Lost Dauphin Park

Lost Dauphin State Park is a former state park in Brown County, Wisconsin. It is located on land that was held for six decades by Mary Hobart Williams (née "Marie Madeline Jourdain"), a French-Menominee Métis woman whose story was buried inside the archive of the man who married her when she was fourteen.

The Land

The land on the Fox River was given to Marie Madeline Jourdain by her Menominee relatives as dowry. She would hold it from the 1820s until her death in the 1880s—through the era of Indian removal, the Civil War, and Wounded Knee.

The Marriage

In 1823, Jourdain—then fourteen years old—was married by her teacher, Episcopal missionary Eleazer Williams, who was in his thirties.

Contemporary accounts noted she was “not a willing party to the contract.” Williams used the marriage to strengthen his claim to her land at Little Rapids. He spent most of their marriage away from home, pursuing his plan to build an “Indian empire” with himself as leader, mortgaging her land without her consent, and later claiming to be the Lost Dauphin of France. He died in poverty in New York in 1858, having never successfully claimed what was hers.

The Woman Who Held the Land

After Williams’ death, Mary Hobart Williams (as she had been renamed by the Episcopal Church) remained on the land. She built a matriarchal household with her adopted daughter Josephine and Josephine’s Menominee birth mother.