A Child of the Sea; and Life among the Mormons (1905)

Summary

A Child of the Sea; and Life among the Mormons (1905) is the self-published memoir of Elizabeth Whitney Williams, an eyewitness to the final years of James Jesse Strang’s settlement on Beaver Island who later became one of the Great Lakes’ longest-serving light keepers. It is a first-person primary source for the Kingdom of Saint James and the Irish resettlement that followed it, written from the “gentile” (non-Mormon) side, roughly fifty years after the events it describes.

Contents and evidentiary character

The book is dedicated to “the sailor men in whose welfare I have always felt a deep interest,” and its introduction states its scope directly: “some incidents of my early life before coming to Beaver Island,” her family’s experience of “the Mormons” from “living constantly near them for four years,” their flight to Charlevoix and expulsion from there, a period in Traverse City, and their return to Beaver Island – “my twenty-seven years’ residence” counting from early childhood.¹ The narrative is a personal memoir, not a researched history: it draws on the author’s own recollection alone, published without footnotes, citations, or corroborating documents, and was written and printed at her own expense by a small Grand Rapids job printer, the Seymour & Muir Printing Co.²

As evidence, the book is strongest exactly where a memoir is strongest: concrete, named, personally witnessed detail – the names of early Irish-descended settlers and businesspeople, the practical operation of the Beaver Island light, and the author’s own family’s displacement during the Strang period. It is weakest where any single-witness memoir written decades after the fact is weakest: it cannot be cross-checked against the author’s own contemporaneous record (none survives), its account of the 1856 assassination differs from both the contemporary Daily Northern Islander and from Milo Quaife’s later scholarly reconstruction on several specific points (who fired first, the number of shots, the number of days between the shooting and Strang’s death), and it is explicitly partisan – written, in the author’s own words, from the side of the “gentile” fishing families displaced by the Mormon settlement.³ Quaife, writing independently in 1930, calls it “perhaps the most comprehensive statement of th[e] body of gentile legend” surrounding Strang – a description that credits its scope while flagging its status as legend-adjacent testimony rather than documentary record.⁴

Significance

This is one of only two full-length published first-person narratives of the Strang period held by this project (with Ancient and Modern Michilimackinac (1854) supplying the Mormon side), and the only one written by a non-Mormon eyewitness. Read against The Kingdom of Saint James (Quaife, 1930), it is a case study in how this project should treat contested eyewitness testimony: attributed by name, compared point by point against other accounts, and never silently adopted as settled fact. See Assassination of James Strang for a worked example of that comparison.

Open questions

• None outstanding regarding the book’s own text and publication details, which are directly confirmed from the copy held. See Elizabeth Whitney Williams for open questions about the author’s own biography (birth year, later remarriage) that this book itself does not resolve.

See also

• Elizabeth Whitney Williams
• The Kingdom of Saint James (Quaife, 1930)
• Ancient and Modern Michilimackinac (1854)
• Assassination of James Strang

Sources