Eleazar's Spirit Goes West

ALTHOUGH Eleazar Wheelock's personal influence on the lives of the "woodland wanderers" wasmarked more by tenacity of purpose than visible result, the white heat of his conviction was to kindle a distant fire that was to burn brightly for many years. The place was Oklahoma, the time 1832, and the protagonist a man of missionary zeal, the Rev. Alfred Wright.

Wright was born in Columbia, Connecticut, in March 1788, and therefore grew up in the town where Eleazar Wheelock had long labored in the fields of the Lord, and where his name was often repeated in connection with positive and humanitarian attitudes toward the oppressed red man. Since 1821, under appointment by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Wright had been missionary to the Choctaws in Mississippi, and he chose to continue his work with them after their removal west to the Indian Territory, now Oklahoma.

Coming with a company of Choctaws, Alfred Wright and his friends crossed the Arkansas line into the Choctaw Nation in 1832. A location near Little River, 18 miles east of Fort Towson (shades of Hanover Plain), was selected; soon government employees and workmen came to erect, with the assistance of the Indians, numerous buildings for shelter, school, and worship.

In the first completed log building the church was "gathered" and a mission organized, the date recorded as December 1832. Wright then formally named the establishment Wheelock Mission, in honor of the memory of the first President of Dartmouth College and former pastor of his hometown church.

In his long association with the Choctaws Alfred Wright learned to speak their language. Until his death he labored unceasingly to bring them into a life which would approximate that of the white people. The shade of Eleazar Wheelock no doubt smiled benevolently on the project.

In its initial stages, Wheelock Mission was set up solely as a religious organization, but shortly after its founding, in 1833, a school was instituted as a component of the missiona day school for Indian children.

In 1846 a stone church was built and called Wheelock Church. This was the oldest church in Oklahoma, and 105 years after its dedication, services were still being held there. It achieved enough contemporary notice to be the subject of a Currier print, a lithograph quite rare today (see below).

In 1853 Wright died and was buried near the church he loved. Despite the attrition of the Civil War and fluctuating interest, the Wheelock Indian school survived until 1951. At the time of its closing, 127 Indian girls were enrolled.

So it was that an humble man also went into a wilderness to teach the Indian, following a pattern created before he was born by the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock. When the bells of Baker Library ring perhaps a faint sympathetic reverberation is heard from Wheelock Church, eleven dusty miles north and west of Idabel in McCurtain County, Oklahoma.

At an informal ceremony in the Treasure Room of Baker Library last month, whenthe Alumni Council was meeting in Hanover, announcement was made that A. Marvin Braverman '29 of Washington (left) had established two library funds to purchasebooks in honor of Librarian Emeritus Richard W. Morin '24 (center) and Vice President Emeritus Orton H. Hicks '21 (right). With a great deal of subterfuge, the realpurpose of the library gathering was kept from the two honored men.

MISSIONARY STONE CHAPEL AT WHEELOCK, CHOCTAW NATION.