the writings of Occom and Johnson, however, I hope to illustrate how the Brotherton movement was also an act of continuance, or a deliberate effort to maintain autonomy, sovereignty, and a link to communal traditions of the past.