Two years after Louis the XVI., Bourbon king of France, and his
beautiful queen, Marie Antoinette, were beheaded by the revolutionists
in Paris, in the closing decade of the eighteenth century, their
imbecile child of eight years, called the "dauphin," was officially
reported to have died in prison. But the story was started at the time,
and popularly believed, that the real dauphin, Louis the XVII., had been
stolen by the royalists, and another child cunningly substituted to die
there in his place. The story went that the dauphin had been sent to
America, and that all traces of him were lost; thus was given to any
adventurer of the requisite age, and sufficiently obscure birth, an
opportunity to seek such honor as might be gained in claiming identity
with the escaped prisoner.
Great was the excitement in the United States, when, in 1853, it was
confidently announced by a New York magazine writer that the long lost
prince had at last been discovered, in the person of the middle-aged
Eleazer Williams, an Episcopal missionary to the Oneida Indians at
Little Kaukauna, in the lower valley of the Fox.
The Bonaparte family, represented by Louis Napoleon, were just then in
control of France; but the Bourbon family, of which Louis the XVII.,
were he alive, would naturally be the head, considered themselves
rightful hereditary masters of that country. Of course, there was at the
time no opportunity for any Bourbon actually to occupy the French
throne; but the people of that country are highly emotional, revolutions
have been numerous among them, and displaced royalists are always hoping
for some turn in affairs which may enable them once more to gain the
government. It was this possible chance of the Bourbons getting into
power once more, that added interest to the story.
Let us see what sort of person this Eleazer Williams of Wisconsin was,
and how it came about that he made the assertion that he was the head of
the Bourbons, and an uncrowned king. It had heretofore been supposed by
every one who knew him that he was the son of Mohawk Indian parents,
both of whom had white blood in their veins, living just over the New
York border, in Canada. Certain Congregationalists had induced this
couple to allow two of their sons, Thomas and Eleazer, to be educated in
New England as missionaries to the Indians; and for several years they
attended academies there, becoming fairly proficient in English,
although their aboriginal manners were not much improved.
At last returning to his Canadian home, Eleazer neglected his
Congregational benefactors, and soon became interested in the Episcopal
Church. He would have become one of its missionaries at once, but just
at that time the War of 1812-15 broke out; and instead he became a spy
in the pay of the United States, conveying to his employers important
information concerning the movements of British troops in Canada. When
the war was over, having, as an American spy, incurred the dislike of
the Canadian Mohawks, he was sent as an Episcopal missionary to the
Oneida Indians, then living in Oneida county, New York.
Williams appears to have differed from the ordinary Indian type,
although he was thickset, dark haired, and swarthy of skin. Some took
him to be a Spaniard; others there were who thought him French; and
comments which he had heard, concerning his slight resemblance to the
pictures of the Bourbons, doubtless caused Eleazer in later years to
pretend to be the lost dauphin. He was a fair orator, and in his earlier
years succeeded well in persuading the simple red men about him. His
plausible manner, and this ease of persuasion, finally led him astray.
The Oneida Indians in New York and their neighbors (formerly from New
England), the Munsees, Stockbridges, and Brothertowns, were just then
being crowded out of that State. A great company had acquired the right
from the federal government to purchase the lands held by these Indians,
whenever they cared to dispose of them. In order to hurry matters, the
company began to sow among the poor natives the seeds of discontent.
Certain of their leaders, among them Williams, advocated emigration to
the West. It appears that Williams, who was a born intriguer, conceived
the ambitious idea of taking advantage of this movement to establish an
Indian empire in the country west of Lake Michigan, with himself as
dictator.
Moved by the clamor of the red men, the federal government sent a
delegation to Wisconsin, in 1820, to see whether the tribes west of the
lake would consent to accept the New York Indians as neighbors. This
delegation was headed by Dr. Jedediah Morse, a celebrated geographer and
missionary. Morse visited Mackinac and Green Bay, and returned with the
report that the valley of the lower Fox was the most suitable place in
which to make a settlement. That very summer, Williams himself, with
several other headmen, had on their own account journeyed as far as
Detroit on a similar errand, but returned without discovering a
location.
The owners of the land selected by Morse were the Menominees and
Winnebagoes, with whom Williams and his followers held a council at
Green Bay, the following year. A treaty was signed, by which the New
York Indians were granted a large strip of land, four miles wide, at
Little Chute.
The ensuing year (1822), at a new council held at Green Bay, the New
Yorkers asked for still more land. The Winnebagoes, much incensed,
withdrew from the treaty, but the Menominees were won over by Williams's
eloquence, and granted an extraordinary cession, making the New York
Indians joint owners with themselves of all Menominee territory, which
then embraced very nearly a half of all the present State of Wisconsin.
Ten years of quarreling followed, for there was at once a reaction from
this remarkable spirit of generosity. In 1832 there was concluded a
final treaty, apparently satisfactory to most of those concerned, and
soon thereafter a large number of New York Indians removed hither. The
Oneidas and Munsees established themselves upon Duck Creek, near the
mouth of the Fox, and the Stockbridges and Brothertowns east of Lake
Winnebago. As for Williams, the jealousies and bickerings among his
people soon caused him to lose control over them, thus giving the
deathblow to his wild dreams of empire.
During the next twenty years, in which he continued to serve as a
missionary to the Wisconsin Oneidas, Williams was a well-known and
picturesque character. His home was on the west bank of the river, about
a mile below Little Kaukauna. Although a man of much vigor and strength
of mind, he soon came to be recognized as an unscrupulous fellow by the
majority of both whites and reds in the lower Fox, and his clerical
brethren, East as well as West, appear to have regarded him with more or
less contempt.
Baffled in several fields of notoriety which he had worked, Williams
suddenly posed before the American public, in 1853, as the hereditary
sovereign of France. He was too young by eight years to be the lost
dauphin; that he was clearly of Indian origin was proved by a close
examination of his color, form, and feature; his dusky parents protested
under oath that the wayward Eleazer was their son; every allegation of
his in regard to the matter has often been exposed as false; and all
his neighbors who knew him treated his claims as fraudulent.
Nevertheless, he succeeded in deceiving a number of good people,
including several leading clergymen of his church; one of the latter
attempted in an elaborate book, "The Lost Prince," to prove conclusively
that Williams was indeed the son of the executed monarch.
The pretensions of Eleazer Williams, who dearly loved the notoriety
which this discussion awakened, extended through several years. They
even won some little attention in France, but far less than here, for
several other men had claimed to be the lost dauphin, so that the
pretension was not a new one over there. Louis Philippe, the head of the
Bourbon-Orleans family in France, sent him a present of some finely
bound books, believing him the innocent victim of a delusion; but,
further than that, and a chance meeting at Green Bay, between Eleazer
Williams and another French royalist, the Prince de Joinville, then on
his travels through America, the family in France paid no attention to
the adventurous half-breed American Indian who claimed to be one of
them.
The reputation of Williams as a missionary had at last fallen so low,
and the neglect of his duties was so persistent, that his salary was
withdrawn by the Episcopal Church, and his closing years were spent in
poverty. He died in 1858, maintaining his absurd claims to the last.