Trouble soon ensued. The fishermen frequently assaulted the "saints,"
and carried on a petty warfare against the colony at large, in which the
county sheriff was soon engaged; for false charges came to be entered
against these strange but inoffensive people, and they were now and then
thrown into jail. The king, thereupon, in self-defence, "went into
politics." Having so many votes at his command, he easily secured the
election of Mormons to all the county offices, and of himself to the
legislature of Michigan.
But despite these victories over outside foes, matters at home went from
bad to worse. The enemies in his camp multiplied, for his increasingly
despotic rule gave them abundance of grievances. At last, about the
middle of June, 1856, two of the malcontents shot their monarch from
behind. He was taken by vessel to his old home in Voree, where he was
tenderly cared for until his death, a month later, by his poor,
neglected wife, who had remained behind when he went forth to the
island. His kingdom did not long survive him. The unruly fishermen came
one day with ax and torch, leveled the royal city to the ground, and
banished the frightened "saints."
To-day the White River prairie gives no evidence of having once borne
the city of Zion, and even in the Michigan archipelago there remain few
visible relics of the marvelous reign of King Strang.
THE WISCONSIN BOURBON
Two years after Louis the XVI., Bourbon king of France, and his
beautiful queen, Marie Antoinette, were beheaded by the revolutionists
in Paris, in the closing decade of the eighteenth century, their
imbecile child of eight years, called the "dauphin," was officially
reported to have died in prison. But the story was started at the time,
and popularly believed, that the real dauphin, Louis the XVII., had been
stolen by the royalists, and another child cunningly substituted to die
there in his place. The story went that the dauphin had been sent to
America, and that all traces of him were lost; thus was given to any
adventurer of the requisite age, and sufficiently obscure birth, an
opportunity to seek such honor as might be gained in claiming identity
with the escaped prisoner.
Great was the excitement in the United States, when, in 1853, it was
confidently announced by a New York magazine writer that the long lost
prince had at last been discovered, in the person of the middle-aged
Eleazer Williams, an Episcopal missionary to the Oneida Indians at
Little Kaukauna, in the lower valley of the Fox.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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