Samuel Kirkland

Samuel Kirkland (December 1, 1741 – February 28, 1808) was a Presbyterian minister and missionary among the Oneida and Tuscarora peoples of present-day central New York State.

Kirkland graduated from Princeton in 1765. In 1793 he founded the Hamilton-Oneida Academy (later Hamilton College) as a boys' school in central New York.

A student of the Iroquoian languages, Kirkland lived for many years with the Iroquois tribes. He helped negotiate the land purchases that New York State made from the Iroquois after the American Revolutionary War, acquiring his own land in the process.

Samuel Kirkland was born on December 1, 1741, in Norwich, Connecticut. He was educated in common schools and at Princeton (then the College of New Jersey), where he graduated in 1765. He was soon ordained as a Presbyterian minister and wanted to work with Native Americans.

Kirkland began his missionary work as a protégé of Reverend Eleazar Wheelock in Connecticut at his Moor's Indian Charity School (later relocated to New Hampshire as Dartmouth College). The two parted company in 1770, but Kirkland had met Joseph Brant at the school, a Mohawk who became a war leader against the rebels during the American Revolutionary War.

Kirkland moved to central New York, where he became a missionary to the Iroquois, especially the Oneida and Tuscarora located at the western end of the Mohawk River Valley. He acted as an adviser and ambassador to the Iroquois during the American Revolutionary War. At a time when four of the Six Nations allied with the British, he helped persuade the Oneida and Tuscarora to assist the American revolutionaries. Warfare in the Mohawk Valley caused widespread destruction in both the colonial frontier settlements and many Iroquois villages, as one side and another conducted retaliatory attacks.

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