The French found a pile of human bones on the western shore in 1699 and called it Massacre Island. By 1707 they had renamed it for the Dauphin — heir to the French throne — and were using it as an anchorage and supply point for the young colony taking hold on Mobile Bay. The name stuck even as the French gave way to the Spanish, the Spanish to the British, and finally the Americans.
Fort Gaines went up at the island's eastern tip in the 1850s. On August 5, 1864, Admiral David Farragut ordered his Union fleet past the fort's guns and through a field of Confederate mines. The exact words are disputed, but the order was clear. The fort surrendered days later, and with it went Confederate control of Mobile Bay.
Today Dauphin Island is a small barrier island town of about 1,300 people connected to the mainland by a causeway and to Fort Morgan across the bay by ferry. Fort Gaines still stands. The Audubon Bird Sanctuary draws thousands of birders every spring — the island sits directly on the Mississippi Flyway, and warblers pile up in the oaks after crossing the Gulf. The Dauphin Island Sea Lab runs Alabama's marine science education programs at the western end. Shell mounds at the center of the island mark a thousand years of indigenous use before any European gave the place a name.