Professional Indian: The American Odyssey of Eleazer Williams by Michael Leroy Oberg

Reviewed by: Professional Indian: The American Odyssey of Eleazer Williams by Michael Leroy Oberg Karim M. Tiro Professional Indian: The American Odyssey of Eleazer Williams. By Michael Leroy Oberg, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, 270 pages, $39.95 Cloth. About fifteen years ago, I was chatting with an eminent historian and the conversation turned to the Reverend Eleazer Williams. "We really need a Williams biography," he opined. Then, resignedly, he added, "but who would want to spend that much time with the guy?" Thankfully, Michael Leroy Oberg saw the same need and proved more willing to sacrifice some of his own mental well-being to satisfy it. The result is a balanced and detailed account of this nineteenth-century Mohawk who was a U.S. Army veteran, treaty negotiator, Episcopalian preacher, and all-around grifter. Williams (1788–1858) played an important role in the removal of Indians from New York State, and his cons, perpetrated upon Indians and whites alike, were emblematic of his era. Williams spent his first eleven years in the Mohawk community at Kahnawake, on the opposite bank of the St. Lawrence River from Montreal. In 1800, his father took Eleazer and a younger brother to live with distant relatives in Massachusetts. They joined a branch of the prestigious Williams family, one of the elite clans known as the "River Gods" of the Connecticut Valley. Eleazer was the great-grandson of Eunice [End Page 113] Williams, the famed "unredeemed captive" from the 1704 Deerfield Raid, and the family was happy to welcome back her progeny. In 1804, Eleazer's parents took his brother back home to Kahnawake, but not him. Eleazer, it seems, had proven compatible with New England life. A sickly youth, he exhibited a studious disposition and an affinity for Protestantism. In 1810, he set off for New York City at least in part for health reasons. He joined the Episcopal Church while there. Episcopalianism presented itself as a reasonable balance between the Catholicism of his first eleven years and the Congregationalism of the eleven that followed. Might it be the right brand of Protestantism for Indians? Eleazer went to Kahnawake to test this hypothesis, but did not make any inroads. This was the first of many failed missions. When the War of 1812 broke out, Williams entered the U. S. Army. While his superiors acknowledged his participation, there is little to corroborate the grandiose claims he later made—that he was appointed "Superintendent-General of the Northern Indian Department and Commander of the Corps of Observation," that he was "at the head of the artillery" that stymied Provost's army, or that he was the clever author of false rumors about Vermont reinforcements that were propagated among the British and spurred their retreat to Canada. In 1816, after another failed Episcopalian mission at St. Regis (Akwesasne), Williams was sent to a more promising mission field: Oneida country. Aided by the work of earlier missionaries and an environment unsettled by alcoholism, factionalism, and white harassment, Williams actually made some converts. Most notably, he brought the "Pagan Party" into the fold of institutional Protestantism. However, Williams also forged connections with powerful land speculators, most notably the Ogden Land Company. Concluding that the Oneidas would be better off abiding by the wishes of the Ogdens and moving to present-day Wisconsin, Williams threw himself into difficult and complex negotiations with Native peoples of New York and Wisconsin, the land company, and state and federal governments. Oberg describes these activities in detail, demonstrating carefully how Williams came into his own as a "professional Indian." He found wealthy and powerful white patrons who supported him while he worked to encourage Indians to cede land and move west. Williams convinced himself he was serving the Indians, but really he was serving himself. [End Page 114] Although the Oneidas quickly lost faith in him, Williams continued to act in their name. When doing so was no longer possible, he showed up at negotiations claiming to represent the St. Regis Mohawks. As his credit among Indians dwindled, exaggeration, obfuscation, and lies became the ballast of his career. Native resistance eventually ground Indian removal from New York to a halt, so Williams...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.