Eleazer Williams, an Episcopalian missionary to the Oneida Indians in New York and Green Bay, was of mixed English, Indian, and French ancestry. He was born about 1788 in Caughnawaga, also known as St. Regis or Sault St. Louis, on the Canadian border near Montreal. His great-grandmother, Eunice Williams, was among the captives of a French and Indian raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1704. Her father was the Reverend John Williams (1664-1729) and her mother was the daughter of the Reverend Eleazer Mather. When the St. Regis Indians released the captives of the Deerfield massacre in 1714, Eunice decided to remain with the Indians and later married a young Indian chief who took her name. Their grandson, Chief Thomas Williams and his wife, Mary Ann Kenewatsenri, were the parents of Eleazer.
Eleazer spent his early boyhood in what is now Montgomery County, New York. Although born a Roman Catholic, in 1800 he was sent to live and be educated with the Congregationalist Deacon Nathaniel Ely and his wife, a descendant of the Williams family, in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Later Williams attended Dartmouth College for a brief period. He served in the War of 1812 as a scout for the United States along the northern New York border. During the war, he became imbued with the desire to serve as missionary to the Oneida Indians. Shortly after the war's conclusion, Bishop John Henry Hobart of the Episcopal Church appointed him lay reader and catechist, and in 1817, he became a missionary to the Oneida Indians at Oneida Castle, New York. He was ordained an Episcopal deacon in 1826.
William's native language was Mohawk and, as the first missionary who could preach to the Oneidas without a translator, he had rapid success in converting a large portion of the tribe to Christianity. His formal education and ability to read and write in the English language were somewhat deficient. According to Albert G. Ellis, who joined Williams in 1820, Williams could not write his own sermons and he translated or read from the many sermons he had collected from his Puritan ancestors.
Contemporaries of Williams characterized him as a vain and eccentric man with elaborate and unrealistic fantasies. In October 1820, the Reverend Jedediah Morse visited Williams and revealed to him a plan to resettle the Stockbridge Indians in the Michigan Territory between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River. Williams expanded this plan into a grandiose scheme to resettle the Six Iroquois Nations and to build an Indian empire in the area that is now Wisconsin. Williams led delegations from the Oneida, Onondaga, St. Regis, Seneca, Stockbridge, and Tuscarora tribes to Green Bay in 1821 and 1822 where treaties were negotiated with the Menominees and Winnebago (Ho-Chunk), securing two small tracts of land for the New York tribes in the Fox River Valley at Little Chute and along Duck Creek near Green Bay. Between 1823 and 1825 about 300 Stockbridge and Oneida Indians joined Williams and moved into the area, while the majority of the New York Indians opposed relocation and remained in New York.
Shortly after the move to Green Bay, Williams became negligent in his duties as teacher and missionary, and he lost the confidence of the Indians, half-breeds, and the French. He established a school in the area, but its pupils were the children of new white settlers and the few remaining French traders. In 1823, he married one of his students, Madeline Jourdaine, a Menominee of mixed Indian and French ancestry, who took the name Mary Hobart. By 1832, a council of the Oneida Indians formally repudiated Williams and, upon their request, the church withdrew from him all confidence and support. Williams continued to pursue his plan for an Indian empire in Wisconsin until 1836 when the conclusion of the Schermerhorn Treaty stipulated that the land in the area would be opened to white settlement. Most of the Menominee lands were ceded to the government and the New York Indians were restricted to two small tracts of land. In 1842, Bishop Jackson Kemper censured Williams and requested him to leave the Oneida Indians to their own devices. Following the final demise of his scheme, Williams moved to a small cabin at Kaukauna and spent most of his time traveling on the Great Lakes and along the Eastern Seaboard.
Shortly after formal ties between the Oneidas and Williams were severed, Williams developed a second fantasy that was to dominate the remainder of his life. As early as 1839, he mentioned that he was the “lost dauphin,” son of Louis XVI and heir to the throne of France. Williams became convinced of his royal origin in October 1841 when Prince de Joinville, son of Louis Phillippe, allegedly approached him and assured him of this identity. His notion was corroborated further when Putnam's Magazine in February 1852 published an article entitled “Have We a Bourbon Among Us?” Subsequently, numerous acquaintances and authorities have established that Williams clearly was of mixed blood, could not pronounce French properly, and was too young to make such a claim. Williams left Wisconsin in 1850 and accepted a small salary to preach among the St. Regis Indians near the Canadian border in northern New York. He died on August 28, 1858, in Hogansburg, New York.
