FOREWORD AND POSTSCRIPT lxxxix 



Eleazar Williams said that his story would work its way 

 without him. It has, but it has taken a different course from 

 that which he would have chosen, especially since the historians 

 at the University of Wisconsin have made it their business to 

 investigate his life history. It has been definitely established 

 that Eleazar Williams was a half-breed Indian, son of Thomas 

 Williams and Mary Ann Kenewatsenri. Thomas was a grand- 

 son of Eunice Williams, who was a daughter of John Williams, 

 minister at Deerfield, Massachusetts. She was captured in 1784 

 in a French and Indian raid, was married to an Indian chief 

 of Caughnawaga, and her descendants all took the Williams 

 name. In 1824 Eleazar gave Sault S. Louis (Caughnawaga, 

 Canada) as his birthplace, but he publicly maintained the 

 fiction of being the French Dauphin up to his death in 1858. 

 Eleazar Williams stands in a class by himself among the 

 better-known pretenders to royalty in relation to Louis Charles. 

 Why did this minister and missionary worker choose to lead a 

 life of duplicity? His dishonesty brought him no monetary 

 rewards. His greatest weakness seems to have been an in- 

 ordinate vanity. His bold claims and those of his credulous 

 friends, who could not have known him any too well, made him 

 a marked man, and wherever he went interest in him was 

 aroused. If he preached in a country church, that was an event 

 to be remembered. In a recently published work on Old His- 

 toric Churches of America there is pictured a church at Long- 

 meadow, Massachusetts, "with which," it was stated, "is asso- 

 ciated the romantic story of Eleazar Williams, believed by many 

 to have been Louis XVII of France." 



What shall be said of the conjectures of Mrs. Tyler on this 

 crude Williams hoax? "There is a persistent rumor in 

 Canada," says Mrs. Tyler, "that the Dauphin lived there. 

 When a legend of this kind lives through a century, it usually 

 has some basis in fact, as is now seen [the basis being that 

 Audubon was Louis XVII, and was secretly taken to Canada 

 when eleven years old]. And this may even account for the 

 story of the 'mythical Williams boy,' who was a missionary to 



