SIXTH LETTER.
THE BAY SETTLEMENT.
Green Bay, Wis., June 13, 1887.
My Dear W——: We had a quiet Sunday at Little Kaukauna. Being a delightful day, we went with our entertainers to the country church, a mile or two back across the fields, and whiled away the rest of the time in strolling through the woods and gossiping with the farmers about the crops and the government improvement,—fertile themes. It appears that this diminutive hamlet of four or five houses anticipates a "boom," and there is some feverish anxiety as to how much village lots ought to bring as a "starter" when the rush actually opens. A syndicate has purchased the long-abandoned water-power, and it is whispered that paper-mills are to be erected, with cottages for operatives, and all that sort of thing. Then, the church and the depot will have to be brought into town; the proprietor of the cross-roads grocery, now out on the "country road," will be erecting a brick "block" by the river side; somebody will be starting a daily paper, printed from stereotype plates imported from Oshkosh or Chicago; and a summer resort hotel with a magnetic spring, will doubtless cap the climax of village greatness. I shall look with interest on reports from the Little Kaukauna boom.
It was nine o'clock this morning before we dipped paddle and bore down to the lock gates. The good-natured tender "dropped" us through with much alacrity. The river gradually widens, and here and there the high rolling banks recede for some distance, and marshes and bayous, excellent hunting-grounds, border the stream. A half mile below the lock we noticed a roughly built hut, open at front, such as would quarter a pig in the shanty outskirts of a great city. It looked lonesome, on the edge of a wide bog, with no other sign of habitation, either human or animal, in the watery landscape. Curiosity impelled us to stop. Crossing a plank, which rested one end on a snag and the other on a stone in front of the three-sided structure, we peered in. A bundle of rags lay in one corner of the floor of loosely laid boards; in another was a heap of clamshells, the contents of which had doubtless been cooked over a little fire which still smouldered in a neighboring clump of reeds. The odors were noisome, and a foot rise of water would have swamped out the dweller in this strange abode. We at once took it for granted that this was either the home of an Indian or a tramp. Just as we were leaving, however, a frowsy, dirty, but apparently good-tempered fisherman came rowing up and claimed the cabin as his home. He said that he spent the greater part of the year in this filthy hole, hunting or fishing according to the season; in the winter, he boarded up the front, leaving a hole to crawl out of, and banked the hut about with reeds and muck. Wrightstown was his market; and he "managed to scratch," he said, by being economical. I asked him how much it cost him in cash to exist in this state, which was but slightly removed from the condition of our ancestral cave-dwellers. He thought that with twenty-five dollars in cash, he could "manage to scratch finely" for an entire year, and have besides "a week off with the boys,"—in other words, one prolonged drinking bout,—at Wrightstown. He complained, however, that he seldom received money, being mainly put off with barter. The poor fellow, evidently something of a simpleton, is probably the victim of sharp practice occasionally. As we paddled away from this singular character, the Doctor said that he had a novel-writing friend, given to the sensational, to whom he would like to introduce The Wild Fisherman of Little Kaukauna; he thought there was material for a romance here, particularly if it could be proved, as was quite possible, that the hut man was the lost heir of a British dukedom.
But the site of another and a stranger romance is but half a mile farther down. The river there suddenly broadens into a basin, fully half a mile in width. To the east, the banks are quite abrupt. The westward shore is a gentle, grass-grown slope, stretching up beyond a charming little bay formed by a spit of meadow. Near the sandy beach of this bay a country highway passes, winding in and out and up and down, as it follows the river and the bases of the knolls. Above this and commanding delightful glimpses of forest and stream and bayou and prairie, a goodly hillock is crowned, some seventy-five feet above the water's edge, with a dark, unpainted, time-worn, moss-grown house, part log and part frame, set in a deep tangle of lilacs and crabs. The quaint old structure is of the simple pioneer pattern,—a story and a half, with gables on the north and south ends of the main part; and a small transverse wing to the rear, with connecting rooms. The ancient picket gate creaks on its one rusty hinge. The front door has the appearance of being nailed up, and across its frame a dozen fat spiders, most successful of fly fishers, have stretched their gluey nets. The path, once leading thither, is now o'ergrown with grass and lilacs, while in the surrounding snarl of weeds and poplar suckers are seen the blossoming remnants of peonies, and a few old-fashioned garden shrubs.
The ground is historic. The house is an ancient landmark. It was the old home of Eleazar Williams, in his day Episcopal missionary and pretender to the throne of France. Williams was the reputed son of a mixed-blood couple of the Mohawk band of Indians; in early life, he claimed to have been born in the vicinity of Montreal, in 1792. A bright youth, he was educated for the ministry of the Protestant Episcopal church and sent as a missionary in 1816-1817 to the Oneida Indians, then located in Oneida county, New York. During the war of 1812, he had been employed as a spy by the American authorities to trace the movements of British troops in Canada. Williams, from the first, became engaged in intrigues among the New York Indians, and was the originator of the movement which resulted, in 1822, in the purchase by the war department of a large strip of land from the Menomonees and Winnebagoes, along the Lower Fox River, and the removal hither of several of the New York bands, accompanied by the scheming priest. But the result was jealousy between the newcomers and the original tribes, with sixteen years of confusion and turmoil, during which Congress was frequently engaged in settling the squabbles that arose. Williams's original idea was said, by those who knew him best, to be the "total subjugation of the whole [Green Bay] country and the establishment of an Indian government, of which he was to be sole dictator."[6]
But his purpose failed. He came to be recognized as an unscrupulous fellow, and the majority of the whites and Indians on the Lower Fox, as well as his clerical brethren, regarded him with contempt. In 1853, Williams, baffled in every other field of notoriety which he had worked, suddenly posed before the American public as Louis XVII., hereditary sovereign of France. Upon the downfall of the Bourbons in 1792, you will remember that Louis XVI. and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were beheaded, while their son, the dauphin Louis, an imbecile child of eight, was cast into the temple tower by the revolutionists. It is officially recorded that after an imprisonment of two years the dauphin died in the tower and was buried. But the story was started and popularly believed, that the real dauphin had been abducted by the royalists and another child cunningly substituted to die there in the dauphin's place. The story went that the dauphin had been sent to America and all traces of him lost, thus giving any adventurer of the requisite age and sufficiently obscure birth, opportunity to seek such honor as might be gained in claiming identity with the escaped prisoner. Williams was too young by eight years to be the dauphin; he was clearly of Indian extraction,—a fair type of the half-breed, in color, form, and feature. But he succeeded in deceiving a number of good people, including several leading doctors in his church; while an Episcopal clergyman named John H. Hanson attempted, in two articles in "Putnam's Magazine," in 1853, and afterwards in an elaborate book, "The Lost Prince," to prove conclusively to the world that Williams was indeed the son of the executed monarch. While those who really knew Williams treated his claims as fraudulent, and his dusky father and mother protested under oath that Eleazar was their son, and every allegation of Williams, in the premises, had been often exposed as false, there were still many who believed in him. The excitement attracted attention in France. One or two royalists came over to see Williams, but left disappointed; and Louis Philippe sent him a present of some finely bound books, believing him to be the innocent victim of a delusion. Williams died in 1858, keeping up his absurd pretensions to the last.
It was in this house near Little Kaukauna that Williams lived for so many years, managing and preaching to his scattered flock of immigrant Indians, and forever seeking some sort of especially profitable employment, such as accompanying tribal delegations to Washington, or acting as special commissioner at government payments. In the earliest days, the house was situated on the spit of meadow I have previously spoken of; but when the dam at Depere raised the water, the frame was carried to this higher position.