American Colonial Colleges 281
by one of the Indian students, delivered from the branch of
a pine tree, for he was too shy to stand on the board plat-
form in the semicircle of grandees. After the ceremony, the
gentlemen sat down to a plain dinner in the college hall (the
President apologizing for the state of the college’s unique
tablecloth), while outside the few undergraduates and the
many frontiersmen who came to see the fun, were regaled
with a barbecued ox and barrel of rum. Governor Went-
worth and his friends, in gratitude for their entertainment,
later presented President Wheelock with a magnificent silver
punch bowl—a gesture typical of Wentworth and his times.
Dartmouth College was going strong, but not as an Indian
college. It was simply the first in a new series of frontier
schools of higher education, with which the New England
people have marked their passage into the northern wilder-
ness, and across the continent.
More than any other American college, Dartmouth is
the lengthened shadow of a man. Yet Wheelock is a baffling
character, of whose sincerity there will always be question.
It was charged at the time that his Indian propaganda was a
mere bluff to extract money from pious Britons, in order to
make himself president of a college for white boys. When-
ever anyone accused him of this, Wheelock retorted that his
white students were being trained to become Indian mission-
aries; or that his enemies were preventing the Indians from
attending. It is true that only two Indians ever received a
degree from Dartmouth in Wheelock’s day, that the cur-
riculum, copied from that of Yale, made no concession to
their peculiar needs, and the college turned out frontier
parsons, school-teachers, and lawyers, rather than Indian
missionaries. Wheelock appears to have been sincere enough
in his ambition to educate Indians; but once the College was
founded, his interest shifted from the aborigines to the