Legacy or Legend: The Lost Dauphin

In the early 1820s, a certain Eleazer Williams, Episcopal Missionary, led a tribe of Oneida Indians from New York state to Green Bay, Wisconsin. On a reservation ceded to them by the U.S. government and now called Oneida, a mission and school were established. A few years later, an article appeared in Harpers Magazine about the ingenious escape from the Temple Prison in Paris of the little French Dauphin, Louis XVII, son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The article explained how the child was removed in a clothes hamper from the prison, smuggled out of France by royalists and brought to a Thomas Williams at St. Regis, New York, where he was raised. This all was based on a deposition of a death-bed confession of a certain monsieur Bellinger from New Orleans, former servant and aide to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

12:00 am Thursday, October 27 on The Wisconsin Channel