Eleazer Williams: The Lost Mohawk
by Darren Bonaparte
(Originally published in The
People's Voice, April 29, 2005)
In a previous chapter, we encountered the story of
the Tarbell boys, John and Zechariah, who were captured and adopted by
the Mohawks of Kahnawake, and as tradition has it, later helped to
“found” the community of Akwesasne. Today we look at another
person whose existence was owed to captivity and adoption, the nebulous
Eleazer Williams, the great grandson of Eunice Williams, the
famous “unredeemed captive” taken by Kahnawake Mohawks in the raid on
Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1704.
The Early Years
of Eleazer Williams
When Eleazer was born is hard to determine, as his
family was known to hunt far from Kahnawake at various times of the
year, and no record of his baptism exists in old church records.
He was the son of Thomas, or Tehorakwaneken, and Mary Ann Williams, or
Konantewanteta, and was probably born around 1787. With the
assistance of his relatives in New England, Eleazer and his brother
John were sent to Massachusetts to be educated in 1800. In 1807
he was sent to Moors Charity School in New Hampshire, where he was to
be educated along with other young natives, but only stayed a
week. A modern biographer, Geoffrey Buerger, sees this as a time
of disappointment for Eleazer, who aspired to a career in the
Congregational ministry, but was more or less being told by his
relatives that they only saw him as a mere “Indian” and not someone who
could rise up through the ranks of New England society.
Several years later the young missionary was on his
way home to Kahnawake, just in time for the War of 1812. Williams
made many claims later in life about his experiences during this war,
none of which have ever been substantiated by official
documentation. By his account, he kept track of enemy troop
movements, served in a ranger unit, commanded an artillery unit, and
was given the title of Superintendent General of Indian Affairs by the
United States government. Another claim was that he helped the
Americans win the Battle of Plattsburgh by devising a clever ruse to
foil the British forces. Not bad for someone who was only about 25
years old at the time…that is, if any of it was true.
Not long after the Battle of Plattsburgh, Eleazer
travelled to Oneida Castle, where he broke his denominational ties to
the church of his Puritan relatives and sponsors, and was confirmed
into the Episcopal Church, the American counterpart of the Anglican
Church or Church of England, in 1815. A fluent Mohawk speaker, Williams
was able to communicate well with the Oneidas. The Oneidas were
divided among two major factions, the Christian Party and the Pagan
Party. With his persuasive oratorical skills, he was able to
convince the Pagan Party to abandon their traditional ways and change
their name to the Second Christian Party by 1817.
There was a lot of pressure on the Oneidas and the
Stockbridge Indians (who lived with them at the time) to relocate from
New York to Wisconsin. Eleazer eventually saw this as a wise
move, due to the increasing pressures from their non-native neighbors,
but it has been speculated that he saw it as an opportunity to create
an “Indian Empire” in the Wisconsin wilderness that he would
rule. By 1818 he was promoting the idea that the Oneidas,
Stockbridges, Munsees, Brothertowns, Senecas of Sandusky, and tribes in
Canada (including the people of Akwesasne) should move to a new
reservation in Wisconsin where they could reorganize themselves into a
grand confederacy. Negotiations resulted in a tract of land set aside
for the New York Indians in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
By 1822, Eleazer Williams established a home there,
followed the next year by about 150 Oneidas of the First Christian
Party and an equal number of Stockbridge Indians. More came in
later years. Williams married 14-year-old Madeleine Jourdain,
daughter of a successful blacksmith and a woman of Indian
descent. She came with 4,800 acres of land that would become
known as the Williams Tract. Williams was ordained a deacon in
1826, but by 1832, the Oneidas dissolved their association with him,
complaining that he neglected them. By 1842, the Bishop of the
Episcopal Church forbade Williams from representing the Church in any
capacity in Wisconsin.
Have We a
Bourbon Among Us?
In 1841 Williams had a chance encounter with Prince
de Joinville, third son of Louise Phillipe, the new King of France
under the reestablished monarchy. The Prince was on a tour of
America and was interested in the natives of the Green Bay area, and
was thus introduced to Eleazer, who happened to be a passenger on the
same steamer.
Eleazer claimed that the Prince had sought him out
personally in order to inform him that he, Eleazer, was the Lost
Dauphin of France, the son of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who
was secreted out of France as a small child and given to the Indians of
Kahnawake to raise as their own. He then presented him with a
document that he asked him to sign, which would abdicate his claim to
the throne in exchange for a wealth of compensation. Williams,
who was shocked to learn of his royal ancestry, refused to sign the
document.
Having lost his kingdom in Wisconsin, Eleazer sought
to re-write his own history and gain another, this one in France.
Although he avoided actually coming out and claiming royal blood, his
story soon spread. His biographers suggest that Eleazer labored
to create this impression, even to the point of forging documents and
writing letters to newspapers under assumed names. He was able to
parlay his fame and make a living off it for a time, particularly after
an article about his story appeared in Putnam’s Magazine under the
title, “Have we a Bourbon among us?” The author, Reverend John
Hanson, later wrote the book The Lost Prince in which he presented the
bulk of the “evidence” for Eleazer Williams’ royal heritage.
Eleazer eventually moved to Akwesasne, where his
father had relocated years before. His supporters
constructed an impressive chateau for him in Hogansburg, known to us
today as the Lost Dauphin Cottage. He established a mission here
but had little success among the predominantly Catholic Mohawks.
The church itself ended up being used to store hay before eventually
burning to the ground in disgust, never to be rebuilt. His role
in the failed relocation of Akwesasne Mohawks to Wisconsin may have had
something to do with the failure of his mission.
Eleazer’s notoriety as a contender to the throne of
France was well-known in Akwesasne, where he had forged his mother’s
name on a document in which she supposedly claimed that Eleazer was
adopted, and not her natural son. When she was presented with
this document in the presence of two other elderly women, “One and all
vehemently denounced the tale as a lie, while the little old mother
bursting into tears exclaimed that she knew Eleazer had been a bad man
but she did not know before that he was bad enough to deny his own
mother.”
Geoffrey Buerger wrote, “Only a biographer
possessing either a sense of irony or extraordinary charity could
introduce a life of Eleazer Williams by claiming he was not a charlatan
of the first water.” Eleazer had his detractors while he lived,
and they didn’t let up when he died in 1858. Yet as Buerger
notes, to dismiss him as a crackpot robs us of an opportunity to learn
about the frontiers of native and non-native society in a critical
period of our shared history. It is hard for us today to envision
someone so embarrassed by his own Mohawk heritage that he would
deny his own mother…but would then return to the Mohawks to spend his
final days.
Like the elegant A-frame where he lived out the rest
of his life, Eleazer William’s fame (or infamy) outlived him into
modern times. In next week’s chapter, we will see how the
mercurial missionary made a final contribution to Mohawk history before
passing on to his eternal reward…and how modern science was brought to
bare on the question of whether or not we really had a Bourbon among us.
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