Introduction
On September 28, 1761, a year after France’s vast North American empire had been surrendered to the British at Montreal, Canada, the flag of Great Britain was raised over Fort Michilimackinac, far to the west at what is now Mackinaw City, Michigan. A force under Major Robert Rogers, leader of the almost legendary Rogers’ Rangers, had reached Detroit in 1760 and had taken control of that post, but the coming of winter had compelled the British to wait until the following year to take over the other French outposts in the upper Great Lakes.
Although Major Rogers later was to serve as commanding officer at Michilimackinac, the red-coated troops who marched into the little stockaded fort on the south shore of the straits connecting Lake Huron and Lake Michigan were commanded by Captain Henry Balfour. He found that the French garrison had departed for the west months before, leaving the fort in charge of Charles Langlade, a native of the area who had fought brilliantly on the French side during the French and Indian War. Balfour was greeted by several enterprising Englishmen who had gotten a head start in the race to gain control of the lucrative fur trade which for so long had been monopolized by French traders at Michilimackinac.
After accepting the fort’s formal surrender and before leaving for the west, Balfour detailed a small force from the famous Royal American or 60th Regiment to remain as the garrison. Two years later, during the great Indian uprising of 1763, fierce Chippewa warriors massacred over half of the soldiers and temporarily drove the British out. But within a year they returned in greater numbers, and from then until 1781, when it was abandoned for a new, more easily defended post on Mackinac Island, Fort Michilimackinac was one of the key links in the chain of military and trading posts which Great Britain maintained on the western frontier of its American colonies.
Among those who came to the fort in the late 1760’s was a Scotsman, Daniel Morison, surgeon’s mate in the Royal Americans’ Second Battalion. Of his life before and after his tour of duty at Fort Michilimackinac we know nothing. Under ordinary circumstances we would agree with one of Morison’s commanding officers who told him bluntly, “You are not worth my Notice.” But Morison is worth our attention because between 1769 and 1772 he kept a journal in which he set down in language that is often unintentionally hilarious and at other times brutally frank the best account that we have of life at this outpost of European civilization.
This important historical document, now published for the first time in its entirety, was purchased in 1914 by the great collector of materials relating to the history of Michigan and the Old Northwest, Clarence M. Burton, who bought it from a book seller in London, England, for $55. He brought the journal back to the state in which it was written where it now rests in the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library.
Dr. Morison’s journal provides us with a picture of the English population of the fort, a people beset by violence, lawlessness, tyrannical officers, petty bickering, and assorted other problems. A reading of the journal should dispel any romantic notions of what conditions were like at an eighteenth-century frontier fort.
The inhabitants of Michilimackinac consisted of several groups. There were the soldiers, numbering around a hundred men. A few of them, we learn from Morison, had brought out their wives. The commanding officer’s house was the most impressive of the thirty-odd wooden buildings located within the stockade. The other officers lived in various cabins in the fort, as did the rank and file of the troops until 1769 when a large barracks was constructed in the center of the fort. Dr. Morison’s complaints about the poor quality of the housing are supported by statements of others who commented on the ramshackle construction which necessitated constant repairs and made the danger of fire an ever-present fear.
As a military fort Michilimackinac was scarcely adequate even to withstand the attacks of Indians. The post was maintained, however, because it was a convenient center of the fur trade. The small garrison, with its six-pound and nine-pound cannon mounted on the bastions, was enough to impress the Indians who lived in the vicinity and those who gathered here each summer with the reality of British armed might. This symbol of military power protected the English fur traders who made up the second, and most important, segment of the fort’s population.
By 1767 Michilimackinac had become for the British as it had been for the French the headquarters for the fur trade of a fourth of the continent. Canoes were sent out from here loaded with trade goods to be exchanged for furs at distant Indian villages located in the uncharted wilderness north and west of Lake Superior, westward across the Mississippi, and southward to the Illinois country. For two or three months in the summer hundreds of voyageurs and traders came back from the west, bringing in the furs they had gathered during the previous year or two. Like the lumberjacks of a later era, these men were bent on enjoying to the fullest degree their brief contact with the comforts of civilization before they returned to the west to barter for more furs.
A few traders who had acquired sufficient means to enable them to hire others to do the actual trading remained here the year round and occupied cabins in the fort. These Michilimackinac traders, men like Benjamin Frobisher, Isaac Todd, George McBeath, and others not mentioned by Morison, together with their agents or partners in Montreal who obtained the trade goods and sold the furs, dominated the fur trade for decades.
From Morison’s narrative we see that the officers and the traders permanently in residence at the fort formed an elite group. It is obvious that the French habitants and half-breeds who comprised a third part of the fort’s population, not to mention the Indians of the area, were not admitted to this exclusive social club. That the strain of being cooped up in the small fort, cut off from all contact with the outside world for over half the year, proved too much for some of the members of this clique, especially the bachelors, is also obvious.
Equally apparent is the fact that Dr. Morison, poor man, was unsuited to withstand the rigors of life at this post. He was apparently an educated man who could quote accurately from Virgil’s Aeneid, and a man of refinement and sensitivity. To some of the cruder members of the English set he must have seemed an easy target and a source of amusement when life became too dull and the bowls of toddy ran dry. Feeling himself much persecuted, as he certainly was, and outraged by the injustices of which he and others were the victims, Dr. Morison fumed, but, with a few exceptions, as when he refused to permit the whipping of a soldier to continue, he lacked the courage necessary to stand up to his oppressors. So, like Lieutenant Maryk in The Caine Mutiny, who kept a secret log on the activities of his sick captain, Dr. Morison recorded in his journal the evidence which he no doubt hoped would some day enable him to bring Ensign Robert Johnson, Captain George Turnbull, and his other tormentors to justice.
Actually, Dr. Morison probably was not a doctor at all. He was a surgeon’s mate, which means that he may once have been an apprentice to a surgeon and that he may have taken a course or two at a medical school but that it is unlikely he ever graduated since had he done so he would not have been simply a mate. The professional ability of the British army surgeon’s mate was of a notoriously low order, and, if we may believe one of the Royal Americans’ regimental surgeons, Daniel Morison was no exception in this respect. Surgeons were scarce, however, and a small frontier garrison, even when, as at Michilimackinac, it had been plagued by much sickness, had to be satisfied with the services of a mate. Unlike the surgeon, who was commissioned by the king, the surgeon’s mate was only a warrant officer appointed by the colonel of the regiment. The mate, therefore, was inferior in rank even to the ensign, the lowest of the commissioned officers. This was undoubtedly the source of many of Morison’s problems. He claimed the title of doctor and demanded equal status with the officers, who, for their part, treated him as they would a common soldier.
Comments added at the end of the manuscript in a different handwriting indicate that someone in England who possessed Morison’s journal in the nineteenth century intended to publish it in a magazine. No evidence has been found that this was done. In preparing the journal for publication we have ignored the numerous changes that this earlier editor made in the document and have retained Morison’s own phraseology at all times, including the misspelled words and grammatical construction so typical of his age. The narrative has been broken into five parts, and paragraphing and punctuation has been supplied at some places in the interest of easier reading. Material within brackets has been inserted by the present editor.
GEORGE S. MAY
Lansing, Michigan
March 6, 1960
“Doctor, damn your blood, get up & give us a bowl of Toddy!”
I
An Entertainment and a Violent Assault
Dr. Morison begins his journal innocently enough with an account of a party which he and others gave in the fall of 1769. Among the other hosts was Isaac Todd, who later helped found the great Canadian fur-trading firm, the North West Company, and whose long-time partner, James McGill, endowed McGill University in Montreal. The party began to get out of hand with the arrival of a couple of rowdy traders—John Chinn, who is best remembered as a partner in an unsuccessful copper-mining venture in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and Forrest Oaks, who was a prominent fur trader at Michilimackinac and later at Montreal for a number of years after 1769.
Morison, who seems to have been something of a name-dropper, mentions as he goes along other men who are familiar to students of the fur trade and British military history. But all of them are dwarfed by Ensign Robert Johnson, who crashed Morison’s party and soon turned the evening into a nightmare. Johnson (which is apparently how he spelled his name, although Morison insists on calling him Johnstone) is the villain of Morison’s journal, a scoundrel and bully whom we come almost to admire for the infinite variety of ways in which he gave vent to his evil nature.
He had been deeply involved in the Robert Rogers affair which had rocked the little community at Michilimackinac two years before. Johnson was in Detroit in the fall of 1767 where he had gone for the treatment of an injury when a messenger from British military headquarters for North America arrived with orders to place Major Rogers, commandant at Michilimackinac, under arrest on suspicion of treason. Johnson brought these orders back to the Straits, and it was Lieutenant John Christie, an officer who also figures prominently in Morison’s journal, who arrested Rogers. Johnson later asked to be given charge of the detail that took Rogers to Montreal for trial, boasting that he would foil any attempt that might be made to set Rogers free. However, when Rogers was acquitted, those who had hoped to see him convicted charged that the prosecution’s case had been fatally weakened by Johnson’s testimony which had enabled the defense to show that Rogers had been mistreated while he was a prisoner. Such mistreatment would be in keeping with the picture of Johnson’s character which emerges from a reading of Dr. Morison’s journal.
Narrative of an Action of Burglary and felony perpetrated on the Dwelling House & person of Daniel Morison, Surgeon’s mate of the 2d. Battn. 60th Regt. at Michilamackinac the Seventh day of November (about 5 Oclock in the morning) in the Year one thousand seven hundred & sixty nine, Vizt:
That the evening before being the sixth of November, Isaac Todd, merchant, William Maxwell, commissary of provisions & I proposed to give an Entertainment at Sergt. [Thomas] MacMurrays to which we Severally invited such people as we thought (in such a remote corner) qualified to make the evening pass agreeably. Accordingly we met, and everything was carryed on with the greatest Decency & innocent Mirth till John Chinn & Forrest Oaks, traders, joined us.
After drinking a glass round, John Chinn (who appeared to be the worse of liquor) before & at supper began to be troublesome, opened upon me with Volleys of ragged raillery (without the least provocation on my side) and that blended with Opprobrious Expressions, namely, that I was an officer in the Rebellion &c. in the Year 1745 [the abortive Scottish attempt to place Bonnie Prince Charlie on the British throne], which tho’ I knew was an arrant untruth, did not think it prudent to make the proper answer his wrongious Assertions deserved, [but] waved it off in the smoothest manner, lest the Company should be disturbed. Notwithstanding, our merriment was in a great measure unhinged, as the said John Chinn’s only pleasure consisted chiefly in being officious, by hobb or nobbing with everyone [who] would chuse to drink with him, & indeed importunely pouring perpetually in upon those who did not chuse to drink more than would do them good.
About the hour of eleven o’clock, Ens. Robert Johnstone (who for ought I know invited himself) came in, accompanied by Ens. John Strickland & Mr. [George] Main. We continued thus till about one O’clock in the morning, when Numbers of our Company thought proper to retire. I proposed retiring also, but Isaac Todd insisted upon my spending one hour or two more with them. Rather than disoblige I consented.
