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The Lost Dauphin: The Deerfield Massacre

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Continued from last week

One of the theories for those seeking the truth about the Lost Dauphin centered on the Deerfield Massacre, which occurred during Queen Anne’s War in 1704.

“On the morning of March 1, 1704, just after daybreak, Major Hertel de Rouville, with 200 French and 140 Indians, surprised the sleeping settlement, killing 47 of the inhabitants and making prisoners of 112. Every building in the village, except two, was burned to the ground,” recalled the Boston Evening Transcript in June 1890.

Some of the Deerfield residents were carried away, including the minister, John Williams, and his wife and some of their children.

On their trek through Vermont, newspaper accounts say that Williams’ wife collapsed with exhaustion and was put to death on the spot.

While those individuals who were held captive returned to Deerfield in two years, one of the children, Eunice, stayed with the tribe and married a Native American man.

“He was proud of his White wife, took her name and then founded the family which Eleazer Williams belonged by descent” some claimed, which was relayed in a 1923 Green Bay Press Gazette article.

“Thomas Williams, grandson of Eunice, served in the Revolutionary War and was made ‘war chief’ by the British,” the article said, adding that once the war ended, Thomas sought out his White relatives who proposed that a couple of Thomas’ children live with them, receive an education and return to the tribe as missionaries.

“The next fall, two lads came to live in the deacon’s home and to attend school. In the [tribe] the older boy had been called ‘Lazau,’ but in the deacon’s home he was to answer to the dignified name of ‘Eleazer’ and he was to learn that he took the name from Eleazer Mather, the grandfather of the little girl who had elected to remain with [the tribe],” the article added.

Eleazer attended Dartmouth College and later Hanover, before serving in the War of 1812.

“Shortly after the war, he was received into the Episcopal Church and nominated a missionary to the Oneida,” the article added.

During the Revolutionary War, the Oneida assisted the new European colonies, serving in General George Washington’s army.

In return, the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua promised the protection of their homelands, stating that the “lands reserved to the Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga Nations in their respective treaties with the State of New York, and called their reservations, to be their property; and the United States will never claim the same, nor disturb them, or either of the Six Nations, nor their Indian friends, residing thereon, and united with them in the free use and enjoyment thereof; but the said reservations shall remain theirs until they choose to sell the same to the people of the United States, who have the right to purchase.”

A year earlier, the United States had also adopted the Non-Intercourse Act, which prohibited the purchase of Native lands without the government’s approval, but the state of New York continued to enter into land transactions and the Oneida were down to 32 acres by the early 1800s

In 1822, the Oneida signed a treaty with the Menominee and Ho Chuck nations, purchasing millions of acres as their new homeland.

“The game, land and seasons were familiar in Wisconsin and our people were decidedly more comfortable here. We negotiated with the Menominee to share their lands, and we came to an agreement in 1822,” said former general manager/strategist, Bill Gollnick during a presentation for the Nation’s bicentennial celebration

“In 1823, some Oneida families, ‘First Christian Party’ loaded horse-drawn wagons packed up with pine boxes of essentials and what they could carry in a sack and left their homelands. For roughly three weeks they traveled over rough trails to get to the port of Buffalo, N.Y. From there they boarded a ship that took between five to seven days to travel along the western shore of Michigan, through the Mackinaw Island straits then on to Fort Howard in Green Bay. The new territory was the edge of the west and there were no log homes or cleared land, so the Oneidas settled in Little Kakalin on the Fox River roughly 29 miles south,” read an article in the Oneida Nation’s Kalihwisaks.

“Mr. Williams was a dark-complexioned, good-looking man. Having always heard him spoken of, by his relations in Connecticut, as ‘our Indian cousin,’ it never occurred to me to doubt his belonging to that race, although I now think that if I had met him elsewhere I should have taken him for a Spaniard or a Mexican,” Mrs. John H. Kinzie wrote in her 1873 book, Wau-Bun, the Early Day in the Northwest.”

To be continued

Lost Dauphin, Deerfield Massacre, Queen Anne's War, 1704, Williams, Native American lands

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