Odd Wisconsin Archive
Mohawk Indian or French Prince?
Eleazar Williams (1787-1858) is surely one of the oddest characters in Wisconsin history.
He was born and raised among the Mohawk Indians and sent as a teenager to the missionary school that would evolve into Dartmouth College. He became a Protestant missionary himself, and his intelligence and eloquence gave him entry into both Indian and white communities.
In his thirties he used these skills to help the Oneida and other nations who were rapidly being dispossessed of their lands in the East. With tribal leaders, Williams imagined a new homeland in the west for the Stockbridge, Munsee, Brotherton, Oneida, and other Christian Indians of New York and New England. In 1820 he led a delegation of them to Wisconsin to treat with the Menominee and Ho-Chunk for territory around Green Bay where they could take refuge from Eastern land speculators. These negotiations, described by Albert Ellis, another Indian advocate, in our Turning Points collection, dragged on for more than a decade. While they were underway, on March 3, 1823, Williams married a 14-year-old Menominee-French girl named Marie Madeline Jourdain, perhaps to gain influence with his negotiating partners (according to her descendants, the marriage was short-lived).
Ellis reported that Williams envisioned a great nation of Christian Indians growing up in the West with himself as their ruler. The Oneida and other so-called "New York" Indians had other ideas, however, and when negotiations with the Menominee were finally completed they repudiated his leadership and sent him packing. With his dream of ruling an Indian empire shattered, Williams became a roving missionary supported by Indian communities and white religious organizations in Wisconsin and New York.
But in middle age, he came up with another way to be an emperor: he began to claim that he was the long-lost child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette who had been spirited away to America for safe-keeping when they were beheaded during the French Revolution. Though his friends laughed at the idea, Williams convinced some European aristocrats he was heir to the French throne -- enough to create a stream of transatlantic donations that helped support him in his final years. When he died in 1858, his last words were about a dress in his possession having been worn by Marie Antoinette.
In 1918 his surviving family members were interviewed in his home above the Fox River near Green Bay. Read what they had to say about the Indian who claimed to be a French prince, in our collection of Local History and Biography Articles, where you'll also find many more stories about the eccentric Eleazar Williams.
:: Posted in Odd Lives on March 3, 2005
Did You Know?
The Wisconsin Historical Museum is currently featuring Odd Wisconsin objects in the latest exhibit: Odd Wisconsin. And don't miss the Odd Wisconsin book by author Erika Janik published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
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